I think one of the hardest lessons I learned was the slow, humbling realization that my parents had something to offer.
Oh, I'd been happy to take much they gave me. The piano lessons, braces on my teeth, the ballet classes, my first car. And French horn, god love them, they let me learn to play the French horn and rented an instrument far too extravagant for a single-income family on a state employee's salary to buy outright. They paid for private French horn lessons, too. Maybe their greatest sacrifice was simply living in a one-story ranch-style house with a 6th grader learning to play a French horn.
THAT is sacrifice.
I took all this stuff and a lot more. But, the idea that they had wisdom, experience, maybe even advice to offer? No, thanks. No way I wanted to be like them. Nothing like them.
The bittersweet truth that karma brings back around, like the endless wheel of life itself, is that, of course, I am like them. My pattern was cut from their material. I got my dad's monkey knuckles, my wrinkled hands like an albino chimp's, just like his. I got my mother's overbite and prematurely gray hair.
It finally dawned on me that my folks might be worth listening to, occasionally, in very small doses, for a couple of reasons.
One is that I'm watching friends agonizing through the slow-motion marathon of grief as Alzheimer's disease devours their parents.
Another is that I now see my grown kids getting battered and bumped around by life. Sometimes through no fault of their own. More often the consequences, unavoidable as gravity, of dumb decisions or bad choices.
The same dumb decisions and bad choices I made decades ago. Not exact carbon copies of my mistakes, but close enough cousins that I could've warned you when I saw them coming. Only heartache waits for you behind that door. Keep moving.
That guy who harbors a deep, bitter resentment against his mom? Not good marriage material.
The insane obsession that this time, it will be different, and now you can drink like a gentleman. You've learned to control it and it won't control you? That idea has to be smashed for people with our allergy. The allergy you inherited from me.
All these painful lessons, and the happiness, serenity and joy that resulted from learning to make different choices. Could I have arrived here faster, sooner, if I'd been willing to learn from my elders? Could I spare my dear ones any tears or make their road any less harrowing?
No, I can't. Because I have nothing to offer them.
