Ask Ellie: How can I heal my relationship with my parents?

Dear Ellie,

Somehow I’m now a man in my late fifties. At my age I’m embarrassed to discuss this with friends — it feels like I shouldn’t still care. But my relationship with my parents has been strained for decades. Now they’re elderly and I — desperately — want to make things better while I still have time. I just don’t know how.

Through the pandemic I thought we would find a way to break through the wall between us. I worried about them and their health. We talked more than we have in years — we even had a daily Zoom call for a while. But it was all surface stuff — weather and food and TV. Now they’re both vaccinated and it seems we might all make it through. Of course, I’m grateful. I know how lucky we are.

But also… I’m so frustrated with myself. If a global pandemic wasn’t enough, when else will I break through to them and close the distance between us? I feel myself crashing toward an inevitable future: someday maybe not long from now they will die, before we manage to work things out. And I’ll spend the rest of my life feeling guilty for the distance between us.

I have tried, many times, through the past decades. We even had a good relationship until my early 30s. Up to then they were happy with my life: I had a good job and money. But I was miserable and addicted — multiple addictions — trying to ignore how unhappy I was. Then I hit rock bottom, joined a program, joined another program, got clean and dealt with my sex addiction (one day at a time).

After that I left my job and my city. I lived all over, working in a bunch of industries, but mostly I spent my life making art and films. Sometimes with a little success. Sometimes scraping by. Right now, I’m comfortable but alone. I have had a lot of love, but at this point in my life I’m single, and I never had kids.

I know that my parents wanted something else for me — like what my brother has: a wife and kids, with a big house and a big retirement plan. But I couldn’t do it. I have tried to talk to them about my recovery and how I’m happy with the way things turned out, but they can’t hear it. They want to stick to small talk. But when we talk about that stuff all I feel is their disappointment in me.

I know that their feelings aren’t my business and my program tells me to just keep my side of the street clean. I always figured that someday I would grow out of needing them to see me. But I never did, and now it feels like I’m running out of time.

Is there a way to fix this?

From,

Parentally Distant and Desperate

Dear PD&D,

The need to be seen: it’s a real bitch.

I’m glad you wrote, and sorry that you feel embarrassed to talk about this. I understand — it’s a hard thing to talk about, because it involves admitting vulnerability and how much we once needed or still need our caregivers. But I want you to know that you’re far from alone. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you did talk about it, you’d be shocked by how many people are wandering around wanting their parents to really see them, whether consciously or not. And even whether their parents are alive or not.

It sounds like there are two separate things going on here. On one hand, there’s that need to be seen, and on the other, there’s wanting to smooth things over with your parents. I think you might be conflating these two things, and that the way forward might be much easier if you separate them.

On the need to be seen: I understand this well. In fact, I think it might be culturally endemic. In our culture, it’s normal and healthy to fly the nest and find your own way in the world — which comes with a lot of benefits in terms of personal authenticity and freedom, plus some tricky relational navigation when it comes to the particular nest you’re flying. We didn’t evolve to live this way — in traditional cultures, we’d all stay in the same village and live lives much like our parents did. If you take the evolutionary view, it’s normal for children of any age to want to belong in their family, and for parents to struggle if they sense that they’re losing their children. It’s all normal, and there’s no shame in it.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot of story-wisdom about the importance of children breaking those bonds and individuating. Do you remember the story of Sleeping Beauty? After long years without a child, the king and queen are blessed with a daughter. They throw a feast in celebration and invite the fairies of the kingdom to come and offer their magic and blessings to the princess — but they only have twelve plates. The kingdom’s thirteenth fairy is left out, but she shows up anyway, furious, and curses the princess: at the age of fifteen, she’ll be pricked by a spindle and fall down dead. One of the other fairies steps in. She can’t remove the curse, but she can soften it: the princess won’t die when the spindle pricks her, she’ll just fall asleep for a hundred years.

So the king has every spindle in the kingdom brought to him and burned. Then, in a stunning lapse of judgment, he and the queen go out of town on the princess’s fifteenth birthday. She wanders into a forgotten room, where she finds an old woman weaving, pricks her finger on the spindle, and promptly falls asleep for a hundred years.

In mythology, spindles are symbols of fate: of the weaving of the threads of each individual life. Think of Plato’s Myth of Er, in which each person’s life is generated by three spinners before they’re born. And fifteen, of course, is an age of crossing over from childhood to adulthood. In a way, the death prescribed by the evil fairy is actually necessary: the child must die for the adult to be born. But the king and queen can’t countenance this. They attempt to protect the princess from her own fate, but nobody can fully escape their own fate. By intervening, all they succeed in doing is arresting her in a hundred years of adolescence.

And it’s not just the princess who falls asleep for a hundred years: it’s the whole palace and everyone in it. There’s a real sense that by meddling in their child’s fate and trying to keep her close and safe, these parents arrest life for the child and stop the progression of life in the wider world, too — since the future of any society depends on its children stepping into adulthood.

My brave friend, I’m telling you all this because it sounds like you might be dwelling in the negative outcomes of your own individuation. You might be looking at the distance between you and your parents, and at your brother’s stable life and, from the sounds of it, easier relationship with them, and thinking it would have been a hell of a lot easier for everyone if you’d just followed the path your parents had in mind. But that wasn’t possible for you. Addiction can be helpful in that way — by turning the possibility of spiritual death that lurks down a particular path into a risk of literal death if you don’t heed the message from your soul. You couldn’t have followed the path your brother did — and it’s good for everyone that you didn’t.

Because look at all the life and motion you brought into the world and into your own days! It is a tremendous triumph and very rare to arrive in the second half of life and feel happy with the way things turned out, comfortable in your own company, and satisfied with the amount of love you’ve had.

I think on some level you probably know all this, and yet I also sense that you really need your bravery and your achievements mirrored back to you, since your parents have never been able to do it. So I want to be clear. What I read in your letter is a person who has lived admirably and fully, who has made difficult decisions, who has tried to love the fact of living as much as it deserves to be loved, take it both as seriously and as joyfully as it deserves to be taken. Your letter tells a story of a life well lived, and a person with a lot to be proud of.

I think things are probably difficult with your parents because this is a developmental leap they never really made for themselves. It sounds like they’ve lived with a lot of fear: for you, for your security and stability, and likely for lots of other things in life too. You have chosen to live your life in a territory they see as shadowy and dangerous, because it’s off the beaten track. This is why they can’t see you — and why, sadly, unless something drastic happens to them, I don’t think they ever will. It’s not that they don’t love you. They just have no frame of reference for the hidden riches of the path you’ve taken and the things you want them to understand.

This is a really bitter pill to swallow, but if you can bring yourself to swallow it once and for all, I think you might find that life opens up in all kinds of ways. Once you accept that their validation of your choices is probably not coming, you’ll become more aware of all the places in your life that you can find validation — starting with yourself. What are you really proud of? Which particular parts of your life do you look back on with admiration for your earlier self? What do you like most about yourself? And can you get in touch with the lost child, adolescent, and twenty-something you once were, before you came home to yourself, to thank them for sticking it out and show them how much better things got?

When you’ve spent some time doing that — and consciously seeking out the company of friends who understand and respect you, too — I think it’ll be much easier to heal your relationship with your parents. Right now, because you are hungry with the need to be seen, you’re desperate for them to connect with you on your terms, in the ways that feel good for you. It sounds like you’re a person who values deep connection, and when they insist on sticking to small talk, you read that as disapproval and distance.

I wouldn’t be so sure. It sounds to me like they might simply be happiest in the shallow end. I think some of the disapproval you sense might be coming from you. Is it possible that the disapproval is actually your own subconscious recrimination for the unorthodox but ultimately life-saving choices you still haven’t forgiven yourself for? Meanwhile, what feels to you like distance might just be their preferred relational mode.

What if healing your relationship with them doesn’t mean breaking down a wall or dragging them into the deep end with you, but rather finding ways to show them that you care, without forcing them out of their comfort zone? Maybe the best use for all this hard-won emotional depth and maturity is to simply be receptive to the signals they give you about the kind of relationship they want, and try to offer them that.

This might sound like cold comfort — like I’m encouraging you to build a relationship that doesn’t meet a single one of your own needs. It might even sound like an invitation to an unhealthy sort of martyrdom. But I think it could be a tremendous gift to you as well as them. Maybe the last stage of your individuation is to come back to your parents in your emotional maturity, having fully accepted yourself, and offer your love generously, without needing to change them. This, of course, is really hard to do, especially with one’s own parents. But reading your letter, and sensing all the wisdom and heart strength and life you’ve built up, I think you can do it.

And remember, it’s people like you who keep the whole kingdom from arrested development. Thank you for your bravery.

Love,

Ellie