when did i become like my parents?
 

the schit just creeped up on me. i like cooking, i just discovered the theraputic powers of a vegetable garden, i have become difficult to part with my money, yesterday, i lectured a 15 year old that my gfriends mom is guardian of,
"you are the first one home on tuesdays, dont just let the empty garbage can just sit there....blah, blah....." i think i was even waving my finger around a bit. i am not married, and dont even have kids yet. WTF? i love my parents but they are dorky nerds! except for my love of tinkering with machinery, and my sarcastic nature (mixed with my inabiltity to keep my mouth shut), i am just like them! ARRRGGH!

cliff

thats not a crime cliff. you've met my pops and we really did not care for one another when i was growing up. i never had the right answer in his eyes. at times i knew the right answer but would hold it out just to piss him off.

now as ive gotten older my pops is one of my very best friends, and i think im his too. even though he made me pick up the dog S and mow the lawns as recently as last week....

you dad is cool. i wish my dad could drive his corvette like your dad can. same car, different purpose. my stepdad only has something like 2000 miles on the odometer, and i bet i put half of those on there. shameful.

I'm like my parents in a way and not. I encourage my son to grow out his hair because right now he looks like the stereotypical typical Asian kid with spiky head of hair. My parents, on the other hand, encouraged me to CUT my hair because I looked like the stereotypical Asian kid with long, feathered hair back in the late '70s, early '80s in SF.

U became like your parents the day U were born...

I'm trying like hell not to be like my parents. Unfortunate, but true.

"You are what you hate"

Maybe not hate...but yeah you get the point...

The only way to not be like your parents...is to confront them on the issues that you don't want to be like. Otherwise your doomed to repeat their mistakes.

Tabs....

Sometimes an excellent approach. But, when I was "young", and inexperienced, I came to conclusions that I rejected at some future date. I remember well there were times when I thought my parents were stupid, authoritarian and meddlesome.Over the years I began to appreciate my parents (both gone now) for the effort they made to keep me from doing stupid things with my life.

If, on the other hand, parents indulge in actions that are truly wrong or embarrasing they can still serve as a good example of bad behavior. There are bad parents out there.

Good point, though....

Me too.

i have good parents, just wacky. now i am becoming wacky too. i was hoping for "grouchy old man" but i dont think i am headed that way.

A friend of mine who BTW started the Fuller Seminary Graduate School of Psychology once told me that, "All parents abuse their children, that the only difference is that I (he) deal with my(his) abusive behavior once confronted with it." I had to paraphrase a bit to get the flavor of what he meant in the context of our conversation. This means that the only way to break a chain of abusivnessfrom generation to generation is for the child to confront their parents with that abusive behavior. One of the problems is that when we grow up in an abusive enviroment we think thats the way it ought to be and that everybody suffers the same kind of thing. Each family has it's own dysfunctionality, after all we are only human beings.

Further it takes a great deal of courage for a child ( a grown one) to confront a parents absuviness, to have the courage of ones convictions..it is going against the family myth so to speak and many times the child will not get the support of the siblings let alone parents who have bought into the family myth. One then faces abandonment by the family and also faces being truly alone.

When I was a kid growing up, once in a while my parents did something that was just so unreasonable, and got me so pi***s off, that I told myself I was going to remember what they did and never do the same thing to my kid(s). I even started writing things down at one time.

Now, I've lost the list, and for the life of me can't remember a single one of those totally stupid, unreasonable things that they did.

I've got a 6 month old son, and I'm absolutely sure that he is already getting upset by something I am doing.

BTW: some further thoughts....

1. Sometimes the cancer of abusivness in a family is so great that it is best to be alone (there obvisously are degrees of absuivness in families).
2. The act of confrontation acts like a cathartsis and sets you free, not that there still maybe echos of the problem...then with that freedom one than can pursue other forms of madness....

I'm just like my dad. I mean really, just like my dad. I realized this all the way back in high school, even. I taught archery at the local summer camp, and parents would routinely walk up to me after the class and ask if who my dad was. In college, the similarities became even more pronounced. I enjoy the same things (computers, photography, cars), share similar ideological beliefs, and tell similar jokes. I guess you'd expect that -- he was my role model growing up, my one major example of what an adult male human ought to be like. You'd expect me to turn out like him.

I suppose it could be worse -- I could have had an abusive father. That would be crappy. Thanks for reminding me how cool my dad is. :)


Dan

Cliff,
Sounds to me like you were simply correcting this kids' bad behavior. Nothing wrong with that.

My parents never changed. Part of their true beliefs were that "children were to be seen and not heard" and "do as I say, not as I do". My father died 12 years ago and my mother is over 80. To the end, my father was detached, uncommunicative and uncaring. My mother caught it from him, I guess, and is still that way. We (kids) were never able to say anything of any substance to them. I was really bothered about this until my mid thirties/early forties. At that time, I realized and accepted that kids can't pick parents and visa versa. I also realized that parents are only people, and they have their strong points and their weak points, like everybody else. So after I accepted that, decided I was never going to get (and shouldn't expect) them to be something they weren't and was getting along with my life, I felt much better. I never expected anything from them, went on with my happy life and was much better off. Parents are just people and those who have good, caring people for parents are very lucky.