A Recipe For Loving Your Parents
By Thoughtis
Stir in 20 teaspoons of maturity. Wake up one day and start to feel terrible about all of the times you called your mom a bitch. Realize that you should love your mom because she carried you in her womb for nine months. She endured weight gain, bizarre hair growth, and the most insane pain of her entire life so she could bring you into the world. Maybe her body was never the same afterwards. Maybe she had a caesarean scar that made her feel ugly. Maybe she had to look at a tabloid cover with the headline “How I Lost The Baby Weight In 2 Weeks!” when she was still unable to fit in her jeans. There were things she had to grieve in order to be a mother. And she did.
Drizzle 1 long hard look at your iTunes library. A lot of your best music was introduced to you by your parents. Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, Cat Stevens—these were all bands you were embarrassed to like in middle school and now can’t get enough of. Play “The Wind” by Cat Stevens and picture your father carrying you to bed one night. You pretended to be asleep so he could tuck you in and make you feel safe. Now you’re not sure if anyone has ever made you feel as secure as you did in that moment.
Slather on Deep in Thought sauce. See yourself as being either your mother’s child or your father’s child. Watch yourself developing habits like theirs. Wonder if everyone truly does just become their parents.
Question the people you’re attracted to and wonder if your romances have ever resembled the dynamic of your parents’ relationship. Are you essentially just dating your father (ew) over and over again? If so, how can you stop it? Like now?
Chop up 5 slices of Regret. Think about the time you made your mother cry on a long car ride and all of the times you ignored their phone calls, only to later come running when you needed their help. It was all so unfair but you figured that they understood. In the beginning, you needed them to live and now you’re just starting to only need them for love.
Everything is on your terms now. You choose how big of a role your parents play in your life. Once you start making your own money, you’ll no longer depend on them for anything other than support. This is something that’s scary for all of you. As much as they act burdened by your crap, parents like feeling needed; they like doing your laundry on the rare occasions you come home. They dedicated eighteen years of their life to you and now they have to remember what it was like without you. It’s not easy.
Loving your parents makes you feel grown up. Forgiving them for all of the damage they may have done to you and accepting them as the flawed insane people they are shows real growth…or something. You’re just tired of being angry, tired of keeping score, tired of blaming them for the things they got wrong. It got you absolutely nowhere besides the inside of a psychiatrist’s office. Granted, your parents weren’t perfect. In fact, they may have been horrible, but you’re the boss of you now. You make your own bedtime, you make the rules, which means you also have the power to love the parts of them that make sense and delete the parts that don’t.
When it’s done cooking, serve this dish steaming hot on a plate of No More Drama.