[Curly Ripe Meat] Kids these days!
If there is one thing that makes you remember being a teenager, it’s
having your parent tell you that you don’t understand something that
you actually do understand. It’s a quintessential barrier between ages;
it’s nearly possible to accept that a younger person’s different ideas
or qualitative values could be true.
Of course, that's because kids are often full of shit.
But when your happy, glowing, successful, loved, newly married
daughter, who finished grad school and is pursuing her intended career
tells you that her spirituality is sufficient… well… apparently that’s
hard to believe, when she doesn't know God.
It’s frustrating that my mom should get so stumped here.
I’m able to translate her universal truths into my spiritual dialect.
Individually, she always smiles and is pleased to hear me eloquently
explain the experience of letting go of defensiveness, of forgiveness,
of openness, love and gratitude. But she remains convinced that, since
I don’t believe in God per say, my spiritual life is not as full as it
could be.
She denied that my path could be equal in “fullness” because she
assumes that I underestimate her path. This is likely because when I
said, “her path,” she imagined whatever my twenty-year-old self said to
her in order to fight off her evangelism. But that was ten years ago,
and my life and spiritual self have radically matured.
Hearing her tell me that I don’t understand immediately brought back
the defensiveness, the sting and the insult of the memory of adolescent
frustration. (Most notably because I had the now-rare impetus to go
outside and chain-smoke.) Her idea of my spirituality is based on my
rebellious, young-adult self. When she insists that I am too
inexperienced to understand, she’s basing her analysis on her own
inexperience of who I am now.
Geez, parents just don’t understand!!
(hah hah…)
having your parent tell you that you don’t understand something that
you actually do understand. It’s a quintessential barrier between ages;
it’s nearly possible to accept that a younger person’s different ideas
or qualitative values could be true.
Of course, that's because kids are often full of shit.
But when your happy, glowing, successful, loved, newly married
daughter, who finished grad school and is pursuing her intended career
tells you that her spirituality is sufficient… well… apparently that’s
hard to believe, when she doesn't know God.
It’s frustrating that my mom should get so stumped here.
I’m able to translate her universal truths into my spiritual dialect.
Individually, she always smiles and is pleased to hear me eloquently
explain the experience of letting go of defensiveness, of forgiveness,
of openness, love and gratitude. But she remains convinced that, since
I don’t believe in God per say, my spiritual life is not as full as it
could be.
She denied that my path could be equal in “fullness” because she
assumes that I underestimate her path. This is likely because when I
said, “her path,” she imagined whatever my twenty-year-old self said to
her in order to fight off her evangelism. But that was ten years ago,
and my life and spiritual self have radically matured.
Hearing her tell me that I don’t understand immediately brought back
the defensiveness, the sting and the insult of the memory of adolescent
frustration. (Most notably because I had the now-rare impetus to go
outside and chain-smoke.) Her idea of my spirituality is based on my
rebellious, young-adult self. When she insists that I am too
inexperienced to understand, she’s basing her analysis on her own
inexperience of who I am now.
Geez, parents just don’t understand!!
(hah hah…)