the no more fuck ups line

are our parents to blame for all our bad shit, or is it ours to own?

lately i keep wondering whether our parents are to blame for all our bad shit, or whether there comes a point when it becomes ours. i find myself asking it when i sit down to write with other artists, when i walk around my neighborhood, or when i get a touch too drunk, which happens more often than i’d like to admit. and if it is our parents’ fault, is it really theirs, or their parents’? maybe we’re the ones expected to make sure it stops with us.

the question gets harder for me when the child is already an adult and has hurt someone. what are their parents supposed to do with that? maybe they know and defend them anyway. maybe they decide the other person must be the problem. or maybe they genuinely see a completely different version of what happened. i honestly don’t know.

i keep thinking about how hard it must be to look at your own kid and admit they treated somebody badly. you knew them before they could walk, and now somebody is telling you they hurt them. maybe it is easier to think the other person must be leaving something out. i can be very understanding about all of this in theory.

then i think about my former in laws, and i become much less understanding. toward the end of my marriage, the relationship between us had gotten ugly. by the time we divorced, my ex wife had cheated on me four times. i had forgiven her after the first three and stayed in the marriage. the day after the divorce, her parents sued me over help they had given both of us. i still think the timing was insane, but i also know this is my version of a situation that had been getting worse for a long time.

i don’t know what my ex told them about me or what they had decided by then. i’m sure they had reasons to be angry with me, and i had my own version of every argument. i also stayed after the first time she cheated, and the second, and the third. nobody forced me to do that. i had reasons. i just don’t know if any of them look good from here.

this is where the whole generational trauma thing starts going in circles for me. if my ex got some of her bad shit from her parents, and they got theirs from theirs, i can keep moving backward until i reach people i’ve never met and know nothing about. that still doesn’t explain what i’m supposed to do with any of it. i’m sure she had reasons for doing what she did. most people have reasons. i had reasons for forgiving her three times too, and i don’t know if mine were any good either.

i’m not comparing forgiving someone to cheating on them. they’re obviously not the same. i’m saying i can spend a lot more time explaining my three decisions than her four, which is probably normal when you’re the one who got hurt. but if that’s the answer, then why do i keep asking the question?

a lot of my friends have crossed what i like to call the “like, for real adult life” line. it’s a line that once you cross, you can’t cross back. it’s when you start having kids. for me, as a perfectionist, it’s the “no more fuckups” line in life. you’re kids with kids now, which is super weird but also fascinating to see from the side.

when i was married, i had no doubt kids were gonna be part of my life, and i still want that. my mom keeps reminding me in almost every conversation we have that i don’t have them yet, and somehow it’s her problem. at the same time, i keep reminding her that she could’ve been a grandma by now, just with a daughter in law she really didn’t get along with, a person who cheated on her son three times and got forgiven, only to do it a fourth time.

my mom and i talk about a lot of things that are actually useful. when we get to grandchildren, though, we usually end up repeating the same two arguments, and neither of us has come up with anything new to say about it in a while.

i do still want kids. my mom will be happy to hear that, although she’ll probably be more interested in when. but i think about having a child who grows up and tells me that i hurt them in some way i didn’t notice. i can already hear myself saying, that’s not what i meant. which is such a useless answer, but also probably the first one that would come out of my mouth.

maybe i’d apologize after. maybe i’d call my mom later and suddenly understand something she tried to tell me. or maybe i’d just be angry for a while. this is all hypothetical, obviously. one day, if my kid asks me why, i hope i can answer without starting with my parents.