I love you you inscrutable weirdo cartoon

My mom had me young, divorced early, and spent a while as a single mom. I’m almost forty, am in a good marriage with a partner who is an awesome parent, and I often find raising my kids overwhelming. She must have found it even more so, but to be honest I’ve never asked.

At one point when we were broke and I was probably going to be jobless soon my wife’s mother said we could move in to her house if need be. It was nice to have that kind of fallback plan, but it wasn’t a pleasant idea. To lighten the mood I joked “we could move in with one of my parents!” My wife laughed and said “you’d hate that even more than I would.” Truth. The expansion of my independence from my parents felt slow and hard won. The idea of turning to them for help any time in my 20s any of the few times I couldn’t find or keep a decent paying job always made me feel nauseous.

When we moved out of my mom and bio-dad’s house, my mom and I moved into my grandparents’ two bedroom house, five miles outside a town of 2,000 people. My grandparents had their kids early, and lots of them, all of whom started their own families early, and when all the kids were out they moved into the place where they planned to eventually retire. When we moved in I think my mom would have been around 23 then. She’s sometimes mentioned in passing that this arrangement was hard for her. That never sunk in until very recently and for a long time I never thought much about it.

My grandparents were in there mid-40s when we moved in. My grandfather died of cancer less than ten years later, at age 54. This has shaped my perception of old age. My wife and I are the same age. (#actually she’s 4 months older than me, which means for 4 months out of the year her numerical age is one more than mine, and I greatly love to say she’s a year older than me. We started dating right after her 20th birthday and right before mine. One of my favorite things is to tell people that when we started dating she was in her twenties and I was a teenager. When she turned thirty I spent four glorious months saying things like “I can see how it might look that way to a thirtysomething but for people like who are in our twenties, we have a different and more youthful view…” I am terribly excited to update those jokes when she turns forty. As you already know if you’ve read my blog before or have ever met me, and as I’ve often said, I am insufferable.) But her parents were born earlier and started having kids later in life. Her parents are closer in age to my grandparents’ ages, though my grandparents have since passed away and, happily, her parents are still alive. To me her folks have always seemed ancient. When we had kids and her parents became my kids’ grandparents, their names converted forever into grandma and grandpa, it just made so much sense, much more so than it ever had calling them by their first names. I felt I should have just always called them that since I first met them.

Thinking now of my mom and me and my grandparents sitting in their front room watching Johnny Carson and sipping Pepsi out of glass bottles with straws, I am today closer in age to my grandparents’ ages in that mental image than I am to my mom’s age. My older daughter is about as close in age my mom’s age at that time as I am to my mom’s age at that time.
The numbers don’t matter much but the comparison involved startles me, the idea that my child would be more proximate to my mom’s life circumstance then than I am, that I might be nearer to being my grandmother than I am to being my mother, it’s all a bit weird. It feels a little like making myself cross-eyed and closing one eye so I can see my nose. There’s a kind of foregrounding there, a kind of seeing myself that I rarely really do. I mostly go through the world looking through a window at the world outside my head, soundtracked by a monologue of doubts and worries and regrets, I rarely ever stop and place myself, in space or in time - I am here now, in this phase of life, with another one coming next, whenever next is.

Because of living with my grandparents, and spending a lot of time with them after my mom began her troubled second marriage, to my dad (not my bio-dad, but no less my dad), my grandparents were I think more like parents than most people’s grandparents. (I sometimes measure my kids’ relationships with their grandparents against that relationship I had with mine. That’s a bad habit.) Like I said, I think the arrangement that facilitated this was hard on my mom, but it was great for me. Once again we see parenting is often at the expense of parents. My parents, including my grandparents, were basically cartoon characters - stylized, two dimensional, inhuman - for most of my life, so I was not aware that they were human being who bore emotional expenses, let alone being aware of those kinds of costs as they actually existed. My parents have begun to become three dimensional slowly, gaining depth and nuance as I have gotten older. This accelerated after I had my own kids, and it hasn’t finished yet. It’s a strange kind of humanizing, though, because at a kind of remove - I suppose I must talk in more complex ways with my parents and see them as three dimensional fully human beings more than I did when I was younger, but I’m not particularly aware of doing so - and this fleshing out comes above all by analogy (parenting is like this for me, so it may have been like that for them… now that I know what adulthood is like I see that they were adults in the same way, and faced challenges), but not with any direct communication. I’ve never asked what it was like. I don’t get the inside picture of what it was like to be them so much as I imagine my own life if it played out like theirs did. Much, maybe all, of this is due to how my parents and I (don’t) communicate, I don’t know if it’s like this for everyone.

With my own kids, I love them so very, very much and it gets to be, well, a bit much. They are earth-shakingly important, and so raising them can feel a bit like an earthquake sometimes. They seem to have no sense of their emotional importance. I know I am deeply important to them, but I don’t particularly feel important, and I don’t think of myself as being to them the kind of two-dimensional-but-massively-significant figure (sort of like greek gods) that my parents were to me, but I suppose I must be. (Certainly my kids are demanding enough that they seem to have no sense of my wife and I as persons with human limits, which makes sense given how young they are.) I expect that my kids will never get what they are to my wife and I unless they eventually have their own kids. I associate loving someone with seeing them as complex and multi-faceted but at least in these relationships at least in my life it feels like the opposite, dearly loved relatives seem to be, by virtue of being the dearly loved relatives they are, opaque and flat to one another.