We're Not Okay, Okay

Recently, I was speaking to one of my successful friends about the generation which preceded us. Because we are both parents, we’ve each heard one of the staple sayings from our parents on a regular basis, “you turned out okay.” The sad and unfortunate truth is that our parents say this because they don’t really know us. Most parents know the educational and professional accomplishments of their children but they know nothing about their bouts of depression, feelings of inadequacy or struggles with loneliness. Theirs is a generation where fatherhood means providing and motherhood means nurturing and, in some cases, disciplining until “daddy gets home.” However, those deep and meaningful conversations were never broached. As a matter of fact, most of us never even had a "sex talk” and while I may not agree with the content of mine; I did receive one from each of my parents and my grandmother. My father’s mother, a preacher’s daughter, turned to me and asked me in a drugstore one day if I was on “the pill.” I was in Junior High School. I was abhorred. Unbeknownst to her, I was a late bloomer who was still very active in the Girl Scouts and whose main interest at the time was tennis and doll collecting. But at least someone said something to me. Most men I know were given a stack of condoms, usually on prom night, and told “don’t get anyone pregnant.” I only know of a few that were actually told how to use them (which kind of left the “don’t get anyone pregnant” request up to chance). Most women I know never received a talk at all, leaving their knowledge of sex up to a friend who was usually one of those fast girls you absolutely didn’t want your child to learn from. And then there are those who got the “sex is for marriage” speech but no real, useful information about how celibacy could actually be achieved. These scant tidbits of information, of course, are far more than what our parents received from their parents. However, it is one of the reasons why many women, even in my age group, confuse sex with love. This was not a problem back in the days when people were getting married at 17 and staying married no matter what. We simply can’t afford to raise our children the same way. Further, while some of us might have “dodged the bullet” in the area of sex by not getting pregnant or, for men, getting someone pregnant, it doesn’t mean the lack of information we received was a successful way to parent. We suffer from other ailments such as emotional scarring and an inability to connect with people with whom we’ve been intimate. I know countless men who suffer from this—countless successful, "degreed", intelligent, married, single, etc. men. And guess what, their parents have no idea. My theory is that for many of us, our parents are like a fan club. It’s actually quite endearing. We’ve been able to accomplish things professionally that, in some cases, they weren’t able to accomplish. Perhaps we’ve travelled to places they haven’t or perhaps we’ve just simply made more money than they did (adjusting for inflation). Some of us have bigger houses, more degrees, more properties or, quite simply, more interesting lives. They admire us the way a kid looks up to a super hero. But they don’t know us. Our conversations are relegated to those comfortable subjects of weather and world problems. No one sits at the dinner table and asks, “Are you feeling isolated in your marriage, dear?” or “How are you dealing with your spouse’s philandering?” Instead our parents ask, “How’s work?” And they sit there and wait for some juicy story of our latest promotion or accolade from our boss. They then go on to enlist others in our fan club such as neighbors and family members. All the while, you face your imminent divorce, your feelings of failure and your insecurities on your own, without so much as a suspicion from the people who raised you. If you do dare to share these feelings, they are often discouraged with words of “it’s time you got over that” or “we all have problems.” Because, at the end of the day, for the most part, they don’t really want to know us. Really knowing your children means facing mistakes you might have made. It means realizing that you failed in some areas and that, perhaps, your offspring weren’t prepared to enter adulthood just because a driver’s license deemed it so. For parents, saying, “you turned out okay” means they were good parents. They did their jobs. Game over. But in our generation, where self-introspection is part of the daily ritual and where parenting involves, well, let’s face it, much more “involvement,” we are going to be doing things a little differently. Unfortunately, due to the world our children will face, we don’t have much of a choice. With all of our imperfections and flaws, our fears and insecurities, we have to go deeper with our children. And we will. Because despite the things we weren’t taught, we were given the insight to know what we lack. So, in the grand scheme of things, we are not okay but we’re going to be alright.