Parentless Parents

Losing parents is a rite of passage that is heartbreaking regardless of your age. But if you lose your parents when you’re not yet an adult, yet old enough to realize you are losing unconditional love (or at least an unconditional pair of figures to rebel against), and no other relative scoops you up and swaddles you with overwhelming empathy (and how humiliating it is that not a single one of your several living relatives swooped in with the parental love you craved, but instead a series of strings-attached favors), you may spend your whole life rabidly scratching at the wounds of your unmet needs, more easily submerging your unanchored self in the abyss of immense pain, insecurity, jealousy, anger, the roiling inky pool always ready to drown us all.

You may romanticize your dead parents’ love and care even when in reality they were temperamental and you were a latchkey kid, and might even have been judgmental of your current lifestyle. For however imperfect the parental thread is, to cut the umbilical cord prematurely is to encourage a lifetime of untetheredness, even if you eventually attach yourself to a particularly enabling host spouse.

And then when you become a parent yourself, you may cosplay adulthood to a significant degree, not just #adulting. Resenting the apparent care you are giving your own children which you yourself did not seem to receive. That you were entitled to and was ripped from you. Commanding your spouse and children to throw unconditional love into your bottomless validation bucket. Exerting arbitrary authority like a bossy teenager, throwing tantrums out of self-pity and dysregulation. You instigate petty antagonistic fights amongst your fellow adult siblings, encourage competitiveness and division—even amongst each others’ offspring. For it is too painful to give love that you did not receive. It is too painful to see young people as innocent and redeemable when you were never seen as such. These consequences might have been more likely alleviated if there were grandparents around as an overarching source of (even feeble) guidance and familial glue, to feel a filial duty towards, no matter how curmudgeonly the old farts might have been anyways.

If you never overcome an unending feeling of lack, scarcity, victimhood, you will become the villain, subjecting everyone to your revenge. Even if you feel like the same hurt child you were so many decades ago, to the rest of the world you are just an ungenerous middle-aged nag. And you may pass on that poison to your now-adult children, so that the family curse is eventually dead—but not because you killed it, but because your small-mindedness will kill your own branch while you were too busy trying to starve the others.

But. There is always time for hope, there is always time for redemption any moment before your last rattling breath.