When we’re young, we tend to judge our parents by how they parented us. It isn’t until much later that we begin to wonder who they were before they became our parents.
That realization was one of the unexpected parts of writing Finding My Way in Westport.
Growing up, I knew my parents primarily through the roles they played in my life. They were the people who made the rules, set expectations, corrected me when I stepped out of line, and tried—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—to steer me in the direction they thought was right.
As a child and teenager, I didn’t spend much time wondering why they were the way they were. What kid does?
My father could be demanding. My mother could be complicated. Both had strong ideas about education, discipline, responsibility, and how my brother and I should conduct ourselves.
At the time, those things simply felt like the rules of our household.
Decades later, I see them differently.
Writing a memoir forced me to go back and look at my parents not simply as Mom and Dad, but as two individual people whose lives had begun long before mine.
They had their own ambitions, disappointments, fears, insecurities and dreams. They had been shaped by a different generation and a different world. And they carried those experiences with them as they tried to raise two boys in America during the 1960s and 1970s.
I didn’t understand any of that when I was twelve.
I certainly didn’t understand it when I was sixteen.
At sixteen, you’re much more interested in gaining freedom from your parents than understanding them.
That’s one of the strange gifts of getting older. The distance that separates us from childhood can sometimes bring things into sharper focus.
I can now look back at moments that once frustrated me and see something else behind them. Sometimes it was fear. Sometimes it was love expressed imperfectly. Sometimes it was simply two parents doing the best they knew how to do with the experiences they had been given.
That doesn’t mean everything suddenly becomes perfect in retrospect.
One of the things I wanted to avoid when writing Finding My Way in Westport was turning my parents into saints simply because they were gone. Memory can tempt us to do that.
But I also didn’t want to judge decisions made decades ago using only the perspective I have today.
The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between.
My parents were imperfect people. So am I. So are all of us.
But as I wrote their stories alongside my own, something changed. I began to understand them with a compassion I couldn’t possibly have had when I was young.
And perhaps that is one of the reasons I ultimately wrote the book.
I thought I was writing about my childhood.
In many ways, I discovered I was writing about my parents.
Their lives shaped mine in ways I understood at the time and in many more ways I didn’t. Even today, I occasionally recognize something in myself—a reaction, an expression, a value, a stubborn streak—and realize exactly where it came from.
Our parents remain with us in some surprising ways.
If you’re fortunate enough to have your parents still with you, perhaps there are questions worth asking them now.
That realization was one of the unexpected parts of writing Finding My Way in Westport.
Growing up, I knew my parents primarily through the roles they played in my life. They were the people who made the rules, set expectations, corrected me when I stepped out of line, and tried—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—to steer me in the direction they thought was right.
As a child and teenager, I didn’t spend much time wondering why they were the way they were. What kid does?
My father could be demanding. My mother could be complicated. Both had strong ideas about education, discipline, responsibility, and how my brother and I should conduct ourselves.
At the time, those things simply felt like the rules of our household.
Decades later, I see them differently.
Writing a memoir forced me to go back and look at my parents not simply as Mom and Dad, but as two individual people whose lives had begun long before mine.
They had their own ambitions, disappointments, fears, insecurities and dreams. They had been shaped by a different generation and a different world. And they carried those experiences with them as they tried to raise two boys in America during the 1960s and 1970s.
I didn’t understand any of that when I was twelve.
I certainly didn’t understand it when I was sixteen.
At sixteen, you’re much more interested in gaining freedom from your parents than understanding them.
That’s one of the strange gifts of getting older. The distance that separates us from childhood can sometimes bring things into sharper focus.
I can now look back at moments that once frustrated me and see something else behind them. Sometimes it was fear. Sometimes it was love expressed imperfectly. Sometimes it was simply two parents doing the best they knew how to do with the experiences they had been given.
That doesn’t mean everything suddenly becomes perfect in retrospect.
One of the things I wanted to avoid when writing Finding My Way in Westport was turning my parents into saints simply because they were gone. Memory can tempt us to do that.
But I also didn’t want to judge decisions made decades ago using only the perspective I have today.
The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between.
My parents were imperfect people. So am I. So are all of us.
But as I wrote their stories alongside my own, something changed. I began to understand them with a compassion I couldn’t possibly have had when I was young.
And perhaps that is one of the reasons I ultimately wrote the book.
I thought I was writing about my childhood.
In many ways, I discovered I was writing about my parents.
Their lives shaped mine in ways I understood at the time and in many more ways I didn’t. Even today, I occasionally recognize something in myself—a reaction, an expression, a value, a stubborn streak—and realize exactly where it came from.
Our parents remain with us in some surprising ways.
If you’re fortunate enough to have your parents still with you, perhaps there are questions worth asking them now.