filling the generation gap with memories

While I've been feeling the need for a vacation (or at least a night out) from the kids lately, I've also been thinking more about our own parents. How did they handle us when we were children? My parents were fortunate enough to have lots of relatives living nearby, and as a result our extended family was quite close and we rarely ended up in daycare facilities or unrelated babysitters.

I'm sure that if we were still living near our parents, our kids would be spending lots of time with the grandparents. There's a special relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren that the in-between parental generation can't seem to comprehend. How can they just let them do anything that they want? How can they spoil them so much when things were so strict and tight when we were kids ourselves? What was this revelation that changed our parents attitudes towards children (and better yet, how can I find it now)?

As their parents, we get stressed and tend to freak out about just about anything. But as grandparents, they have this awesome capability to just let things blow over. I've tried to emulate this attitude and it just doesn't happen. Why? Perhaps it's because at the end of the day, the kids are back at *my* house. So eve if they've been pumped full of sugar and television at the grandparents house, they're still going to be back home when they are going through withdrawal.

It's actually quite interesting to see how different our parents act around our kids, compare to how they acted when we were young. It's almost like they are completely different people once they retire. And it prompts me to wonder if I ever really knew my parents at all when I was young. As popular music blogger Bob Lefsetz recently stated, once you grow up you realize that everything your parents said when you were a child was right...and wrong.

So how do we get to know our parents? How do we get past that point where we are inherently trying to impress them and earn their respect so that we can just be friends? I often wonder how many people ever even get the chance to do this, and I suspect that once they have passed on, that thought is the one thing that haunts us. That we had all of this time to get to know who they really were, and now they're gone, and all we've got left are old photo albums and our own skewed memories.

I've been working on my genealogy off and on for the last decade or so, and one of the things that has floored me is how I waited so long to get to know some of my oldest living relatives. In some cases, I waited too long. In other cases, I actually got to meet a relative only weeks before they passed away, and the information that they gave me was more than I could have ever found in any census record or vital statistics report.

I think that lots of people wait until their parents are on their death beds (or worse, until after their death) before they decide to try and learn who they really were. And even if we catch them at the end of their journey before they pass away, there's always Alzheimer's disease to worry about. Will they remember the answers to our unsolved mysteries? Will they even remember who we are? It's a frightening and saddening thought.

So take this post as a reminder to cherish your parents now, while they are still around and of sound mind. While hearing about their latest bowel movement or trip to "Wal-Mart's" isn't going to make your day, you'll likely look back on the time spent together with fondness and longing when they're gone.