Mom and Dad

Once, when my brother and I were children, we found ourselves ready to leave the beach with Dad, having having finished some sand sculptures we’d taken a few strenuous hours to make. More often than not, under both our parents’ guidance, we’d been training to shape an element as light, elusive, and ephemeral as sand, to participate in a contest taking place in the following weeks.

Realizing we were about to walk away from the work we did, some kids gathered a few steps around and looked at it with piercing eyes that immediately revealed their predatory intention to Father. He could see that as soon as we turned on our heels, they would destroy what we had, with a lot of patience and tenacity, detached out of the uniformity of that extensive, tricky, white ground. They could hardly wait, and as we finished gathering our things to leave, started to kick our sculptures. With a gravity that dispensed any tone of reproach in his voice, Father took one look at them and told us, “You guys should never destroy anything, unless you can make it better.”

Catching one more glimpse of the group’s vandalizing lust, I sensed the absurdity of their attempts to compensate their falling short of what we built with the fake power of aggression. Their discontent in hiding impotence with anger was blatant.

We walked away, but kept the commitment to always do better, not because we wanted to destroy anything, but because, in Father’s commandment, the condition “unless you can make it better” made us aware of the pettiness inherent in not even trying to measure up to what we admired, even if by just learning something about it, or about ourselves from it.

More than twenty years ago, on a day I was particularly disgruntled and had complained to my current therapist about the shortcomings of my parents when raising me, the thought they were old became suddenly very scary. Although nothing is more normal and common than criticizing Mom and Dad to one’s psychologist, I was already living abroad, and wondered how much peace with myself my mixed feelings would allow me if Mother or Father passed from one moment to the next. On top of having left them behind, would my restrictions about their behavior make me feel unloving and ungrateful? Would I be sentenced to live under an eternal conflict? Would I be fine with whatever I happened to feel forever?

The professional I was seeing was a little older than me and his parents were no longer alive. He said that in his experience the feelings people have toward their departed parents tended with time to give way to love. When I first heard it, I thought it was wishful thinking, but in fact, throughout the years after Mom and Dad left the planet, I revisited most of my life and made my peace with the past. I even discovered that the unrealistic conditions, the eccentricity, and the lack of objectivity of my upbringing, by allowing me to lead a contemplative, introspective life, is the source of my highest values. I found myself able to evaluate Mom and Dad with objectivity and be grateful they were who they were.

Mother and Father devoted to art because they could afford not having to turn their work into a remunerated profession, by living off the small rent of an old apartment Father had. My siblings and I inherited their artistic gifts, and they always expected us to be creative with anything we did, like making drawings inspired by the movies we were taken to watch, keeping journals to register and reflect on our life, practice musical instruments, and enter art contests. But when we happened to win the prize of a contest, which was in general a trip to Europe, they would decide we should let go of it to whoever came in second. The main reason was the fact that our family name was connected with the wealth of Grandfather, and the artistic, intellectual environment, which was mostly leftist, should think we could afford traveling without having to win any prize and take the opportunity from others. Mom and Dad thought the jury and contestants would be bent out of shape, like it happened when she herself won a first place and had to take the case to court in order to receive the scholarship to France promised to the winner.

Despite Grandfather’s money, we were rather hard up, could not travel on our nickel, never understood the reason we were made to compete in art contests, and would have liked to go to Europe by our own merit. Adding to the incoherence of making us compete for nothing, our parents never sent us to any art schools to help us become professional artists. The unmentioned but sine qua non principle we lived by was art for art’s sake, art above usefulness, financial reward, or temporal goal — in one word, art in and by itself. We were brought up to be well rounded misfits.

Mom and Dad were contradictory, and if they agreed on keeping us from the world, they looked at life in opposite ways. Mother found magic in our poetic vision of reality, developed our imagination of mythical beings, and believed there was much more to see than what is available to one’s eyes. But Dad thought he was in charge of showing everybody he cared for, that life, for those who have enough guts to take it, is a bleak and absurd final stop. But despite the conflict of his professed atheism with Mother’s faith, both of them made us aware of the sacredness of creation.

I am grateful to God for having had a mother and a father that messaged to us, even though holding opposing views of mostly everything and coming to very few agreements, the reality of uncompromising respect. For their transmitting, regardless of their verbal beliefs, the existence of Soul.

I give thanks to God for their having always placed the value of their actions in the actions themselves, rather than in the ends to be achieved by them; for them having been incapable to “use” the present for the sake of the future, even if that didn’t make them the most grounded people; for their never lying to make things easier for themselves but only to keep from hurting others. I am grateful for their never thinking they deserved to be bowed down to, and neither bowed to anybody else; for their being horrible at thinking of money, let alone making it.

I thank God my parents were always ready to learn something new and barely cared for the image they gave to other people. I am grateful they were far from traditional “role models,” but could oblige values that lay beyond usefulness, temporality, and self-interest.

Last but not least, I am thankful that they were, in a few words, in touch with the dignity inherent to every being.