RULE 73

Don’t blame your parents

When we’re little, most of us assume our parents are good at the job. Unless they’re really dreadful, it doesn’t occur to us that they don’t always know what they’re doing. As we get older, we notice that our friends’ parents do things a bit differently. Maybe we’re envious – maybe we think we’re the lucky ones. Probably a bit of both. As we get older still, it may start to dawn on us that our parents are getting some bits really wrong.

That’s what happened to me. Quite early on I realized that my father was seriously bucking the trend by not actually being there at all. Before long I realized that my mother was in very different ways similarly hopeless, and she struggled to cope or to show any affection to us.

Now, in my case, things were sufficiently bad that I had to face up to them. Either I spent my life bitterly blaming my parents for all my problems, or I moved on. I chose to recognize that my mother was just not even slightly cut out to be a parent, and that for someone like her, being a single parent to 6 children was too big a task. If I were airlifted into another life where I was required to manage a football team, or an oil rig, or a classroom full of 30 troubled kids, I would perform similarly badly. All of us have things we just can’t do. Maybe my mother only realized too late that being a parent wasn’t her thing.

So I forgave her, and got on with my life. It saved me from becoming bitter and twisted, and it enabled me to put right the damage in a positive frame of mind. If you really feel that someone has ruined the first 20-odd years of your life, the only sensible thing to do is make sure they don’t ruin the next 50 or so as well.

Funnily enough, it’s often the people with the best parents who find it hardest to stop blaming them for the odd shortcoming. If your parents are basically pretty good at the job, it’s somehow tempting to blame them for not being absolutely perfect. But why should they be perfect? And, indeed, how can anyone be expected not to put a foot wrong in 18 years?

Your parents are only human, and it’s very likely that somewhere along the way they did a few things that caused you real upset or difficulties. That’s what happens when people with no training spend 18 years in a job. The odd thing goes wrong. They were only doing their best, and they couldn’t help it. But you can help it: you can choose to stop blaming them and to forgive them. In fact, what’s even to forgive? They weren’t getting it wrong on purpose, they just made a few mistakes.

It’s too late to put things right by blaming your parents. But it’s not too late to let it go, recognize that their hearts were in the right place, and quietly sort out any residual damage yourself.