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Community Corner

Connecting With Parents

With Basic Love And Respect, It Works

It’s 5 a.m. and I’m on the train. I have been in this seat for 12 hours, and I’m in the home stretch of my trip back from visiting my parents in Williamsburg, Virginia. Everyone around me is sleeping in various tortured up or down positions. We have all spent the night together, and I feel in some way that I know them.

Despite all I said last week about not wanting to leave my family, this has been a great trip. Train travel, in this era of expensive gas and long waits at the airport, is the way to go. I got on the train at night a mile from my house, read and slept for twelve hours (when it’s not too crowded, Amtrak has a "quiet car"), and got off in my parents’ town the next morning. Nothing could have been simpler.

It has been literally decades since I spent three uninterrupted days alone with my parents: No kids, no siblings, no spouse. My parents are in their mid-seventies, and they have had a difficult medical year. My mother had a stroke and an autoimmune disorder affecting her joints, and my father had knee surgery followed by months of digestive trouble.

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Now they are both doing well, and we had a lovely visit. I had run a 33-mile race the day before I left, which left me (normally an antsy, need-to-get-up-and-move, type of visitor) in perfect condition for long walks, long chats and long meals.

Conversation with my parents is always intense. It’s a decades long dialogue bred from wildly differing views on everything from religion to politics to money. My parents are right-of-center conservative and I am not. They are devoutly Catholic and I am not. And they are much more in tune with their investments than I will ever be.

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And yet, because there is so much basic love and respect, it works.

There is no question that my parents think I’m weird. They don’t know anyone else like me. Most of their friends’ children are traditional folks, people with office jobs and respectable clothing. That has never been my style, and to their credit, my parents have (for the most part) rolled with it.

Because most of my friends are more like me, my parents challenge me in ways no one else does. They force me to define my views and voice my goals. No benign chitchat about the weather here.

From the moment I arrived until the moment I left, the depth of conversation never varied. We covered it all: politics, religion, money, parenting, family history and work.

And it was great. We talked, we laughed, and we shared memories. And when it was time for me to leave, we were all a little sad, wishing for more time, more talk, less physical distance between us.

I’ll be getting off this train in a few minutes, and not long after I get home, my own kids will be waking up and looking for their mom. I can’t wait to gather them up and hug them.

I fervently hope that someday, when they’re in their 40s and Brian and I in our 70s, that we’ll have lots of visits just like my parents and me.

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