"we are perfect parents"
An alphabet of grievances
This essay is part of the Sum Flux v.2 zine - check out the whole thing here.
I was driving when I noticed it, this feeling, exploding through my body like the shards of ice we'd yesterday broken across the frozen lake. The crackle sparkle of each tiny piece gliding across the surface, tshhhhhhh in all directions.
My parents were visiting for Emma June's first birthday and the weather had finally warmed up to a scorching 45°F, so we'd gone for a walk around the still very much frozen lake.
Inspired by the band of ten-year-old boys throwing blocks of ice bigger than their heads off the dock, three-year-old Wilder and I started throwing ice too.
Lauren joined in.
Tshhhhhh.
My parents, both bundled up in all black like Soviet penguins, stayed back about twelve feet with Emma June.
It’s a magical thing, to watch a brick of ice shatter and glide across a perfectly sleek sheet of frozen lake. Like ASMR for your soul, it feelsounds perfect, though I couldn’t enjoy it much with Wilder having his little shitfits about the sticks not being strong enough to crack the ice. True tantrums, stomping and jumping in rage before melting into a defeated puddle.
Looking up at my parents, I was pissed at them too. Why didn't they want to come closer, I felt my little self scream, stomping and jumping in rage inside my skull. I wanted them with us, hurling cold cold ice across the frozen surface, laughing, being silly lil guys.
They are not risk takers – living in Ukraine for most of their lives was risk enough. Here, in America, they play it safe. Once they find something they love, they do not stray. Democracy, Toyota Priuses, and their most revered of holy places, Whole Foods.
Every morning of their visit, before coming to see us, they'd first visit Temple Whole Food to pay their respects and buy salmon. On the second day, when they couldn't find salmon, my dad asked the guy working the hot food counter why they couldn't just cook some of the fresh salmon they had in the fish department?
"No we can't do that. The salmon for us comes pre-cut. We can't cut it ourselves," the guy said. Pointless bureaucracy, it turns out, knows no borders.
This injustice left my dad no choice but to use his "O" word.
"O word??" I asked.
"Outrageous," he said.
This wasn’t the first letter in his growing Alphabet of Grievances. On an earlier visit, also at Whole Foods, in response to something to do with their cheese, my dad told me he was forced to use the U word ("Unacceptable").
A history of passionate discussions
My parents and I have a history of fights, or as my dad calls them, "passionate discussions in which all sides try to convince the other of their point."
About seven years back, in the heat of one of these "discussions," I distinctly remember my dad using the P word.
Perfect.
"We are perfect parents!" he said, not a shred of awareness at how insane of a thing to say that was.
All of our fights back then, in my pre-Covid early-thirties, were about the same thing. They were worried about my career as an actor/writer in LA and wanted me to consider finding a Plan B (B is for Plan B).
This enraged me. For one, I had a full time job on top of all my creative pursuits, and for two, why couldn’t they just believe in me??
As an artist who could make it. As a man who was in control of his own life.
Anything they did, however neutral, became further proof that they thought I sucked and I’d pounce on it, hearing in their words my worst fears come true:
They'd say, "you need a more stable career," I'd hear "you don't have the talent to make it."
I'd say "why can't you just believe in me," and they'd hear "Wanna see me destroy my life hehehahao."
Them: "We are the way we are." (We don't understand this world.)
Me: "So am I!" (I don't understand this world either.)
Them: "Why can’t you accept us as we are." (We cannot accept you as you are.)
Me: "Because you won’t accept me as I am!" (I will not accept you as you are.)
Different versions of this same fight built atop one another until, one cold night, I got more mad than I’d ever gotten before. A thirty year old man, I had a full blown tantrum of screaming before declaring that I was done. I was leaving.
I went upstairs, packed my stuff, and told them I’d walk to the hotel nearby.
“Wait!” my mom screamed.
I turned around - an apology? A realization?
“Take the cereal I made you.”
She handed me a freezer-size ziploc bag of her specialty cereal - baked oats with honey and raisins and craisins. It’s super good and of course I took it, and then huffed and puffed my way out. Goodbye, and thank you for the cereal.
do you remember?
The day after my parents flew home from this last visit, I called them and asked if they remembered using the P word in that fight years ago.
"We never said that," they said.
"You definitely did."
"When," my dad asks.
"I don't know seven years ago?"
"I need to check my journal, I don't remember us saying that," he says, the closest thing to an admission of guilt I'll ever see.
"Don't write anything bad about us," my mom said.
"I'll send you guys a draft of whatever I am going to publish," I told them. That's our system - I can write about whatever but I send it to them first.
They kept thinking out loud, talking to each other while on the phone with me, about what perfect meant. “In ice skating,” my mom says, “there’s perfect. 10 out of 10.”
“Yes but life isn’t ice skating.”
then what is it (life)?
I think for so long I needed my parents to be the bad guys so I had something to rage against. I'd wield lines they said ("we are perfect") like cudgels to show that I was the victim. Here, your honor, is why my life is fucked.
Soon after that incident, my anger stopped boiling over, freezing instead into an icy sheet of resentment through which I saw them everything they did, self-fulfilling prophecy style, as further proof that they believed that I sucked.
But ice can only stay frozen for so long.
something is changing though
When my parents first got there on the trip, and my mom was in the kitchen laying out the Whole Foods purchases for the day (cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, pita), I distinctly remember feeling that I was really glad they were there. I even said that to my mom as I gave her a hug and kissed her head: “I'm really glad you guys are here.”
And that feeling I noticed while driving home after they’d left from this last visit - the tshhhhhh of cracking ice - it was my icy sheet of resentment finally thawing into something else.
Sadness, pure and unadorned. Tender sorrows for the time lost to anger, sadness for their struggles, sadness for my own. But mixed with that sadness was something else:
Love. For the cereal, for the grievances, for the chance to throw ice into a lake in the USA with my son while they watched, just feet away and not any closer.
We are each of us little nations full of pointless bureaucracy full of an entire alphabet of grievances we have no idea what to do with.
But what is a grievance, if not a stop on the road to grieving.
It’s right there, inside each word:
Right there in Outrageous is the word ‘rage.’
And there inside the U-Word, Unacceptable, is the big one. The mother of all feelings: accept.
Acceptance is the hardest thing, and the most essential. Acceptance of what is and what isn’t, what might be and what never will. That nothing is perfect so, in a way, everything can be.
We become who we are in response to not only who our parents are, but who they’re not.
The glass doors of the hotel tshhhhhhhed open. “I’d like a room for one night,” I said, my suitcase dragging behind me.
“Sorry, we don’t have any rooms.”
Well fuck.
Too tired to walk, I called my dad. “Can you come pick me up?”
We drove home in silence.
I walked upstairs, dejected only the way a person who has been given everything can be, and went to sleep, the freezer bag’s worth of cereal still in my bag.
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Comment
Have you heard that noise ice makes when it breaks on ice?
Do you or have you ever had parents? Discuss.
Any good stories of fights you’ve had with family that in hindsight were hilarious like the cereal incident?
idk i’m really tired from this one so maybe lets all just chat in the comments? I’ll be around
love u
2. I remember meeting my Mum and Dad for dinner in a restaurant in Calgary where my mother beamed at me across the table and supported my decision and intent to go to art school. This was after I had very nearly failed my first year of a bachelor of journalism degree because I was drunk and high all the time. My plan was to be an advertising artist - Visual Communications it was called at this college. I had a genuine interest in it, however, the only students that made it into this highly competitive department in year 2 of the 4 year program were those with the highest marks. I was a cartoonist, could do calligraphy, took lots of photos, and had a genuine interest in advertising. I did not get the highest marks. I was not a skilled artist, but I was a stoner and a drunk. I became a Dadaist, drawer and painter, performance artist and continued - with a mix of passion and self-destructive focus - to be a stoner and a drunk. I graduated with honours from my school and have been a housepainter for over 30 years. I make art but am not "in" the "art world" and never have been. I'm a mangy coyote circling just beyond the glow of the campfire. I don't speak that language. Sometimes I wish my Mum hadn't beamed at me so lovingly across the restaurant table and supported me. Maybe sage counsel to apply my skills to something practical and make art on the side. But she loved me and believed in me. That is a good thing.
The linguistic archaeology in this piece is stunning - finding 'rage' inside 'outrageous' and 'accept' nestled within 'unacceptable.' Your dad's Alphabet of Grievances at Whole Foods (the O word, the U word) perfectly mirrors how we all catalog our disappointments while missing the bigger emotional vocabulary underneath. That frozen lake scene captures it all: you throwing ice with your son, wanting your parents closer, while they stay safely back with Emma June - three generations processing risk and connection differently. The cereal moment kills me. You storm out in righteous anger, and your mom's instinct is still to make sure you're fed. That's immigrant parent love in a freezer bag. And seven years later, the ice finally cracks.