When I was in my twenties, my former boss teasingly asked why I always needed to make myself the center of attention. In my twenties, I felt I had something to prove, something to say, and exciting stories that everyone needed to hear. Gen Z would call that “main character syndrome”, when we see ourselves as the main character in everyone’s story. I’m sure I was annoying at times. As I moved throughout my thirties, I became less interested in hearing my own voice. It's hard to know whether the change happened because of the pandemic or a natural side effect of getting older. I learned to take myself less seriously where it didn’t matter. Some of the sharper, pointier sides of my personality have softened. When I asked my dad about what was the best part of getting older, he echoed the same sentiment: “caring less what people thought.” As I cared less about how other people perceived me and impressed other people, it opened up space to be interested in other people.
I’m striving to be more curious because curiosity is the foundation for listening, and being interested in other people helps us build more meaningful relationships.
Think about the last time someone asked you a really good question, and you felt seen and heard. We don’t ask our parents about their lives outside of ourselves enough.
I started a series on Instagram called Questions to Ask Your Aging Parents, where I asked my parents questions about their lives. I asked about what they valued, what their biggest regrets were, how they have changed over time, and what their childhood was like.
I was surprised to learn about similarities in their upbringing. They both had brothers who were their parents’ favorites, and they both felt their parents were emotionally unavailable to them. I know they both made considerable efforts to make sure I never felt that way. I found out that the best gift my dad ever got was matching motorcycles that he and his brother used to ride from sunrise to sundown when he was 14. It was also the last gift his mother ever gave him before she died, his father remarried, and he was sent to Kentucky to live with my Aunt Myra. My grandpa married someone 10 years older than my dad and started a new family. That, despite a tumultuous and unaffectionate relationship, my mother was able to forgive my grandmother in the end when she cared for her when she had dementia. Thinking about how these events rippled through my parents’ lives helped me to build the best by-product of curiosity: empathy.
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time, they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. – Oscar Wilde
In our twenties, we look back on our parents and recognize how they might have screwed us up a bit. We may even blame them for things that didn’t work out in our whole life, but as we enter midlife, we see them through a more empathetic lens. Empathy gives the means to forgive and accept our parents for who they are, to see them as fully fleshed out people. You might find that even though they didn’t always show up in the way you wanted, they broke generational chains and traumas that you were not aware of. I asked my dad, “Why do you think Grandpa is the way he is?” He told me that his grandmother was the same way with his father, and he probably thought criticizing him was the best way to raise him. “I never want you guys (my sister and I) to feel that you aren’t loved or valued.”
As a child of divorce, you often feel that you end up parenting your parents and prioritizing their emotional needs. I’d be lying to you if I never carried around disappointment and resentment with me. For so many years, I carried around anger at my parents for their failure to protect me from their own animosity and dysfunction. I didn’t know where to put it or how to channel it, so it just bubbled below the surface. Asking my parents questions allowed me to exhale, like how your body relaxes after a long breath. I could recontextualize my own experiences in the backdrop of where they came from and what they had to overcome. After all, the great struggle of adulthood is taking the best parts of our parents and shedding some of our more corrosive learned behaviors.
There’s a phrase from a speech I gave in Mandarin that I keep coming back to: 一个简单的问题，打开了一扇我不知道存在的门. One simple question can open a door you never knew existed.
The good news is curiosity is something you can practice and get better at through small, tiny sound bites. Give your parents a call, shoot them a voice message, or buy them a coffee.
Some Questions To Start:
Moving Away From "I'm the daughter. Let's talk about me."
The more you invest in getting to know your parents, the easier it is to talk about difficult topics further down the road. At CrossGen Health, I help adult children audit their caregiving preparedness and put the right documentation and communication plans in place before they're needed. I can give you the conversation guides, the checklists, the consolidated health records, audit for knowledge gaps, and prep you for caregiving. But there is work to do outside of my services, and it just starts with curiosity.
Follow along on Instagram @crossgenhealth for how to speak to your parents,
