Kids these days!

If there is one thing that makes you remember being a teenager, it’s having your parent tell you that you don’t understand something that you actually do understand. It’s a quintessential barrier between ages; it’s nearly possible to accept that a younger person’s different ideas or qualitative values could be true.

Of course, that's because kids are often full of shit.
But when your happy, glowing, successful, loved, newly married daughter, who finished grad school and is pursuing her intended career tells you that her spirituality is sufficient… well… apparently that’s hard to believe, when she doesn't know God.

It’s frustrating that my mom should get so stumped here.
I’m able to translate her universal truths into my spiritual dialect. Individually, she always smiles and is pleased to hear me eloquently explain the experience of letting go of defensiveness, of forgiveness, of openness, love and gratitude. But she remains convinced that, since I don’t believe in God per say, my spiritual life is not as full as it could be.

She denied that my path could be equal in “fullness” because she assumes that I underestimate her path. This is likely because when I said, “her path,” she imagined whatever my twenty-year-old self said to her in order to fight off her evangelism. But that was ten years ago, and my life and spiritual self have radically matured.

Hearing her tell me that I don’t understand immediately brought back the defensiveness, the sting and the insult of the memory of adolescent frustration. (Most notably because I had the now-rare impetus to go outside and chain-smoke.) Her idea of my spirituality is based on my rebellious, young-adult self. When she insists that I am too inexperienced to understand, she’s basing her analysis on her own inexperience of who I am now.

Geez, parents just don’t understand!!
(hah hah…)