The guardrails between adult children and their parents

Last week, I watched Ghostbusters Frozen Empire. In the final scene (this is sort of a spoiler but I assume most people know the ghosts don’t win), Phoebe is fighting the evil ghost when her mother cries out her name and rushes to her side. She props Phoebe up and helps stabilize the proton blaster.

And I cried. I didn’t full-on weep, but I teared up. It was just lovely to see the mother helping her daughter.

It’s not often that I mourn the fact that I don’t have a relationship with my mother. I am close with all my other family, so I don’t usually feel the void. But that’s probably because I don’t think about it very much. I know many of my friends have close relationships with their mothers, and there are really beautiful examples in the world of adult daughter and mother relationships. So, sometimes it’s sad to be reminded I won’t ever have that.

Last week, The New Yorker published an article by Anna Russell about children who go “no contact” with their parents. It is a well-rounded piece that considers both the well-being of the adult children and the impact it has on the parents. However, I do feel a bit defensive of the parents, who are on the receiving end of no contact, which is more similar to my situation than not. My sympathy, of course, is entirely dependent on why the child decided on no contact.

Probably more than ten years ago, the same publication published an article (that I’ve failed to locate) about students demanding “controversial” speakers be removed from campus. At the time, I recall these speakers were not racist or otherwise hateful, but took positions on which many students disagreed. I — about ten years past college age myself at the time — complained that it was not meant to be a place where you agreed with everything you heard. I thought of this as the “everybody gets a trophy” generation, where the world was made out to be sunshine and roses. And I wondered what would happen to these students when they entered the real world and had to sit in a cubicle across from a woman who laughingly admits her parents vote in open primaries to detract support from the best democratic candidate — just, you know, for example.