On Becoming Our Parents
The Gifts of Resisting and Returning to Their Experience
Sometimes we discover something about ourselves and our shared humanity in the strangest places, like a TV commercial. Sure, most of them are focused on getting us to buy crap we don’t need or even want. But occasionally, they tap into something universal, evoking strong emotions or highlighting humorous and relatable behavior.
Like the Snickers Hangry commercial, which reminds us that we’re probably just irritable because we need a snack. Or this Doc Morris Christmas kettlebell commercial that paints a perfect picture of a deeply personal and emotional connection to exercise.
I still think about both years after I first saw them. But the commercial that lives rent-free in my head is that pesky progressive one about young homeowners becoming their parents.
The first time I saw it, I laughed wholeheartedly. The next time, I chuckled anxiously. The third time, I looked in the mirror in dread. Now I find myself continually and uncomfortably aware of all the ways I am becoming my parents.
One of my earliest memories is of my mom sitting on the floor of her office surrounded by stacks of printed pages. It’s the mid-1990s, and she’s organizing “A Moving Journal,” the publication she created with a few friends about Authentic Movement and somatic exploration.
It was a “niche newsletter” created 23 years before Substack existed. Instead of email, it was physically mailed around the world to a few hundred paying subscribers.
At the time, I thought it was bizarre. Now I see how badass it was.
As a baseball-obsessed kid, I had direct access to my mom’s expertise in the Alexander Technique, a popular method for improving performance in activities like music, acting, and sports.
Yet, I rejected it entirely. Because it came from my mom, it was so obviously silly and unhelpful. I dismissed the power of embodied movement like a teenager judges and rejects their parent’s musical tastes. I ran from the parental association as hard as I could, only to discover decades later the wisdom I’d pushed aside.
Now, I can only laugh that reconnecting to the body and embracing more intuitive exercise have become central to my life.
Despite my mom publishing “A Moving Journal” for 12 years, I never saw her as a writer. After all, she was just my mom.
So when she told me she was writing a book about her experience of my grandfather's death, I was surprised. The thought of reading something so personal brought a wave of tension, a mix of curiosity and trepidation. It was an invitation to experience a part of her I'd never seen before.
In reading her book, The Watch, I was captivated by both the story itself and the continual realization of the uniqueness of our subjective experiences. I was there, experiencing his death with her, yet in my own world. There was just so much I missed.
We can live in proximity through the same moment yet experience it fully in our own way. The vantage point is different. The relationships are different. We are different. So, the feelings and sensations we encounter and the meaning we take from them are often surprisingly different.
In many ways, I sense my mom was wrestling with this same idea as she lived through my grandfather’s death and wrote her book. In her words:
When my father was diagnosed with cancer, the ground beneath my feet seemed to fall away. As he faced the upending of his life, I felt woefully ill-equipped to offer support to the person who had always been the center of gravity within our family.
A moment like this upends not just each person but also the way everyone interacts and relates to each other. Thankfully, my mom had thirty years of relevant practice she could lean on.
Through Authentic Movement, I learned that if I close my eyes and attend to how my body wants to move, something meaningful happens, and that having an outer witness to the process profoundly deepens the experience.
Authentic Movement is a practice grounded in relationship: When you see me with compassion, as I am, I can see myself more clearly. An awakened presence of the inner witness begins to develop.
This isn’t restricted to just movement practice; it’s an approach that deepens and appreciates each of our subjective experiences across life:
When we are seen enough, we can see ourselves with compassion and greater awareness of the way our minds produce the judgments and projections that cloud our vision, we may find it possible to see someone else more clearly as they are.
Our differences, including our physical bodies, our sensations, our emotions, our dreams, our images and memories, our languages and cultures, become infinite details to be discovered, to be cherished.
In a way, the whole book is an exploration of what it means to truly connect with our experience in even the most intense and poignant moments:
The Watch invites you to witness your own experiences, discovering what wants to be felt and known within the mysteries of life, death, and time.
So, if you enjoy personal memoirs, stories about life and death, or examples of how decades of awareness practice can ripple across your life, I think you’ll enjoy my mom’s book, The Watch.1
As I write this, I feel proud of my mom for courageously sharing her experience of such a powerful and vulnerable moment in her life. It reminds me how often we don’t open the door to these deeper parts of ourselves and our experiences with even our closest family members. But when we do, the vulnerability is an invitation to greater understanding and connection. Her book is an immense gift to not just me but anyone who discovers it.
This is what I love most about writing: not trying to convince others of anything or preach absolute truths, just giving a glimpse into our unique vantage point, thoughts, and experiences. In this way, we leave a few breadcrumbs that might be of value to others on their own journey.
In a world that seems to be shifting increasingly toward artificial abstractions, it’s human stories and personal reflections like The Watch that feel most alive to me.
When I first thought about those progressive commercials, my main questions were about why so many of us have a tendency to become like our parents and how to avoid this unfortunate fate.
But now I find myself more curious about why we resist their gifts in the first place, only to discover them later. Ideally, not too late to share the joy of them together.
Like the way I avoided helping my dad in the garden all those childhood summers, only to fall in love with gardening while living 700 miles away. Or how I dismissed his tendency to tackle ambitious home improvement projects, just to now discover the delight in inviting him over for a demolition day.
Maybe the way to think about this pattern is that our parents and our early childhood experiences plant seeds within us that lie dormant waiting for when conditions are ripe to sprout. Maybe there’s an intelligence behind the way we resist them at first, holding them at bay until we’re ready to make them our own.2
There’s something significant about discovering an idea yourself or starting an activity on your terms. By embracing our own journey with it, we can more fully honor our subjective experiences and authentically connect with others. I felt an extreme version of this in reading my mom’s book about her father, as I also digested my own early experiences as a new father to my daughter. The window into my mom’s experience enriched not just our connection but also continues to influence my relationship with both my kids and my parents.
Just as there’s wisdom in resisting parental influence early in life, there’s also value in allowing it to reemerge.3 So now, instead of running from or toward the vortex of my parents’ experiences and preferences, I just sit back and marvel at all the fascinating ways certain themes, ideas, and activities weave across generations and bubble up in my own life.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear from you with any reflections in the comments or by replying directly to this email.
If these quotes from my moms book, The Watch, piqued your interest in the discipline of Authentic Movement, she also helped create a book on the movement practice titled Intimacy in Emptiness.
When I shared this notion of the wisdom in resisting parental influences with a mentor, she commented that it could also be understood within the context of the Jungian idea of individuation.
One of the most powerful articulations of this comes from
, who continually reminds listeners of Founders Podcast that “the story of the father is embedded in the son”. By this, he’s naming (and I sense warning us about) how “a man often spends his entire adult life trying to be exactly like his father or nothing like him.”