Expecting a Superhero was the Real Villain of my Childhood
By: Paige Wilson
During my senior year of high school, while my classmates were blowing off steam in Cabo, I was freezing my ass off on the East coast, warming up to the idea that my parents weren’t superheroes
“I feel like you don’t even like me,” my dad lamented two years earlier, as I sat brooding on the couch. I didn’t even look up to give him an answer.
The truth is at the point in time he was right. I was angry. I was livid in fact, because I was struggling and he didn’t know how to fix it. The pandemic came down hard on people in a lot of ways and for me, it was a serious mental health decline.
Due to a myriad of existing anxiety issues and a fear of illness that had of course been exacerbated by the state of the world, I sank further and further into a depressive spiral. I had never been one to lean on my family much for support and without my friends, I didn’t know how to cope with so much stress when I felt so alone.
I hardly spoke to anyone. I lashed out at my sisters. My parents left town for a weekend and I didn’t eat for two days. They never would have known, because I never told them. I vaguely told them one time that I was struggling and wanted help, but they didn’t understand the severity of the issue.
“You just have to take better care of yourself.” My dad was unphased by my pleas. At the time, I questioned whether he even cared.
I slumped back into my sinkhole of intrusive thoughts and I held his words of dismissal against him for a long time. I liked to believe that I had the agency to stand up for myself, but the truth is that at the time I didn’t. I never asked for help again. I was quite comfortable in my misery, and it was easier to believe that the whole world was against me than to, my parents in particular.
Little by little, as many of us have had to do, I climbed out of that suffocating sinkhole and clawed my way back into the world of rationale. It certainly wasn’t easy, but I got to a point where I was managing my anxiety, and the resentment I had held for my parents was buried deep within.
That’s where I was senior year spring break, just after my 18th birthday. I was breathing fresh air again and touring colleges for the coming fall with my parents by my side. Our beautiful brick AirBnb heard our laughter echo off kitchen walls, the click of my parents wine glasses and the strum of my dad’s guitar. An enormous portrait of a woman holding a basket of fruit hung opposite my bed. She made me laugh, and I blew her an exaggerated kiss every night and giggled, as if I were 13 again and she were my friend across the room at a sleepover.
My childish glow began to fade on the third day of our trip, in a seaside parking lot in Newport. A raging argument broke out between my parents. How it started I don’t remember. What I do remember is crying in the backseat of the rental car as a full grown adult, while my dad threatened to fly home, and I sat silently blaming them for all that was wrong with me.
By the end of the car ride they had finished fighting. Tears were wiped away and apologies were sincerely delivered, but I was still upset. They had faltered again and it had scared me. I made my way inside and lay alone, tears streaming out of my eyes and blurring the lady with the fruit, the last of my adolescence leaking out onto the decorative quilt that I had nuzzled under the night before.
Eventually my dad knocked on the door. I nearly refused him entry, but I begrudgingly allowed him to make his way in and sit beside me on the bed.
“I’m sorry,” he began. What followed were words that came from his heart. Not superficial explanations that you’d give to a child, but real, legitimate explanations for what had upset me. He told me he wanted to grow. He told me that he wanted to be better. He graciously didn’t expect me to say much.
It took me a moment to process. Be better? But you were supposed to already be the best.
When he finished he kissed me on the forehead and I’m sure I smiled and said I forgive you, but it wasn’t until later that it really sunk in. All this time I had expected them to have all the answers. When I was struggling, I wanted them to flip a switch and make it all better. I never considered that they might be struggling too.
We want our parents to be perfect people. In fact, as kids we tend to labor under the delusion that they are. The truth is, they are only human, and all humans have faults. Not only are they humans, but they are humans with past experiences that shaped them. They are humans who aren’t done learning and never will be. They love us, sometimes just not in exactly the ways we want them to. They care, but they aren’t always sure how to make you know that.
Love looks different for everybody, but at the root of it all, recognizing that someone has flaws and loving them anyways is a concept that I feel like I truly understand now. Just as I love so many people in spite of their flaws, I know that they love me regardless of mine. I look up to my parents these days more than ever, because they demonstrate that it’s not perfection that makes a person whole, but the capacity for growth.