(Dec. 31, 2010) Jane holds a photo from her childhood, the one of her father carrying her on Easter as she holds a pastel colored plastic egg in one hand and a little Easter basket in the other. Her father is dressed in brown corduroys and a blue velour top, reminding Jane that this photo was taken in the mid 1980s.
Her eyes soon dart across the room and she sees her grandmother posing in an old photo. She is sitting on top of a picnic table, smiling to whomever is on the other side of the camera. In the photo, her grandmother is at the age where she already has had her five children, probably in the middle of raising them all – the prime of her life. By the pose her grandmother strikes, it seems that she is channeling the person she was before she became a mother.
Jane then finds old photos of her mother and her father. There are pictures of them together, pictures of them apart, photos of them with Jane and her older sister, and photos of them without children – which causes Jane to pause: photos taken before she and her sister were ever a reality, possibly even before they were even the glimmer of a thought in either of her parents’ heads.
And she realizes, “Mom and dad were someone else before they became mom and dad.” And then Jane has yet another interesting thought – children put a lot of pressure on their parents to be perfect, to be the hero, to have all the right advice and to always know the answer. However, Jane admits, if she were to have a child now or five years from now, she still wouldn’t know all the answers, she wouldn’t be perfect and she might be able to offer good advice but probably still wouldn’t be able to take her own.
So, Jane wants to know: as a child, where exactly does this expectation of perfect parenting come from? Holding parents up to ridiculous levels of excellence or placing them on a pedestal may begin for some only when they are old enough to register society’s marketing of what a seemingly perfect family should look like, as reflected, or rather, dictated to us in commercials or weeknight TV shows.
Or perhaps this perfection is engrained within us from the moment we are born. Do we innately know that these are the two people who brought us into this world and because of that, our expectations abound? And then what’s to be said of the parent who tumbles off the pedestal that we have erected for them and placed them so carefully atop? Is it the child’s fault for ignoring that their parent is teetering in imbalance, a structure built on a foundation so unleveled that it is similar to the Leaning Tower of Pisa?
As Jane puts the old photos back into storage, so go her disillusioned expectations of her mother and father that she has housed since childhood. And as she shelves both the images and the ideas, she wonders: what if these black and white comic strip sketches of mom and dad are merely drafted and simply never make it to print?
just jane. 