Will we ever understand or stop striving to understand our parents?

A wise friend said to me the other day, ‘Rosie, we will never, not matter how hard we try, understand our parents.’ I started to think, will we? After all how much do we really actually know about our parents? And how much do we compare ourselves to them? ‘It’s because they’ve got a unique relationship to you. They’ve got a unique relationship, more to you than anyone else,’ she said.  Caught in a bad romance, oops just heard the acoustic version off some sound device. Back to reality, yes, it could be some Freudian theory maybe, though let’s be honest, is it really about us wanting to suck our mother’s nipple? Nah, we just want to know that ‘things’ are cool with our parents at all times and then we feel slightly less anxious or maybe so far as absolute in ourselves. After having an argument with my mother for what seemed like years, in reality minutes, after being fine with her for months, I felt ready to renounce myself – for the bigger judgment had come and granted me unworthy. Evidently they are our biggest example to lead by, like a God in some way, so in order to disobey is either rebellion or complete confusion. Another friend said: ‘People strive for the ideal family, but go through different things anyway, like the father who supports the family won’t lose his job, or his wife might die or might become ill, all that will influence his relationship with the parent to the child. Depending on how that parent reacts is between, maybe neglectful or compassionate shown to different degrees so you can’t really wholly express a mass ideal of the parent and as well if you consider historic context people in more affluent families would spend a lot of their developmental time away from their parents, maybe with their nannies, so their relationships to their children are wholly down to their own experiences.’ Although slightly eschewed and alcohol strung, my friend made a good point. The point he made was different to that of my other friend, and again, just brings me back to the unique volume of relationships we all have to our parents. That’s just it, we can’t judge, because they are all different and only our individual selves just know how to roll with it.