Tonight, Chris and I went to see the Love, Love, Love off-broadway show at the Laura Pels Theatre. The show depicts what they call the Beatlemania era, a time of the “Me” generation. It shows two people who fall in love, get married, and raise children in what is to me, a house full of dysfunction. This quote I read from Mitch Albom’s Five People You Meet in Heaven rang in my head:

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”

The parents of the two children in the show are clearly very into themselves. They both work hard and seem ambitious in their careers, but they never truly hear or listen to anything that their children say. They are superficially involved in their lives with things like birthday cakes and candles, but really have no idea what their children do. Fast forward about twenty years later, their son is still living with their dad (as the parents have divorced) and is clearly suffering from a mental illness that the parents don’t want to address, and the daughter is barely making her rent payments in her sagging career as a professional violinist. She blames her parents for her lack of mobility, and as “payment” for their wrongdoing, she demands that they buy her a house in an economy where she cannot afford that luxury.

I’m not sure I agree that her parents should buy her the house. In the end, they refuse and do what they always do — ignore her and her brother in favor of what they want. It almost makes me remember how Ed used to say he always felt ignored by our father, that our father preferred being in the garage and tinkering with things down there and talking to himself over talking to and bonding with Ed, so Ed actively and consciously made the decision one day as a pre-teen to altogether stop talking to our father. I didn’t always get it then when I was young, but as an adult, I understood completely. How much can we blame our parents for what our lives turn out to be, and how much can we blame ourselves for potentially not trying hard enough and finding our own way? I think that’s what I’m always wondering.