Parenting Lessons – and Being a Parent

a few nights ago i was chatting to a friend about summer plans, and she mentioned that her first priority was trying to schedule a time to visit her mother, who lives in a different country. I remembered that he had recently taken a long trip for his mother’s birthday, and asked if everything was okay with his aging parents. Yes, my friend explained, but after a long lockdown when no one was allowed to travel, she now felt an urgent need to see her mother more. And since her mom had no desire to move, my friend just had to make more long-distance flights, even though she doesn’t like to travel constantly and her life is between her work and raising her kids. Beach was busy in New Delhi. York, thousands of miles away.

I could relate to that. My own mother lives just a train ride away, but over the past year, I’ve also found myself feeling more and more urged to visit her — even if, during those visits, it takes her a lot to make me feel Need only a casual comment from the side like an angry teenager again. As I’m getting older, I’m reminded that she’s getting older too, and I have an internal compulsion to spend more time with her, despite the sometimes challenging dynamics of our relationship. It got me thinking about how delicate and complex the relationship between parent and child can be, and how it changes throughout life.

in double portrait of david hockney In “My Parents” (1977), the British artist paints a domestic scene that one imagines reflects his view of the central aspects of his parents’ personalities, and how he perceives the relationship between them. The artist’s father, his head bowed over a magazine on his lap, is slightly higher in the foreground of the canvas, though his attention is clearly drawn away from the artist, the viewer, and his own wife sitting next to him in the picture. His feet are not completely on the floor, as if he is restless and impatient to leave. This is a man who is completely in his own world, despite the presence of his family.

Hockney’s mother sits upright on the left side of the canvas, feet together on the floor, hands folded in her lap and focused completely on her son, the painter. Her expression is conscientious and friendly, as if she is used to the role. A green wheeled sideboard stands between them. On its surface is a tray with a vase of flowers and a table mirror. In the reflection we can see a partial view of a smaller replica of a painting on the opposite wall, Piero della Francesca’s “Baptism of Christ”. On the shelf below is a stack of books, including one by Jean-Siméon Chardin, an 18th-century artist who was famous for his own seemingly simple paintings of domestic scenes, yet packed with emotional energy.

This image shows a couple together in a way that may prove distant as well as durable, with a hint of some unspoken discontent or sadness. Hockney, born in 1937, painted it when he was 40. But he had begun two years earlier a portrait called “My Parents and Myself”, which included his own image in the mirror. He gave up the painting, which angered both the parents.

The image sums up a sobering aspect of parenting: that you must abandon your child in a world where you do not have the means to protect them

It makes me wonder how Hockney might have portrayed his parents when he was 20, barely a man, just learning to experience the ups and downs of adulthood – or at 60. For most of us, the way we view our parents, their relationship to each other and to us, changes as we go through our own life experiences.

When I turned 31 or 32, I remember I was the same age as my mother, when she decided to take her life and ours in a new direction, eventually moving to a new country. . I had a completely different perspective on my mother and the situation than before. When we are children, we believe that our parents have all the power and limitless choices they occupy in the far away adult world. There was room for a little more compassion in my assessment now, because by then I had experienced what it was like to be an adult without complete control of life’s circumstances.

How can any of us at the present stage of our lives paint pictures of our parents when we were young? What will we include? How do we explain the way we imagine them in relation to ourselves?

I was killed by the act of arresting “Melanie and Me Swimming” (1978–79) by British painter Michael Andrews. Based on a photograph of the artist and his daughter, the image shows a father teaching his young child to swim in a waist-deep river. The father’s attention is focused on his child as he holds her by the arms, steadying her as she spreads her little legs apart. When she smiles, nervous and happy, thick tufts of gray hair fall over her face. The water is black, and we can barely see what’s at the bottom.

There are a lot of metaphors in this painting about how we make it through life. Even though this child can hardly stand at this shallow depth, she still looks to her father to guide her, just as she might in the future when she is away from firm ground. But he may not always get that support. Sometimes he has to rely on himself. It is a swimming lesson but it is also a survival lesson.

Yet what’s so awesome and heartwarming about this image is how it captures another sobering aspect of parenting. Oftentimes, you must abandon your child in an unknown world where you do not have the means or control to protect them. This can happen at any time in a child’s life, including adult children who may still need active support and parenting because of developmental issues or life choices. And some parents face this terror on a more consistent basis because of how the world is socialized to view and treat children who look like them.

“Smile II” by Shaina McCoy, A tiny painting by a 30-year-old Minneapolis-based artist, 5 inches by 7 inches, but I was immediately drawn to it as I walked through her current New York exhibition, gauge, Two little girls are facing each other. A child is dressed in a colorful polka-dotted tank top and mauve shorts, her hair tied back with a pink barrette. She holds a camera up to her eyes and kneels in front of another child, a child wearing a white shift dress slung off one shoulder, to photograph her.

McCoy doesn’t paint faces on his figures, but we still get a sense of an intimate scene of both drama and life-training. There is something beautiful in this moment of both seeing and being seen by children. Mutual gaze is a recognition of belonging, of safety, of feeling valued enough to be seen with interest and care.

No matter how we raise our children to value themselves or see the beauty in the world, the world will not always provide the same loving gaze

There are no parents in this painting, but the way the little child is dressed, the way the camera someone has taught him to use, and the child he knows to take care of even at play. signal is received. We can tell that someone told this little photographer something about self-worth, about finding the beauty in faces like hers and her sister’s, and about taking the time to look up and see another person. In.

But there is something poignant and also frightening about parenting in this image. The feeling that no matter how we raise our children to value themselves or see the beauty in the world, the world will not always hold the same loving gaze. This will be true for a lot of parenting statistics, but even more so for many parents of black children – especially in America, where the news regularly reminds us that we live in a society That doesn’t always correlate with our children as we see them or have trained them to see themselves.

I love that McCoy keeps his figure faceless. Discipline would be to imagine any child as valuable and to be able to care for them, regardless of how they look or who they belong to.

This painting also makes me think about the fact that we are all someone’s children. And there are many ways we still carry within us the children we were, the ways we were taught to live in the world, and the lessons we learned, for good and bad, from parents as human beings. As in, as we find ourselves to be adults.

What we do with those teachings and lessons is the parenting we all have to learn to do on ourselves. Sometimes this means revisiting the way we grew up and recognizing what lessons we learned from our parents kept us from life patterns and relationships. have been Sometimes this means remembering and relearning the powerful and positive teachings that remind us to be who we can be in the world, regardless of what the world suggests or demands of us.

Follow Anuma on Twitter @EnumOkoro or email him enuma.okoro@ft.com

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