Latest / After the Signal / Before They Were Our Parents

Transcript

Before They Were Our Parents · After the Signal

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is After The Signal.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Thomas Calder.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: We spend our whole lives knowing our parents and remarkably little time knowing who they were.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's a photograph of my father that I've always liked.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Not because it's particularly remarkable.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's remarkable to me because when I look at it,
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm reminded of something that took me a surprisingly long time to understand.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: My father had a life before he was my father.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds obvious.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Of course he did.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Every parent did.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: But knowing something intellectually
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: and actually understanding it are two very different things.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: When we're children, our parents seem to begin with us.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Dad is dad.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Mom is mom.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: They occupy these roles so completely that it's difficult to imagine there was ever
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: a time when the roles didn't exist.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: But there was.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Before my father was my father, he was somebody's son.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: He was a boy.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: He had friends I never met.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: He went places I've never been.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: He made decisions I know nothing about.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: He had ambitions before he knew whether any of them would work out.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: He worried about things that probably seem trivial now.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he experienced entire chapters of his life before he had any idea
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: that I would eventually exist.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: The older I get, the more interesting that becomes to me.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think one of the strange things about losing
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: a parent is realizing how much of that person you never thought to ask about.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: We ask our parents practical questions.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Where are the keys?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: What time are we leaving?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: But there
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: are questions we often don't think to ask until much later.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Who were you before you were responsible for me?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: What did you want?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: What frightened you?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Who broke your heart?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: What did you think your life was going to look like?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: What mistake changed you?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: What did you believe at 20 that you no longer believed at 40?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Who influenced you?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Who disappointed you?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Who helped you when nobody else knew you needed help?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe the question I find most interesting,
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: what happened to you that eventually became part of me?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's inheritance too.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: We inherit more than possessions.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: We inherit consequences.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: A parent makes a decision at 25.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it changes where they live.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: That determines where they meet someone.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: That determines where a family eventually settles.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: That determines which school a child attends,
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: which friends that child makes, which opportunities appear.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: One decision becomes another.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And decades later,
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: somebody is living inside the consequences of a choice made before they were born.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: We rarely see our lives that way.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: We experience the present as though it arrived independently.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it didn't.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: There is an architecture beneath it.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: A chain of decisions,
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: accidents,
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: relationships,
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: sacrifices,
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: opportunities, and mistakes stretching backward through people we may barely know.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's part of what fascinates me about families.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can look at an old photograph and see three people smiling at a camera,
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: but the photograph can't show you everything that had to happen
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: for those three people to be standing there.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: It can't show you what almost happened instead.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: It can't show you the job somebody didn't take,
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: the person somebody didn't marry,
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: the train they almost missed,
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: the argument that changed the decision,
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: the money someone quietly saved,
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: The risk someone refused to take or the risk they did take.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: The photograph shows the result, not the architecture.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And when we're children, we mostly see results.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: We see the house.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: We don't see what it cost.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: We see Christmas morning.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: We don't see the bank account.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: We see dad leave for work.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: We don't necessarily understand what he's carrying with him.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: We see mom make a decision and sometimes assume that's simply the kind of person she is.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know what experience taught her to make that decision.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Children inherit outcomes long before they understand causes.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then something strange happens.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: We get older.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: We become adults ourselves.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we become parents and suddenly certain memories change shape.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Something your father said when you were 12 makes more sense when you're 40.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: A decision your mother made that once seemed overly cautious begins
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: to look completely different when you're responsible for somebody else.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: You begin seeing your parents less as characters in your childhood and more
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: as people,
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: imperfect people,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: people improvising,
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: people making decisions without knowing how things would turn out, just like us.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: I find that strangely comforting because when you're a child,
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: adults seem to know what they're doing.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Then you become one and you discover the terrible secret.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us are figuring things out as we go.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Your parents were too.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't excuse every mistake.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Understanding isn't the same as absolution.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Some parents fail their children badly.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Some wounds are real.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Some choices deserve to be judged honestly.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: But even then, context matters.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Understanding how somebody became who they became isn't the same as approving
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: of everything they did.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's simply seeing the whole person.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's something we owe the people who came before us whenever possible.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Not sainthood, not condemnation.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Complexity.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: The willingness to let them have lives larger than the role they played in ours.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've been thinking about this a lot while writing the executor books.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: At the center of them is a son trying to understand his father after
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: the father can no longer explain himself.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the deeper I go into that idea, the less interested I become in the question.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: What did his father leave behind?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm much more interested in who was his father before Elias knew him.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's where the real inheritance begins.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Long before the will.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Long before the estate.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Long before anybody knew there would someday be an executor.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's true outside fiction too.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: If your parents are still here,
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: there may be an extraordinary opportunity hiding inside an ordinary conversation.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Ask something you don't already know.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not about the family logistics.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Ask about them.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: What were you like at 20?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: What did you think you would become?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Who was your best friend?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: What were you afraid of?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: What decision changed your life?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: You may hear a story you've never heard before.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if your parents are gone, as mine are, perhaps there's still something worth doing.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the photographs.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Read the letters.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Ask the people who knew them before you did.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Not because you're trying to reconstruct a perfect history.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: You can't.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: But because every now and then, you'll discover a piece of them that existed before you.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when you do, something interesting happens.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: You understand them a little differently.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you even understand yourself differently.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because before they were our parents,
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: they were people becoming the people we eventually inherited.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Thomas Calder.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is After the Signal.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, strengthen the things that remain.