“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

-attributed to Mark Twain

I think everyone I know has felt this way at some point. When we are little our parents seem flawed, but still the ultimate authority and our protectors against the outer world. As we approach adolescence their authority wavers and we begin to question their rightness more and more. By the time we are teenagers most of us have rejected their beliefs entirely and embark on our own search for our own truths. Finally it seems that what we have become is not so different from what we were rebelling against and that we were rather silly to have gone through all that, anyway.

Tonight at dinner my father asked what I was doing in chemistry and we proceeded to get into a debate as to what a mole was and whether it was the same thing as molecular weight. The dictionary proved him right, although I’m certain moles have nothing to do with molecules or weight. When we went to Mexico last year we spent half the time arguing about his grammar and whether it was ever proper to call a stranger “tú” and not “usted.” We seldom have real arguments, but we’re generally in one state of controversy or another.

A few years ago I decided to stop talking as an experiment. I just wanted to try it for a few days and see what it was like. My sister was annoyed and my mother puzzled, but Dad blew up. Apparently I hit on something that he simply couldn’t stand, so of course I refused to give it up. We ended up sending furious emails to each other every few hours and I spent most of those four days in my room. A year later Mom explained to me that Dad’s father used to give him the silent treatment and that had been why he had reacted so strongly to my experiment. He was too worked up about it to realize that if he had remained calm I would have abandoned it much sooner.

I hope we will not always be this way. I wonder what I’ll do years from now when he is an old man in a flannel shirt and I am tall and calm like he is? Will I be able to really love him them? Will I forgive him then for spending all those years at the office earning money I didn’t want? I hope that when I am 21 I can finally be proud of him, respect him. If I can’t learn to get along well with my own father, how am I going to get along with anybody? If I don’t understand him, how will I understand myself?