Life Question 5

Parents as Significant Others

Abraham Lincoln said, "All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother." He remembered her as the most significant person in his life. Barbra Streisand told an interviewer that she owed her career to her mother, but the reason was not angelic. "If my mother had believed in me," she explained only half joking, "I'd probably have been a typist."²

Most likely we consider each of our parents to be a significant other. When we are very young, parents are giants in our lives; as we grow and our world expands, they become more life-sized. But, for many of us, our parents continue to be a considerable force even though they be far away or long since dead.

Our parents often serve us as models, and our realization of this can be a source of pleasure, ambivalence, or outright rejection. Friday writes, "The older I get, the more of my mother I see in myself. The more opposite my life and my thinking grow from hers, the more of her I hear in my voice, see in my facial expression, feel in my emotional reactions I have come to recognize as my own."³ In dedicating a book to his own parents, psychologist Howard Halpern wrote, "Though you have been dead many years, I increasingly marvel at your continued existence in me, sometimes to my frustration and chagrin and often to my pleasure."⁴

Throughout the life span, relationships with mothers are generally closer than those with fathers, and this is particularly true for daughters.⁵ Dinah Eng grew up in a Chinese-American family, one of seven children -- all girls -- with a father who desperately wanted a son. She wrote that he hasn't been a perfect father, and neither has she been a perfect daughter, but he is getting better -- at least in one area -- under her caring tutelage. Although her father's good-byes were always perfunctory and physically distant, she decided to reach out and hug him hello and good-bye each time they were together. She recalled that was like hugging a log, but she never gave up, and then one day he hugged back. She was so moved she cried. She wrote, "Now, each visit, he reaches out to hug and kiss me."⁶ Eng's story suggests that it may never be too late to rear a father.

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