- Peta-Gaye Nash
- Oct 4
There’s a song that brings me to tears the older I get: The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics. It’s old school but the lyrics apply to every generation, as long as there are parents and children. The first line gives me great hope – “Every generation blames the one before’ - because I genuinely thought I had improved on my parents’ parenting. I thought I did it better. Turns out no matter what you do, your offspring may blame you for something. Those mistakes you made will be remembered and brought up like acid reflux just as you thought you were having a good day.
The next line says, “And all of their frustrations, come beating on your door.” Life is hard and it’s easier to blame someone else. The easiest someone-else to blame is your own parents (although I’d prefer that my children just stick to blaming the government, the economy, corporations and social media). It’s even worse for today’s young people because now, unlike any other time, they can witness other people’s lives and what those people choose to show on social media which usually appears too good to be true or shows only one part of the story.
But I digress. This is not about how to stop the child-to-parent blame game. That’s part of being human. The meaning of the song is that a man wishes he could have communicated with his father, all that he needed to, and he wishes he could have told him in his father’s living years. ‘It’s too late,’ he sings, ‘when you die.’
I’m not being morbid, but no one ever tells us that our elders are not going to be around forever. Of course, we know this on an intellectual level, but it’s not so obvious as we go around our daily lives busier than ever before, saying we’ll call, we’ll visit, we’ll send a note/email/text/letter and then out of the blue, our loved one is gone. Just like that. The pain and the regret are palpable; a smell, a taste or a word brings back memories and we long for something not possible – to simply say to our loved one, ‘you were human. You made mistakes. I did too. I love you and you brought lessons and beauty into my life.’
The song says, ‘say it loud, say it clear, you can listen as well as you hear.’ What an incredible message. Even if we parents are blamed, I’ve learned that children want to be heard. No matter how you’ve sacrificed. No matter how you gave up things for them. No matter how utterly ungrateful they may seem. They want to tell us how they experienced their childhood – it’s hard to listen and even harder to hear, but hear we must, with compassion. Like the song goes, ‘we all talk a different language/talkin’ in defense’ without deeply listening and hearing.
We usually have less time than we think and it’s not about being frightened of death or worrying about it or even avoiding blame. It’s about living life to the fullest. To me this means embracing hard conversations. If there is something to resolve, resolve it, something to say, say it. Say it loud and clear and listen deeply to the other side. Once you’ve spoken, it’s so much easier to let go. Those past resentments don’t belong to your present or future self. And like the song says, ‘if you don’t give up and you don’t give in, you may just be okay.’
