There's a Margaret Atwood quote I love, "Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.".
I love it because it neatly highlights the disparity in power dynamics between men and women in the world we live in.

This weekend, I can't stop thinking "Parents are afraid their children will shame them. Children are afraid their parents will leave them."

Maybe I need to preface that with "Witness parents" and "Witness children".

My folks. Man. I love them. There's no but after that statement. I just love them, as I'm sure they love me.

The disparity in the power dynamic between myself and Christopher and them, though, has been sharply highlighted. They grieve the fact that we don't believe what they believe. And we live in childish terror of being abandoned, left for dead, deemed untouchable.

They mourn our worldliness, even as they revel a little in the freedom we have.
We tiptoe around them, constantly trying to be on our best behavior, subsuming deep inside any part of ourselves that might provide the push over the edge into unacceptable. There is no trying to win their acceptance, because that's gone. Once you don't believe what they believe, they can't accept you. Because that would mean acknowledging what they believe isn't the only thing out there. There is only trying to make sure they don't reject you completely.

It sounds so melodramatic. On the surface, it's not like that. It's comfortable, and loving, and relatively easy. We keep the heavy, difficult conversations to a minimum, and we avoid topics that would lay things too close to the bone.

But under the surface, we're just kids trying to live up to impossible standards (not impossible in their goodness, but impossible in their basic wrongness). And they're disappointed parents.

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