Perhaps. I'm afraid I personally can't do that, though. For one very simple reason: My dad has never
made a wrong decision.
(You think I'm joking? Think again.)
Is that for real, or in his own mind,
MLB?
Oh, it's for real, all right.
And by the way: Not his mind. Mine.
You know what they say about false idols...
(Just saying, your Dad has made a mistake or two in his lifetime. Trust me, it's happened.)
As for my parents ... we had a funny dichotomy. I got along pretty well with both my Mom and my Dad when growing up, although my Dad had a vicious temper ... thankfully, it only manifested itself on very,
very infrequent occasions. Both were children of alcoholics, which, I firmly believe, informed their parenting styles once they had me.
My Dad and I didn't get along at all through high school and some of college, but around the time that I took out a significant bank loan to buy the equipment to start a business (and had it paid off through revenue within seven months), during my junior year, we started to see each other on a different wavelength. We had the same passions in sports (I grew up seeing plenty of Chicago Cubs baseball games and Blackhawks hockey games live), but he had the most controlling personality I've ever seen. Basically, he was a dry drunk: If something didn't go his way, he became infuriated. He blamed his obesity (he nearly topped 380 pounds) and diabetes on his family, because we "enabled him." For a man who accomplished so much, eventually becoming the #2 guy at a bank before taking early retirement when the bank was sold, he was terribly insecure.
But we ultimately fell apart due to two reasons: One, I got married in the United Church of Christ, as opposed to the Catholic Church (as I was raised) -- he spent many months threatening to not come to the wedding before finally relenting; the other, because I fell into alcoholism before going into rehab in 2009. My Dad and I never communicated the same after that, because, from his point of view (he never drank), one could simply say "no" and be fine. He didn't think I needed to go to AA meetings (which he called "a cult"), or have a sponsor, or speak to a counselor or psychiatrist ... he thought that all I needed to stay sober was to go back to Catholicism, and I'd always be a drunk until I returned to the Church, that I could simply turn the "drink" switch off. He thought that until the day he died, on September 19, 2010, and the very last conversation we had was him telling me (after six months of unemployment) that I'd never get another job until I returned to Catholicism.
Still working through a lot of that.
My Mom? I got along with her really great for years until she announced in April that she was moving from the Chicago suburbs to fucking Boise, ID, and then said she was moving long before her announced date, even though she hasn't sold her Illinois house. So she, my college dropout sister and my multiple-convict brother are now shacking up in the basement of my mom's sister.
Yeah,
that's how much I have in common with my parents.
