| tomboy | |
| sensitive | |
| mature | |
| quiet | |
| self-sufficient | |
| lazy |
I so recognize that! I tried explaining my chronic depression to my secretly very chronically depressed father, but that didn’t go anywhere.
In hindsight, I wish I had pushed a bit harder. Since the main approach to deal with that as a big strong boomer man was alcoholism. Which is ultimately how we lost him. Sometimes I wonder how many boomers/ parent we lost to that path of denying mental health complications, leading to alcoholism, leading to cancer.
@HeliaXyana @MelkyWay
That's definitely a shame.
My dad is still with us and he's doing well for 80. He's still active and fairly sharp, and retirement has helped his state of mind immensely. He married a nurse around 20 years ago and she is one of the most patient and caring people I've ever known, so I don't worry much about him.
He wasn't a bad father by any means, just has some blind spots that would be familiar to anyone who knows boomers.
Ah, yes, my father was a sweetheart. Drinking just made him a bit of a poetic philosopher. And precisely, it's an issue of blind spots. Not that there aren't any boomers guilty of neglecting their children, of course, but I think this list is very recognizable because of that reluctance to recognize more profound issues. That disproportionate fear of somehow indulging an issue.
@HeliaXyana @TheGreatLlama @MelkyWay can be both though. The amounts of time I heard “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”…
Interestingly enough, he also went into alcoholism, which surprised me, but not his ex-wives (not that they were innocent… my mother to this day insists she’s a good mother and won’t hear about things, hah).