The Parent Trap

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday September 4, 1996

TONY SQUIRES

When does parenthood end, childhood finish and the perfect adult-to-adult relationship begin? Almost never, writes TONY SQUIRES , who still hides the ashtray when his parents visit.

YOUR parents arrive home unexpectedly. As they make their way from the car to the front door you do what's natural. Panic. The overflowing contents of the ashtray are hurled into the back yard, the tasteful shell receptacle wiped clean of its incriminating evidence. Empty beer bottles are rattled into garbage bags and stuck under a bit of canvas at the back door. If only you had time to bury them.

You rush to the bathroom to clean your teeth, simultaneously throwing down a packet of biscuits. That always hides the fag-breath, you tell yourself as you dump a canload of air freshener into the house.

And now they're here, striding down the hallway. You bump their cheeks in greeting, like a socialite looking for someone more important at a swell party. But you're looking for trouble, your eyes darting about uneasily for the item you've missed, for the nasty clue that will finally scream to your folks: "He's not the boy you think he is!"

It's so damned difficult being 35.

Gee, I really hope my mum and dad don't read that. Because maybe they'll think it's me who does that sort of thing ... hiding his life from the people who gave it to him. Let's not even get into what they'd think about the smoking bit.

It raises the question: when does parenthood end and childhood finish? Never. Ever. And for the most part, according to the experts (people who are parents and children of parents), that's not a bad thing. This most basic of relationships rarely becomes a simple one. As years tumble by and life roles change, the web of this relationship usually remains sticky.

Experts in family structure urge that we maintain open parent-child communications. Excellent advice, although in some cases it seems an open parent-child relationship is as tough to get right as a so-called open marriage. Are we competing with our parents? Are we afraid of them? Wounded more deeply by their criticism than by that delivered by anyone else?

For some people, the question "but what would mum/dad think?" hovers above nearly all decisions. A 40-year-old woman who lives in Australia, tens of thousands of kilometres from her British parents, still finds herself with these thoughts, and often adjusts her behaviour to accommodate the anticipated answer.

And, according to David de Vaus from the Australian Institute of Family Studies, the author of Letting Go: Relationships Between Adults And Their Parents (Oxford University Press, $19.95), the influence can extend way beyond just the international. Our parents can still seem to be peering at us from beyond the grave.

"There are adults who keep hearing in their head, if you like, their parents throughout their life," says de Vaus. "Even after their parents are dead they keep asking the question: what would their parents think?"

There was no sense of mental liberation for Mikey Robins when his mother died in 1989. He became an adult orphan, since his father had passed away when Robins was a boy. The issues were all there to be worked through ... mortality, responsibility.

Robins's sense of humour, heard on Triple J and seen regularly on ABC TV, is a quick-response gun of a thing. It involves having the ability to react to situations and conversations and come up with the winning one-liner. It also often borders on what a mother or father might find cheekreddening at the Tupperware party.

Those in the public eye have no opportunity to hide a goodly proportion of their antics from their parents, since it's hung out for all to see. How do they cope, if what they do sometimes angers their folks?

While Robins acknowledges that it may appear he has total freedom in this regard, he believes that he would not have changed anything he's said or done were they alive.

"But I probably would have regretted it more once I'd done it," Robins says. "I didn't really worry about her reaction; it was never a concept. Mind you, in those days there wasn't much of a chance that she would turn up at the Harold Park (the Sydney hotel stand-up comedy venue). Getting a laugh was very much big currency in our household when we grew up. Dad was an amateur weekend comedian and MC. Mum had moments of being very funny. One of the ways you got attention was to try to keep up with the adults, so being funny had a lot of currency."

But the fact that he is known to occasionally work a little lewd has caused him to think about the oft-quoted picture of the path to what exists beyond death. You know, moving towards the white light, with the river bank where the families of the dead wait in glorious anticipation.

"I have this image of walking up out of the water and my parents just shaking their heads, going, 'What? Get out of here!' Picking up rocks and throwing them at me."

The currency Robins earned from his parents by making them laugh has now been converted to the stuff you stick in the bank. The passing of his parents helped him to establish the fact that the laughs had become the career. "There is a thing ... it's not just that I'm in my 30s and I'm an adult ... it's, I really do have to make a living out of this 'cause I can't go and crash on the couch."

And what about the adult orphan and the sense of mortality?

"Yeah. Very much so. Less and less as the years go on. Like most adolescents I had a morbid fascination with death, so compared with what I was like when I was 15 I'm probably far more sane about it now.

"When the second one goes there is that thing ... you can't fool yourself that, even though you're in your 20s, you're never going to die because it's been proven to you several times in your life that irrefutably you will die. Which is why I live such a healthy lifestyle."

Nick Murray's parents live in Adelaide and probably having nightmares about elephant poo. Murray is the chief executive of pay-TV's thecomedychannel , which launched its service with an act by comedian Matthew Parkinson that used the word "c---" several times in the opening minute. It has giant posters in Sydney and Melbourne featuring a picture of elephant droppings and the tag "heaps of funny s---".

Not surprisingly, Murray's parents have reacted to the most recent efforts of their son. But it's a reaction he is happy to receive. He is determined to know what they think of his work, although it's not something that crosses his mind during the decision-making process.

"I'm not running around doing things to impress or outrage my parents," says Murray. "Afterwards, you think, 'I wonder what mum and dad would have thought about that'.

"They rang me up when they heard about 'c---' being in the program. My mother said, 'You know, if you could tell that Matt Parkinson that there are a lot funnier words than that word ... the C word'. She said, 'What about dill?'

"I said, 'Mum that wouldn't have been funny'.

"She said, 'If he used all you dills out there tonight, that would have been all right'."

Murray says his parents go to the theatre regularly and often tell him that there is a lot of "unnecessary language" in the plays, so he knows they will always take the bait on that score.

When he told them about the elephant poo posters, they wondered if he wasn't going too far. He then said he was thinking of putting them up in Adelaide, to which his mother responded: "Oh, dear. It's a good thing most of my friends don't know what you're doing at the moment."

Murray says: "I used to be in university revues and they'd come along to see the show. You'd always be wondering what they'd think about what you were doing in it. I appeared nude on stage in one of them. Mum's got a great sense of humour. I had a little notebook that I held. She rang me the next day and said, 'I loved the show, it was very good. The notebook didn't need to be that big, let's be honest'.

"My sense of humour comes a lot from her. Dad is outwardly a lot more open-minded, but doesn't like poo jokes." The elephant variety gave him far too much to think about.

The editor of Australian Women's Forum, Sheryn George, comes from a Catholic background, so the idea of running a magazine with a male centrefold and frank discussions about sex may have been a divisive issue. It hasn't turned out that way.

George says her mother, who returned to finish school and complete university and does some teaching in Lismore, is almost fervently enthusiastic about what she does. "She often has big groups of women and they talk about women's issues," says George. "Women's Forum comes up and she seems really stoked that she has this inflammatory take on it all because of what I do.

"My Dad sort of ... I guess it's like sex itself, my dad and I have never really talked about it. But he's never anything less than really supportive."

George's grandmother is another matter. She doesn't know what her granddaughter does, and is "wheeled up to the telly" for George's occasional appearances, but the volume is left down. Clearly she wasn't told about the appearance on Denton with a nude man.

"She just says, 'I hear you're an editor now'. I am a little bit embarrassed with my grandmother because she's a genteel person. I wouldn't want to upset her or browbeat her into some kind of acceptance of something I know just may not be possible."

George was raised in an open, accepting family and the bond is still strong. She acknowledges, though, that she did what a lot of young people do: went overseas so she could experiment with her personality away from her parents.

"I went overseas to make mistakes. I think I would have made them at home as well - in fact I was making them at home - but I wanted to make more exotic mistakes in a more forgiving environment."

Perhaps it is the private things in our lives that can at times be more difficult to reveal to our parents.

David de Vaus says his studies have found many adults who would never swear in front of their parents, never drink or smoke in front of their parents, "even though they do that as part of their normal life".

"They actually switch persona almost when their parents are around because they know their parents disapprove of that.

"There are two ways of looking at it. In some cases, people behave in the way they do with their parents partly because they respect their parents. So, their parents may be teetotal; the adult child drinks but not in front of their parents. Not so much because they're scared of their parents but out of respect and so forth.

"There are others who behave in a way because of their fear of criticism and rejection from the parent."

De Vaus says adult/parent relationships have changed very little over the years. The same problems and strengths exist. But the role models are out there, he says.

"The best relationships I came across in my study were parents who could say (even to their adult children) 'I don't particularly like what you're doing ... you're still my son, you're still my daughter, we'll have our relationships, adult to adult accepting one another with our differences'. But it doesn't come with a sense of rejection or hostility or deep criticism."