Getty Many people I know have parents who are suffering from Early Fox News Dementia, ranting about the perfidy of Anthony Fauci and the possibility of catching critical race theory from an open jar of mayonnaise. But at the same time, they want to give their children parental advice and guidance, though now through the prism of their separate bespoke realities. They want to remain parents, but only on their own racist and hurtful terms. My counsel to these children—stemming from what my closest friends and I experienced, all of us immigrants in our forties from different parts of the world—is to orphan yourself. A few years after graduating from college, I decided to do just that. Not to become an orphan per se, because my mother and father remained thankfully alive, but to leave their vast, roiling emotional spheres of influence. I realized that they could not provide me with what parents are supposed to provide twenty-somethings, which is not necessarily a trust fund but rather a map of what early adulthood could look like based on their own experiences. My post-Soviet parents’ map of adulthood ended at the Baltic Sea; none of their advice made any sense, but all of it was rendered with supreme parental self-confidence, because they were, after all, my parents. As a sickly adolescent, I remember them taking me to a Russian energy healer who was supposed to cure my asthma by rubbing my chest with his alcohol-soaked hands. On the career front, my… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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How to Love Your Parents Even If You Hate Their Politics
