I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

From Luke Skywalker's father, Darth Vader, to Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, our literature

and movies are full of bad parents.

I mean, imagine having Joan Crawford as your mother, or Jack Torrent as your father.

Although characterized in popular culture to the extreme, real parents are often recalcitrant

and judgmental, critical of their children's choices of friends, careers, partners.

Parents play favorites, or simply are neglectful and absent, leaving us love starved and wounded.

They make irrevocable decisions that do lasting harm.

And yet, at a recent dinner party with friends and neighbors, I pronounce rather assertively

that an important part of our journey on life is learning to forgive our parents.

My dinner host, a generation older, vehemently disagreed.

They reminded me that some events in life are too traumatic.

Some abuses never meant to be forgiven.

Some of us, they proclaimed, are simply out of the reach of healing.

And between bites of Brussels sprouts and mint cucumber soup, we debate it well into

the evening, how to make room for those familial slights and hurts that shape us.

I did not want to give up the notion that reconciliation and empathy are possible.

It just takes an opening up that feels like a cleaving of the heart.

I was speaking that evening as a witness.

I have a relative who severely struggles.

He never reconciled differences with his mother before her passing from cancer.

He carries an ongoing feud with his father, which has left him estranged and lonely.

...