Ancestral Amnesia
Your Father Was Thirty Before There Was a Word for It
We have become fluent in critiquing our elders and lost the language for honouring them. We are also diagnosing them with a vocabulary that arrived, in most cases, several decades after their lives did.
A woman in her eighties comes to me every six weeks. We have the same conversation every time, in the same order, and I could set a clock by it. Last month, somewhere in the middle of it, she mentioned — as a subordinate clause, as a way of explaining why a particular year was difficult — that she had buried a child.
Then she asked whether I thought the rain would hold off until Thursday.
I have thought about that sentence for weeks. Not the fact of it. The grammar of it. She had put the largest thing that will ever happen to a person into a dependent clause, on her way to the weather, because that is how she was taught to carry it, and because nobody ever offered her another way.
Her generation was not given the vocabulary. They were given instructions.
1980 the year post-traumatic stress disorder entered the diagnostic manual — several decades after most of the events it describes
1983 the year a sociologist first named “emotional labour,” a thing women had been doing without a noun for it
1992 the year the book appeared that gave “boundaries” its current meaning in ordinary conversation
27% of American adults who have cut off contact with a family member, in the first large national survey of it
The Vocabulary Arrived Late
We are living through what somebody sensibly called an age of ancestral amnesia. It has become entirely normal — sociable, even, a way of making friends — to sit down and take one’s parents apart. To name their flaws precisely, diagnose their limitations confidently, and explain oneself, more or less completely, through their failures.
I want to be careful with what I say next, because there is a lazy version of this argument and it is everywhere.
Here is the thing I actually find remarkable. The language we use to conduct these audits is younger than the people being audited.
Post-traumatic stress disorder was not a diagnosis until 1980. Before that, a man who came home from something unspeakable came home to a word like “nerves,” or to no word at all, and to a general expectation that he would get on with it. Arlie Hochschild named emotional labour in 1983. “Boundaries” entered ordinary speech through a book published in 1992. Most of the terms now used casually across a dinner table — the ones deployed with such confidence about a woman born in 1946 — were not available to her when she was forming the habits we are now grading.
She is being marked against a syllabus published after she graduated.
That does not make the marking wrong. Some of it is entirely correct, and quite a lot of it is overdue. It does mean the marking is happening from a position of enormous, invisible advantage, and that the person holding the red pen might usefully notice they are holding one.
Endurance Was the Skill
Many of our fathers were not taught how to feel. They were taught how to endure, which is a different competence entirely, and which they were extremely good at.
Many of our mothers were not taught how to process. They were taught how to survive, how to stretch, how to hold a household together on an arrangement that offered them very little and demanded almost everything.
Neither of those is the same as emotional intelligence, and I am not going to pretend it is. Endurance without expression has real costs, and a great many of them were paid by the children. That is true, and it should be said plainly rather than folded into a compliment.
But endurance was not a personality defect. It was a skill, developed under conditions that required it, and it built the floor the rest of us are standing on while we discuss its shortcomings.
And I am not going to tell you that everything was better then. It was not. It was colder, poorer, considerably more violent, and people routinely died of things we now treat with a lozenge. Nostalgia is a lie told by people who did not have to live there. The point is not that their world was better. The point is that it was harder, and they walked across it carrying us.
What stands behind you goes back considerably further than the photographs do. Photos: Unsplash
Some Doors Should Stay Closed
Now the part that any honest version of this argument has to include, and that the sentimental version always skips.
Sometimes the audit is correct and the verdict is severe, and the right answer is distance.
The Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer ran the first large-scale national survey of family estrangement in the United States and found that 27 percent of adults — something like 67 million people — had cut off contact with a relative. Ten percent between a parent and an adult child. This is not a fashion, and it is not a generation being delicate. That number is far too large, and the accounts behind it far too consistent, for anyone to wave at it and say the young are simply soft.
Some parents were cruel. Some were dangerous. Some are still dangerous. A person who has walked away from that does not owe reverence, does not owe a phone call at Christmas, and certainly does not owe a paragraph of context to a hairdresser writing an essay. If that is your situation, this piece is not addressed to you, and you may go with my genuine respect.
Nothing that follows is an argument for staying in a house that is on fire.
“Reverence does not mean blindness. It means remembering context — that a person can be flawed and sacrificial, limited and loving, wounded and still willing to hand over everything they had.” — Two things being true at once is not a contradiction. It is the ordinary condition of every family that has ever existed.
When the Word Gets Bigger
There is a piece of research that sits underneath all of this, and it is worth knowing because it cuts in both directions at once.
The psychologist Nick Haslam described something he called concept creep: the way harm-related words — trauma, abuse, bullying, neglect — have steadily broadened over recent decades to cover experiences that would once have fallen outside them.
The generous reading is that this is moral progress. Things that genuinely damaged people used to have no name and therefore no standing, and now they have both. That is a real gain, and it is not a small one.
The less comfortable reading is that a word which expands to cover everything gradually stops carrying weight anywhere. If the term that describes what happened to my eighty-year-old client is the same term used for a tense phone call, the term is no longer doing any work, and the person who actually needs it finds it has been spent.
Both readings are true. That is the annoying thing about honest research: it very rarely arrives on your side alone.
The table you eat at was set by people you will never entirely understand. Photo: Unsplash
You Are Inherited
You are not, whatever the internet has told you, self-made.
You inherited resilience you did not build, endurance you were not asked to earn, and a floor beneath you that somebody else poured in bad weather. You inherited a certain amount of damage as well, and you are entitled to say so out loud. Both arrived in the same delivery. There was no option to take only the good half.
And one day — sooner than is comfortable to think about — you become the imperfect elder.
The next generation will see your blind spots with a clarity you never managed. They will have words you were never given, standards you were never taught, and questions you will not know how to answer without sounding defensive, because you will be defensive.
The question is not whether they will judge you. They will, and they will be right about some of it.
The question is whether they will also remember what you built.
Karl Pillemer’s Fault Lines (2020) reports the estrangement survey alongside interviews with 200 people who lived it and 100 who found a way back — and it is notably unsentimental about the fact that reconciliation is not always the right goal. Nick Haslam’s work on concept creep is the other half of the picture, and is a good deal more sympathetic to the expansion of these words than the people who quote it usually are.
Back to the Chair
I have two daughters in their twenties. They are better educated than I was, more articulate about their own interiors than I have ever managed to be, and entirely capable of explaining me to me. They are also, on the available evidence, kind about it, which is more than I deserve on a given Tuesday.
I know perfectly well that there is a version of my parenting that will get discussed one day in a language I do not yet have access to. I have no defence prepared. I did what I understood at the time, with the tools I had, in three countries, and some of it will not survive review.
What I would like, when that conversation happens, is not to be excused. It is to be placed in context — which is all any of us can reasonably ask, and all any of us can reasonably offer the people who came before.
I wrote once about what happened to the fathers we used to see on television, and separately about the skills that vanish when nobody thinks to write them down. This is the same loss wearing different clothes. A culture that forgets its ancestors does not become enlightened. It becomes unanchored — free-floating, certain of itself, and standing on a floor it has stopped being able to see.
My client will be back in six weeks. We will talk about the weather, and about her neighbour’s dog, and about the state of the roads.
And now, when she mentions something enormous on her way to somewhere else, I stop. I put the scissors down, and I let the sentence have the room it should have been given sixty years ago.
It is not much. It is roughly a minute and a half of silence in a small room in Brasschaat. But nobody ever gave her that minute, and I have decided it is the least I can do about it.
The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.
