Watching your parents age is a little like peering into a portal of the next dimension. It has a slight resemblance to normality, but for the most part it is twisted, distorted, and more than just a little frightening.

My parents are in their mid to late seventies, and His Highness’s parents are slightly older than that. His Highness’s parents seem to be holding up considerably better than mine…or maybe it’s just that a lifetime of knowledge of my parents is suddenly being both challenged and confirmed.

Let’s admit it. We all come from dysfunctional families, everyone of us. And those of you who pro-created probably managed, inadvertently, to produce “Dysfunctional Family 101, part 3(a) subsection 4iii”.

I can see the true characters of my parents coming into focus as they drop their lifelong facades in their old age. Sometimes it isn’t pretty. I can’t say that I’m totally surprised at what I see. To a large degree it comes as simply a confirmation of what I’ve always suspected.

Deep down inside, I knew that my father was never happy with the man that he became. He has always tried to follow the straight and narrow highway, do what was expected of him, suck up the miseries of life and carry on with a stoic expression.

My father. A compulsive gambler who quit gambling when I was a child. An alcoholic who quit drinking when I was an adult. A faithful husband to a woman he really didn’t want to be with. A dedicated worker to a job he hated. An old man who now looks back on his life with deep regret and bitterness, but still trying his best to mend fences (mostly with me) before he dies. A man who has somehow managed to still hang onto his soul and still know himself. I admire him… a lot.

My mother. Oh dear, where do I begin? A woman who boxed herself into the smallest, safest corner she could find and would/will not, under any circumstances, allow nasty reality to intrude. A woman with a remarkable ability to create and exist in a world that only she can see, regardless of the pain it may cause others. After all, if people feel pain, it’s because they’ve done something to deserve it. (I’m still trying desperately, after all these years, to shake that mantra out of my head). Since I was a child, there was a timid voice in the back of my head, never wanting to be too loud, that said my mother somehow managed to reached adulthood with a little part of her soul missing. And as I watch her increasing nastiness and greediness as she ages, I’m beginning to think that I misjudged her. She’s not missing a little part of her soul…she’s missing a substantial part of it. When I’m feeling munificent, I acknowledge her hard childhood life and the opportunities she never had. But I have my own philosophy about that…if you’re unhappy as a child, it’s your parents fault. If you’re unhappy as an adult, it’s your fault. My mother decided to save up every petty grievance she ever had, store them into a little (big?) box, and then spring them out on the world.. aka Pandora.

I’m not quite sure where I would be if I had not met His Highness. I always thought my family was bizarre and unusual. Then His Highness would have himself a few glasses of wine and regale me with stories of equally flakiness in his family. At which point, we would raise our glasses to each other and vow that we will never, ever, become our parents.

Oh yeah?

How much of our pasts can we escape? How much of our childhoods are destined to drive us, well into old age? We can make the conscious decisions to change behaviours and attitudes, but the past keeps tugging on us and threatening to bring us down. I guess the best we can do is fight everything that went wrong in our pasts and do whatever we can to reduce the number of times we make the same mistakes as our predecessors.

He says: In a way I’m lucky. I don’t get to see my parents all that often. I don’t live in the same city and I simply don’t have the ability to get away from the job when they declare, “We’d really like to see you.”

I live with the non-stop descriptions of medical problems and the details about the restrictions imposed by prostate, knee and back problems. I understand that these things become the focus of an octogenarian’s life, however, sympathy is difficult to produce.

I only have to go back to my childhood and realize how I was in their shoes. Sympathy? It never happened.

My mother was intent on being the “Victorian” matriarch. The idea of showing a young boy compassion was so far beyond her capacity that I had learned to go elsewhere for such things. The mothers of my friends treated me eminently better than anything I received at home. I can expand on that.

She thought that kicking my sister out of the house because she discovered that my teenage sister had had sex was perfectly acceptable. It was the late 1960s.

Here’s the kicker. My mother still believes she was right and to this day does not communicate, in any way shape or form, with my sister. My sister is now in her fifties.

Yes, it boggles my mind too.

It’s one of those things Her Highness and I share. We left home of our own volition at an early age for the same reason. And we succeeded in this world through our own efforts.

So, Queenie, I’m going to give you this one. Your parents live close by. That’s not necessarily a good thing.