Welcome to Other People's Parents

Join me as I ask mentors, experts, and the wise people all around us to answer the dynamic question of how to be a human.

When I was growing up, my head was in the clouds, my nose was often in a book, and my parents feared I was missing the brain matter necessary for long-term survival. I was book-smart but scattered, creative but clueless, poky, procrastinating, and a little bit goofy.

“You do not,” my mother said, “have the good sense that God gave a goose.”

Families hold the first mirrors that reflect our identities, the first reflection and the most enduring. I believed my mother when she told me I lacked common sense; she spoke of it as an irreversible malady. Either you matched a goose’s native intelligence, or you did not. I accepted from a young age that I did not. I relocated to my imagination, staking claim to limitless and impractical territory that was mine alone to define.

It was a wonderful place to live as a child, a swirling vortex of curiosity where you could ask every what-if, how-about, and just-maybe imaginable. I wanted to flow through its countercurrents forever—and, in a way, I have.

Searching for sense

I became a journalist.

When I left home, I went looking for what was possible instead of what I lacked. I tried on cities and took them off again, returning them to their more sophisticated owners. I visited all-night diners and talked to their patrons at 3 a.m., hoping to split a stack of pancakes with some fellow common-sense refugees. I tip-toed through art museums and interviewed the quietest pieces in the galleries. I found clues in stadiums and hospitals, in blues clubs and living rooms. I wrote about sports, politics, health, medicine, education, and, on one regrettable occasion, nanotechnology. (Not everything belonged in the vortex.) I was connecting the disparate dots of everything I consumed, dreamed, and wondered about.

Eventually, the timid girl who once lived inside her head became a woman who could speak comfortably with strangers for hours, so much so that swells of common emotion would build between us. As I interviewed them about their lives, we connected so deeply that I often wondered silently: “Can you help me figure out mine?”

I was chasing the elusive goose. And I frequently borrowed other people’s parents for the pursuit.

During my 20-plus years of writing magazine profiles, I often called the subject’s mother and father to hear their insights about the people they raised. Before I hung up, I sometimes asked them for advice, voiced a shortcoming that was troubling me, or silently wished I could stand beside them at the kitchen counter, eating apple pie straight from its tin and talking about how everything would be OK.

While that may have tested the boundaries of professionalism at times (and certainly hinted that I needed a good therapist), I know now that I was searching, through the lens and permission of my career, for a way to be. To change the reflection in the mirror. To belong. My head was never really in the clouds. It was on the hunt for its place in the world.

Other people’s parents—and, yes, people who were not parents in the traditional sense—were often easier to approach than my own. In my family, the help I needed passed through the haunted hurts and ancient wounds of many lifetimes before it reached my ears; it traveled through the weighty expectations of my parents and their parents before them. It was tailored not for my fears but for theirs. It underestimated me.

We need our families. But we also need abundant perspective to locate the authentic ground beneath our feet. In a world where headlines predict the opposite, I have received extraordinary wisdom, care, and comfort from strangers and friends alike. I may never catch up to the wild goose, but I have been lucky on the journey.

And I’d like to share that luck and that journey with you.

Starting next week in this newsletter, I’ll ask other people’s “parents” to help answer the dynamic question of how to be—one dilemma, roadblock, insecurity, challenge, or life circumstance at a time. I hope you’ll contribute your own stories as we navigate the hard work of being human and honor the people who guide us.

I might be wrong (if you’ve got a parent I can consult, let me know), but I think that’s what we all want and need most days. No matter how old we are, no matter how young we are, no matter how lost we are, no matter how broken, bent, or bruised. We want a slice of pie, and we want kind advice and meaningful stories, and we want to know that we’ve got this.

That the next thing we do will be all right.

That we will be all right. ♣