Parental Units

“What do your parents do?”
It’s a typical question that every child gets. And most of the time, you’ll get typical answers: teacher, scientist, professor-something-or-other. Maybe sometimes you’ll get something more unusual, like an FBI Agent. But I can guarantee that you’ll rarely find a child who will answer, as I did with a huge smile on my face and without a clue what the words I was saying meant, “My mommy and my stepdaddy are psychiatrists!”
As time passed I grew to understand exactly what a psychiatrist was, and as time passed, I tried to avoid mentioning what my parents did. It seemed to oddly fascinate people, from my friends who thought it was bizarre, to my teachers, who wanted my parents to come in and lecture about their oh-so-interesting profession. I tried to avoid psychiatry; I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn’t want to be “the shrink’s kid”. I wanted parents with normal jobs and normal lives. I could never see what was so fascinating about sitting down with a person and listening to a rant about problems with life and what makes her sad and what makes him happy, etc, all the while taking notes. I couldn’t see what was so fascinating about mental illness or what was so wonderful about sitting in a room one on one with a mentally ill person. Call me prejudiced, but listening to people talk like that just wasn’t my thing.
As more time passed and I became a teenager, I became a little more opinionated, a little more argumentative, and a little louder, perhaps, on the subject of psychiatry and therapy. Strangely enough, I wasn’t arguing against psychiatry; I was arguing in favor of it. How bizarre was that? I had been so against it, against everything about it from insisting that I would never be a psychiatrist to avoiding mentioning my parents’ professions in conversation yet suddenly I was defending the virtues of psychiatry. What changed? I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps it was part of a transition into myself as a person, accepting what my parents did for a living. However, I think it’s much more likely that I just became aware that what my parents did was necessary for, one with major misconceptions about mental illness and treatment. I wanted everyone, my friends, my teachers, and even my grandparents to understand how important my parents’ work was. While I’d rather eat glass than admit to my parents that they were right all along about their work, secretly, I acknowledge that they were. I admire them for the long hours, the phone calls in the middle of the night from distressed patients, the multiple court appearances as experts. I’m slightly less appreciative of their inability to leave their job at work; as I tell my friends, being a psychiatrist requires a certain state of mind and training to hone that state of mind, and after a time, it’s impossible to leave the job at work. I’m less appreciative of what comes from that: the long “analytical” conversations, where they ask me everything from what I ate that day to what I think about the president. And I’m certainly less appreciative when I can hear them analyzing my responses from my room as they finish dinner.
Although I’m not too fond of those things, my parents are certainly far more involved in my life than those of many of my friends’. As time has passed I’ve realized that I don’t want any of their disconnected parents; I only want mine. Don’t get me wrong, I still think that anyone who wants to be a psychiatrist is crazy. But at the same time, I think it’s that certain kind of insanity that’s made my parents into such wonderful parents, parents who have taught me to listen to people and give advice. My parents have taught me that service comes in many different ways. They gave their lives to their profession and their daughter, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.