Do we ever really know our parents?

Also: Why I'd like to apologize to my Barbie [Donate ❤️]( [View in Browser](  November 12, 2023 Dear Cog reader, If you could ask your parents anything, what would your questions be? Would you ask them about their childhoods? About their relationship to joy and sorrow? About what they loved doing most in the world — when they felt most alive, the most like themselves? More to the point: Would they have answered those questions? Or rather, would their answers have satisfied your curiosity? Naomi Schalit asks questions for a living. She’s a Gloucester-based journalist who co-founded the [Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting]( and works as the current senior editor of politics and society at [The Conversation]( a nonprofit news organization.  But the one person Naomi really wants to query isn’t answering. Her mother, Harriet Natalie Brodie Arbib Schalit, died nearly five decades ago when Naomi was just a teenager. Naomi’s been thinking a lot recently about [how strange it is to have never known her mother as an adult]( when she might have had the wherewithal to pose the questions that really matter: “Why did you marry Dad and stay with him? Why didn’t you go to college? … Who are you, really?” Naomi’s mother was a complicated person. The “good” version of Harriet was the one who read two New York newspapers every day and drove 10 miles to get “the best butter-and-sugar-corn.” This version played boogie-woogie piano and hated Richard Nixon. But there was also the “bad” version of her mom; the version who drank and took pills. She emerged before Naomi was born, after her first husband, a war hero, died in 1945; her beloved sister passed shortly thereafter. Naomi explains: “... I spent much of my childhood putting out the little fires my mother caused, putting my stumbling mom to bed, and hiding the car keys.” Editing this piece got me thinking about what we choose to reveal or withhold about ourselves from our own children, and why. Surely some element of mystery is the natural order of things. Parents aren’t supposed to intentionally burden their children with their own sorrows and angst. Plus, our role as parents is to raise kids who leave us. In the normal push-pull of the parent-child relationship, things get lost along the way. But how are we to make sense of it? I don’t yet have an answer to that query, but Naomi got me to consider it. Last August, on the anniversary of her mother’s death, Naomi posted a photo of her mom to Facebook with this caption: “I have distilled to its essence what losing my mother — when both she and I were young — has meant: So many unanswered questions.” One of Naomi’s friends responded to the post, suggesting that even if her mother had lived to be very old, there would still be unanswered questions: “Maybe unanswered questions are what parents leave us as inheritance.” Thank you for reading, Cloe Axelson Senior Editor, Cognoscenti [Follow]( Support the news   Must Reads [Do we ever really know our parents?]( Naomi Schalit lost her mother when she was just 18 years old. I've been thinking a lot recently about how strange it is never to have known my mother as an adult, she writes. I never got to ask her the big questions, or understand her joys and demons. [Read more.]( [Do we ever really know our parents?]( Naomi Schalit lost her mother when she was just 18 years old. 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