Are you very much like your parents or very unalike? Isn't it natural to mirror them since you are made up of their combined DNA?

I think it is cruel to dismiss one's parents as "deformed and twisted".  We have to look at them from the point of view of how they see and interact with the world and understand that they have their own demons and expectations they have to deal with.  We see our parents acting certain ways and we say OK I am not going to act in those ways so we become very conscious of not doing so and we make our own lives. But still we carry so much of them of course that comes out as well but in different ways. 

I am constantly amazed at just how much I absorbed from them.  Not just from their lessons but from their values and lifestyle.  Also from the community they chose to make their home in.  And I left home at 17 and never lived with them again.  I very much have my mother's coloring and sometimes focusing on that I look at myself and see her.  Weird!   And more like her in the sense that she saw things in terms of women's and men's spheres which were different. So she avoided thinking too much about what she considered men's issues  and concentrated on home, self, and community. Though I work five says a week and have for many years I am still mostly a homebody and home is where I am most comfortable. Similarly I go for whatever solutions make the most sense to me and am not given to overthinking things.  Much like her.  But while my mother was very beautiful and lush I am physically more spare and ordinary like my father.  And I think I retain more of my father's morality which was expressed not just in one-lines but in actions.  When he could - but he was a very tormented person I think about the pressures and necessities of success in business.  He was very successful but paid the price of inner peace I think.  Or perhaps he was peaceful inside but it was the social aspects of what he had to do to be successful that took their toll.  My mother married for love and companionship which is very much like me but my father was away so much of the time she had no companionship at all which she resented to the point of desperation. My father turned to alcohol, she turned to pills. 

Though they seldom associated with one another at home they were the "ideal couple" in public - at the country club, at deceptions and community events.  Because they both had a strong sense of the importance of community.  Part of which was that they were always being judged by others and they always needed to "fit in" of they would not be able to maintain the lifestyle they most wanted to.  So they put so much into shaping how they wanted others to regard them and it became such second nature to them they just slipped easily into their public mode as though putting on clothing. 

Was a world where success and innovations and getting on socially was very very important.  And if you didn't fit in you could not expect much in the way of life.  I felt I did not fit in and no way could I see myself as ever being good enough to make it in that world.  So I rebelled and final left and I was their "failure" as both my brothers were smart and personable, made strong business successes, and married well.  But funny thing later when I began to work in the business world I so surprised myself by how much I knew just from growing up in that climate and understanding corporate expectations. After spending years avoiding it I just was able to slip into corporate life almost like it was a second skin. 

My life has been happier than my parent's life. Though without the sense of community they so treasured and strived for. I make myself useful in my community but I do not find my deep identification in community and the standards of community.  For which my mother resented me though to my father I could almost do no wrong even when I did wrong!   Though he lives to see me begin becoming successful in my job.  I have pretty much gone my own way and community for me is more a set of obligations than a way of life. 

Every day we read in the paper or see on the news a story about parents who abuse their children in the most horrendous ways and in some cases, to the point of killing them.  You think those parents are not deformed and twisted?  If you don't, you're wearing rose-colored glasses.