25 Years of Parenthood

 

  This August marks 25 years since the release of the movie “Parenthood,” a Ron Howard comedy with an all-star cast including Steve Martin, Jason Robards, Mary Steenburgen, Tom Hulce, and Rick Moranis. In my opinion, it’s a film that gets more brilliant with age; not so much the age of the movie but my own age (and the ages of my children).

  The plot centers around four adult siblings from the Buckman family, their spouses, and their children; illustrating the diverse personalities, attributes, and neuroses that can emerge from the same gene pool. The characters include Gil and his wife Karen, parents of three children, including an eight-year-old son prone to anxiety attacks and struggling in school.

  Gil’s older sister Helen is a divorced banker and single mother raising two rebellious teenagers, a daughter who prefers sleeping with her non-intellectual boyfriend over academic success (even while her mother boasts of her SAT scores on the phone in the next room), and a younger son who is sullen and withdrawn, resentful of growing up with an absent father.

  Susan is Gil’s little sister, and is married to Nathan, a control-freak father so obsessed with maximizing the intellect of their young daughter that he is robbing her of her childhood. Larry is the youngest Buckman sibling, the irresponsible and conniving twenty-something who returns home to get help with a gambling debt, and with a son he’s only recently discovered he has.

  While I’ve always enjoyed the movie, I used to think the parental challenges depicted in it were exaggerated for effect. Of course, that was before my children became teenagers, and before some of my friends became parents of teenagers. I have discovered that every family struggles on one level or another, though you often wouldn’t know it from the outside.

   In realizing that his son’s struggles are not going away easily, Gil (played by Steve Martin) sums up his own parental angst to his wife: “You know, when your kid is born, it can still be perfect. You haven’t made any mistakes yet. And then they grow up to be like..like me.”

 In my book, the best scene in the movie occurs between Gil and his own crusty and aloof father Frank (played by the Oscar-winning Jason Robards). Surprisingly, Frank comes to seek Gil’s advice about whether to help his youngest son Larry with his gambling debt and the violent threats accompanying it. In the midst of discussing his financial ability of helping Larry, Frank blurts out, “I never should have had four,” referring to the number of children in their family.

   Frank then tells Gil that when Gil was two, Frank and his wife thought he had polio. Frank admits, “I hated you for that,” referring to “the caring, the worrying, and the pain,” and concluding “That’s not for me.” He continues, “You know, it’s not like that all ends when you’re 18, or 21, or 41, or 61. It never, never ends…..There is no end zone. You never cross the goal line, spike the ball, and do your touchdown dance. Never.”

  Frank then realizes that he has answered his own question: “I’m 64, Larry’s 27, and he’s still my son, like Kevin is your son. Do you think I want him to get hurt? He’s my son.”

  If you haven’t seen the film, you might think it would cause people to question the “value add” of having children at all. But here’s the thing; a child is not a “value add,” but is the fruit of love, a love that finds its joy in giving.

  In its own implicit, rough-around-the-edges way, the movie captures this idea, for after the movie’s smorgasbord of parental drama and distress, the film ends with the oldest Buckman sibling (Helen) having a baby with her new husband, and a hospital waiting room filled with new babies for Gil and Karen, Helen’s daughter and her young husband, and a very pregnant Susan.

  This redemptive scene reflects the blessed amnesia of parenthood, without which we might wonder if bringing children into this broken world is worth it. In that sense, we’re like God himself, who—in Genesis 6’s humanizing language—once regretted making humanity. Yet, in reality, God knew that in making us he would become one of us, suffer for us and even suffer by us; and yet He made us anyway. Parental love, then, with its accompanying joys and pains, is our opportunity to know something of the heart of God.