I had enlightened parents. They worked hard at it. My parents were proud of their modern parenting skills, so different from their own parents. Their parents believed in original sin that must be harshly eradicated in children; that children should be seen and not heard; and that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. I have no idea how my parents survived my grandparents, and not only survived, but somehow learned better parenting techniques.

My parents believed in praise, and lots of it. So I should be happy with my parents, right? Well, I am happy, at least sort of. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they didn’t ignore me or beat me, but my parents’ positive attention always took the form of praising my potential. And the shadowy underbelly of potential, which I was fed in lethal doses, is that to be told you have potential is to be told you are not enough right now. Potential is something you never reach.

My parents’ expectations set up impossible platforms that they expected me to attain. I can see their happy smiling expectant faces, encouraging me, secure in their belief that they were going to have the smartest, most successful, maybe even famous, daughter of all time. If I wrote a poem about a cow who mooed too loud, they wondered (aloud) if I was the successor to Shakespeare. If I got an A in math, they speculated (again, in my hearing) that I might become the female Einstein. If I bandaged up my little brother’s scraped knee, they bragged that I had the makings of a brilliant doctor.

Of course I never argued with them — I wanted to be smart and successful too. They believed in me – how could I complain? How dare I complain when some people have parents who neglect and abuse them? As a matter of fact, why am I still complaining?

Because complaining about your parents is a time-honored activity, practiced by all of us at one time or another. I just want to know: where can the fortunate go to complain?