Who's your daddy, who's your momma.

I once knew a man with 8 children, and periodically he would disappear from his family because no one had called him anything but daddy or grandpa for so long he was forgetting who he was.  He wanted to hear someone call him by his name.
That is what he told me.
That is what he was afraid of---losing himself in a single role.  No one remembering anything about him except in the context of his role of father.
While I suspected at the time there was more to this than just identity loss, I did understand.

I have worked in a few nursing homes where women carried baby dolls and only answered to "granny" or "ma".  They were suffering from dementia and had truly lost all of themselves except for this one role.

As an older person with children, I do recognize the possibility of losing parts of myself.  My world becomes more about family and the work part and friends part shrinks and falls away as the job changes, retirement looms and friends go through the same.

I know that my own parents experienced some of this.  In the last 10 years I heard about parts of their lives I hadn't known existed.

As a geneology/history lover, I enjoyed the stories, but as a daughter, I always wondered about the depth of our relationship.  I never doubted the love or support, but while we talked--a lot, and shared time--a lot, they had lived over 30 years when I was born.  They also lived over 20 years after I was grown, and while I was probably around more days than was necessary for any of our sanity, there was a lot of time in which I have no idea what they were doing.  I definitely didn't know what they were thinking or talking about with their friends and each other.

I just assumed they spent all their time being my parents.
Kids don't stop being egocentric just because they pass toddlerhood.

Now my own children are grown.
I'm pretty open about who I am now.
I tend not to talk about the past unless a particular thing is pertinant to a current topic of conversation.  (past life experience makes excellent illustrative examples in conversation)  I tend to be a good listener and a minimal talker in the small talk social setting.

I know who I am.
I am not at all sure my children know who I am.
I'm not sure any of us really know who our parents are.

So, if I were to go back in a time machine, these are the questions I would like to answer.
Mom?  Dad?
Who were you?
Did you have a life goal?
Did you have a bucket list?
What was your all time favorite movie?
Who was your best friend in all your life?
What place did you most like to visit?
What was your favorite color and why?
What did you think was the most important part of living?
Did you consider yourself a good person?
Did you consider yourself successful?
What did you want to do that you never really got to do?
Do you have regrets?
Did you have a good childhood?
Did you daydream?
Did you have hopes and fears?
Did you really know your parents as people?
What else would you have talked to them about?

Are we all just doomed by the very age differences and developmental stage differences  to a relationship in which we only know each other through our roles.

I thought I knew my parents fairly well, but everytime they rolled out a story I had never heard before, it was a shock.
A shock that there was more about them than I knew.
A shock that I had not recognized that, while they were huge in my life, bigger than life for half my life, they were mostly 2 dimensional characters in my life.
I knew them through a relationship.
I knew them through a role.

Maybe that is just the way that is supposed to be.

But please don't ever let me forget the sound of my own name.