Rabbi Pinchas Winston tells over a personal story:
IT IS AMAZING how much we “fight” our parents as children, and then respect them later as adults. For the longest time as teenagers, we think our parents can’t “hear” us, and don’t understand who we really are. Once grown up, and especially after raising children of your own, we usually realize that our parents were just trying to share their gained wisdom with us, as we now try to do with our own children, who claim that WE don’t hear or understand THEM. It’s a cycle of foolishness.
Everything changed for me with MY father on a single day, and rather unexpectedly. I was at university at the time, but I had borrowed a book from a friend on the laws of honoring one’s father and mother. Needless to say, with each page that I turned, I also turned a new leaf. I could not believe how, in fighting for my personal childhood “rights,” I had violated so many Torah laws regarding the all-important mitzvah of “Kibud Av v’Eim.”
Before even finishing the book, I picked up the phone to call my father long-distance from school, and to apologize for years of inexcusable behavior. I told him about the book and what it said, and how I had completely come to realize and accept that even if I was right about the things I wanted, I had been wrong about the way I fought for them.
My father could tell, even long distance, that my apology was heartfelt. We had a decent relationship UNTIL that time, but a far closer one FROM that point…