I saw this rain-ruined crocus the other day, and thought to myself, better a broken flower than an empty patch of ground.

I don’t ask that anyone succeed in all they do– but I do ask that they try. This is the key to my relationships with people—I can’t be around quitters, or people too cowardly to try in the first place. Better to try and fail, than to never know if you could have succeeded.

My obsession with trying stems directly from my observations of my parents’ behavior. My mother gave up on her Ph.D., gave up on working, gave up on being independent, gave up on her health and attractiveness, gave up on being forgiving. My dad tried and failed to stop drinking for a long time; he tried and failed to get his temper under control—but eventually, when he bottomed out after being arrested, losing his driver’s license, and losing his job, he tried some more. Eventually, he succeeded. First, he stopped smoking and drinking. Then, he started going to A.A. Then, he got two jobs below his abilities, so he could pay our child support. Then he began trying harder to present a more pleasant face to the world, and to overcome his misanthropic tendencies. Meanwhile, my mother, a pretty, smart, ordained minister with a promising career as a lecturer on women’s issues in the church, allowed herself to become obese, increasingly crippled by the obesity (no outdoor family activities with her), and welfare-dependent– yet she continuously harped upon my father for putting her in this position, while somehow missing that they’d been divorced for ten years, and she could try to do whatever she wanted.

Obviously, my perspective is my own, flawed, and I am not as sympathetic to my mother as I would like to be. But the fact remains that older I get, the less sorry I felt for my mother, and the more I appreciate my father’s attempts to be a better person. That I got my bipolar in a double shot from both parents makes the contrast in possibilities, in attempts at success, even starker. But Dad finally pulled past his own pathologies, and worked long and hard to improve. I never really saw my mother trying, although she’d talk a good game, and did manage to do the minimum, working as a substitute teacher just enough (never full time, never every day) to earn what child support didn’t supply each month, when it became clear she wasn’t going to win the lottery (or an increase in child support) anytime soon. However, as soon as my grandparents died and her brief teaching pension vested, she stopped even that– and now lives a life of complete leisure in Southern California. I say that sarcastically, but still– she’s clearly got more disposable spending money than we do on a month to month basis.

I am always going to resent her—for not even trying. She did not try to shelter us from poverty. She did not try to get help for her own mental state in order to do best by us. She did not even try to think about her own mental state in order to recognize she needed help. She was too focused on being the victim. (I suppose that’s what makes her a narcissist.) She did have unloving and harsh parents, and she had to work at the family business—but she also had loving sisters and many friends in high school, and that family job paid for college. Yet the focus is always on the negative, unless she’s feeling ignored in a social situation, when she gets grandiose and bragging. My father’s mother was not the most loving or uncritical of women, either, and he had to become the “man of the house” at age 13 when his father died. So I don’t know where she got off whining about the tough childhood—certainly, she never had to endure the humiliation my brother and I did of being called to the front of the classroom to get our free lunch tickets as my brother and I did, or being mocked by other kids for wearing the same five outfits, week in and out, all school year long.

My dad doesn’t try to be a parent now. He just wants to spend time with me. He is constantly trying to make amends, even though I’ve long since forgiven him. I worry about his getting older, and his untreated depression, but he knows enough now that if he got really bad, I think he would do something about it.

My mom, however, still tries to parent me. She urges me to finish all the food on the plate, despite the fact that her obesity as a model of my biological fate makes me sick to my stomach. She tells me what to do. She interrupts constantly to relate her opinion. She never listens to any professional legal advice I have to give her, only when she asks. In short, she has no respect for me as an adult. No conception, I suppose, because her narcisissm dictates how she re-writes the stories I burst in upon.

I tried to forgive and to understand her perspective, but I can’t understand how she could be so smart and yet so damaged that she is unable to make up her mind to get better. So what do I do? I tried to keep my mouth shut and my temper in check. For a while, I was getting better at it. I didn’t erupt, insult or ignore as much as I once did. And I tried not to take it so personally; realizing that her failure to try has nothing to do with my worthiness, or lack thereof. I failed, and we’re not speaking anymore, but I think I tried.