As an adult, Bill Gates says he looks back at his childhood and feels immense gratitude to his parents.
But when he was a kid, they didn’t always see eye-to-eye — and by the time he started seeing a therapist, he actually used the word “war” to describe the state of their familial union
Gates, now 69, was put into therapy at age 12 by his parents. In his new memoir Source Code, he shares one particularly nasty argument that broke out at dinner.
Although he doesn’t recall what led to the disagreement, Gates admits that his “particularly mean” behavior” caused his “gentle” father, Bill Gates Sr., to empty “a glass of water in my face.”
What happened next? Gates snapped, he writes: “Thanks for the shower.”
Then he “slowly put down my fork, stood up, and walked downstairs to the room.”
By that point, Gates writes, he “was generating so much turmoil” that his parents sought the help of Dr. Charles Cressey, whose clientele in the mid-1960s was largely made up of married couples.
“My whole family came to the first visit, but everyone knew that we were there because of me,” he explains in his memoir.
At the time, the problem seemed clear, at least to him.
“I’m at war with my parents,” he remembers telling Cressey.
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Bill Gates.
Ian Allen/Gates Notes
Gates, whose sessions continued for around two and a half years, writes that Cressey “never told me how I should think or what I was doing right or wrong.”
Instead, he assured the young man, “You’re going to win.”
“Without being prescriptive, Dr. Creesey helped me see that (A) my parents loved me; (B) I wouldn’t be under their roof forever; (C) they were actually my allies in terms of what really counted; (D) it was absurd to think that they had done anything wrong,” Gates writes.
Years later, Gates also learned from his dad that Cressy had told his parents to “ease up” a bit.
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Speaking with PEOPLE in an interview about Source Code, Gates says that his “admiration for my parents goes up” the more time he’s spent reflecting on his childhood and everything they were able to do for him — especially when he didn’t make it easy for them.
“By and large, I knew that I’d been a challenging child and I wasn’t going to hold back from saying that it wasn’t a straight path for my parents to figure out what to do,” he says.
“If you’re willing to read a book about somebody, you hope that they’re not writing some expurgated hagiography that I never got any math problems wrong and always got As, and I never broke any rules or got in trouble,” he continues. “I think the main thing you read these things for is to understand, okay, these people are human.”
Source Code is out now.
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