If being happy and fulfilled helps a person at work, then Aaron Rodgers is apparently setting the table for a good final NFL season because his strained relationship with his parents seems to be healing.
Rodgers and his parents have been estranged for nearly a dozen years and perhaps longer.
But on Monday evening the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback posted on Instagram new photos of himself with his mother Darla Rodgers and father Ed Rodgers.
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And there seemed to be a good amount of joy in the snapshots.
Rodgers is seen in one photo with his arm around his mom while she embraces him with both arms. Both are smiling at the camera.
Rodgers and his father can be seen in the next photograph standing side-by-side, smiling, with their arms around each other’s backs.
“Another bonding week,” Rodgers wrote.
And then he added the hashtag “#fam.”
This is not nothing.
The estrangement between Rodgers and his parents has been one of the NFL’s most-discussed family stories despite the fact neither the quarterback nor his parents have ever pointed to one critical reason for the problem.
Most reporting is based on observations from family members, friends, former partners, and Rodgers’ own comments over time. All of those have sometimes been used to paint Rodgers in a certain way – usually as aloof or haughty in articles that typically were unflattering.
Ed told the New York Times years ago that the family stopped communicating with Rodgers around 2014.
“It’s complicated,” he said of the reason.
The situation became widely known when younger brother Jordan Rodgers appeared on ABC’s “The Bachelorette” show and said, “Me and Aaron don’t really have that much of a relationship.”
“It’s kind of the way he’s chosen to do life,” Jordan added.
Not good.
Rodgers, meanwhile, suggested in a 2024 Netflix documentary that he started growing apart from his family well before 2014.
He cited his family’s religious beliefs, differing value systems, and feeling emotionally unsupported as some factors that contributed to the unquestionable rift.
It should be noted Rodgers has been the most prominent active NFL player to openly discuss using ayahuasca, a psychoactive Amazonian plant brew traditionally used in Indigenous spiritual ceremonies, and has also embraced Ayurveda, the traditional Indian system of medicine.
He’s gone on so-called darkness retreats, and discussed interest in psychedelic mushrooms.
All of that perhaps explains why Rodgers, who grew up in an evangelical Christian environment, may have rejected his family for a time.
“I started to stand up to the institutions of my youth,” he said in the Netflix documentary.
But the past couple of weeks have shown a different side of Rodgers – at least based on the photos he’s posted on social media.
He spent time with teammates last week in what he called a bonding week in preparation for his final NFL season.
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And now, at age 42 and on the cusp of his 22nd NFL season, he seems to be settling family business before what he has called the “last rodeo.”
The Pittsburgh Steelers and Rodgers report to training camp in Latrobe, Pa., on July 28.
