That day I was sitting behind my dad on his old motorbike, in the exact posture I've sat in since I was tiny. We stopped at a red light. I happened to look up, and saw a single gray hair on the back of his neck. Then another. Then I realized both of his temples had turned silver at some point without my ever noticing.
Something caught in my throat. Because in my head, my dad was still the huge man from twenty years ago — the one who carried me on his shoulders, the one I believed could fix anything in the world, from a broken fan to a child's sad little heart.
As a kid, I thought my parents knew everything
For a stretch of my life, my parents were practically gods to me.
Mom knew why the sky was blue. Dad could find his way anywhere without a map. If I fell, a hand appeared to pull me up. If I was scared, a hug made the fear evaporate. I grew up with a naive, warm belief: that as long as these two people were here, there was no problem in the world that couldn't be solved.
It's a beautiful belief. But it also quietly laid something on my parents' shoulders that no one can carry: the expectation of being perfect.
Then I grew up, and started seeing the cracks
By my teens, I began to notice the places my parents got things... wrong. Mom said things that people now call "hurtful." Dad went silent at exactly the moments I needed words. I got angry. I blamed them. I'd picked up a few new psychology terms — inner child, boundaries, healing — and I held them up to my parents like a prosecutor holding up charges.
I forgot one thing. My parents grew up in a completely different era. A time when raising a houseful of kids with enough food, enough clothes, enough money for tuition was, in itself, a miracle. No one taught them about feelings. No one ever sat down and asked them, "how are you doing in there today?" They learned to love in the only language they were ever handed: keep the child fed, keep the child warm, give the child a roof to come home to.
I wanted my dad to say "I love you" like in the movies, while his whole life he showed love by quietly placing the best piece of fish in my bowl and saying, "I'm full already."
Until life knocked me around too
It wasn't until I stepped out into the world myself that I began to understand.
I started working, and learned how hard it is to earn an honest wage. I tried to hold onto a few relationships, and saw how much effort it takes to love one person well. I'm only responsible for myself, and there are still days I want to collapse. And yet my parents, at exactly the age I am now, were carrying an entire family on their backs. Working, raising children, and skillfully hiding all their exhaustion so their kids wouldn't have to worry.
My parents were never superheroes. They were just two ordinary people, learning to be adults and learning to be parents at the same time, with no one to show them how.
When I understood that, the anger in me softened on its own. I stopped demanding that my parents be a perfect version of themselves. I began to see them as they actually were: two humans with their own wounds, their own limits, who loved me with everything they had — even when that love was clumsy, even when it sometimes hurt.
I'm not writing this to tell you that all parents are good, that you should just let everything go. Some wounds are real, and I have no right to tell you to forget them.
I only want to invite you to try, once, to look at your parents not through the eyes of a child still demanding, but through the eyes of an adult who has tasted how hard life can be. You might find that behind every time they let you down was a person who was also straining their hardest with the meager toolkit they'd been given.
Next time you're home, if you can, give your parents a hug. Not because they gave you everything you wanted. But because they gave you everything they had.