My daughter called over the weekend, just to talk, the way she does. Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, she mentioned something she’d been working on in therapy—a pattern she kept noticing in herself, a way she responded to conflict that she was trying to understand. She described it matter-of-factly, not as an accusation, not as something she was bringing to me. Just something she was figuring out.
I recognized it immediately. Not because I’d seen it in her before—I had—but because I knew exactly where it came from. I’d watched myself do the same thing for decades. I’d learned it before her. I’d modeled it in front of her while she was small and absorbing everything and completely unable to evaluate what she was taking in. She was working through in therapy something I had handed her before she was old enough to know she was receiving it.
I got off the phone and sat with that for a long time. I’m still sitting with it, honestly. This is what that reckoning looks like.
I heard myself in what she described
It wasn’t the first time, if I’m being honest. There have been moments over the years—things my children said, reactions they had, ways they moved through difficulty—where I caught a glimpse of myself and felt something uncomfortable I didn’t always stop to examine. It was easier when they were younger to tell myself I was seeing a coincidence. That’s just how she is. That’s just his temperament. The kind of accounting that lets you off the hook if you don’t look too closely.
At 70, with adult children in therapy working through specific and nameable things, the looking away gets harder. My daughter described the pattern clearly, in the language she’s developed for it with her therapist, and every word she used landed somewhere in me. I knew the architecture of what she was describing because I built it—not deliberately, not maliciously, but through years of behaving in certain ways in front of someone who was watching and learning and had no framework yet for what was healthy and what wasn’t. Children learn what they live with. She lived with me. The math isn’t complicated, and I’ve stopped pretending I don’t know how to do it.
I didn’t invent any of it—I just passed it on
My own mother was not an easy woman to grow up with. I don’t say that to shift blame—I’m well past the age where blame feels like the useful frame—but because it’s the honest context. The patterns my daughter is untangling in therapy are ones I learned first, from watching how conflict was handled in my house, how emotions were managed, what happened when someone needed something, and the room couldn’t hold it. I absorbed all of that before I had any ability to assess it. And then I grew up and had children of my own and ran the same system, mostly without knowing I was running it, for years before I started to understand what I was doing.
There’s a long chain here, is what I mean. I’m not the origin point. But I’m also not exempt from accountability because the thing came from somewhere else. I received it, and I transmitted it, and the fact that I was also a casualty of it doesn’t change what my children experienced. Both things are true. The lineage explains it. The lineage doesn’t excuse it.
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I was trying—and trying isn’t the same as doing well
I was present. I was engaged. I went to the school things and the sports things, and I knew their friends, and I worried about them constantly in the way that parents do. I was an involved, attentive mother, and I believed—I genuinely believed—that I was doing reasonably well at it.
What I didn’t understand then was the difference between trying hard at the visible parts of parenting and actually doing the interior work that the invisible parts require. I hadn’t examined the patterns I was carrying. I hadn’t asked myself what I was modeling emotionally, how I was handling my own anxiety in front of them, what messages I was sending about conflict and need and love when I thought I was just getting through the day. I was putting in the effort I could see and not attending to the effort I couldn’t, and my children were living in the full picture—the visible and invisible both—and taking all of it in.
I didn’t know what I didn’t know. That’s true, and it matters. It doesn’t mean the impact wasn’t real.
They were children who had no say in what they absorbed
When adults develop patterns in relationship to each other, there’s at least the theoretical possibility of choice, of exit, of naming what’s happening and deciding what to do about it. Children don’t have that. They’re inside the thing before they have language for it, before they have the cognitive development to evaluate it, before they have any frame of reference beyond what they’ve been given.
My children didn’t choose to learn what I taught them. They didn’t agree to absorb my unexamined patterns as the baseline for how relationships and emotions work. They were just there—small and trusting and utterly dependent—and I was the water they swam in. What was true of me became, by default, what they understood to be true of people. Of love. Of what you do when things get hard.
I find this the most difficult part to hold. Not the guilt, exactly—I’ve moved somewhat past guilt into something more like grief—but the specific powerlessness of it. There’s no version of this where they had a say. There’s no negotiation I can retroactively offer them. It happened. They carry it. And now they’re doing the work of understanding it, at their own expense, in time they’re taking out of their adult lives, because of something that was done to them before they were old enough to consent.
What I actually do differently now
Doing better is quieter and more specific than I expected it to be. It doesn’t look like grand gestures or dramatic apologies—those tend to be more about the person offering them than the person receiving them, and I’ve tried to be honest with myself about that. It looks more like pausing before I react. Like noticing when I’m about to do the thing and choosing not to. Like asking questions instead of giving answers. Like staying in a hard conversation instead of finding a way to end it.
It also looks like being willing to hear things that are uncomfortable to hear. My children are adults now, and they’re in the process of understanding their own histories, and sometimes that means saying things to me that I’d rather not sit with. I’ve had to learn to receive that without defending, without explaining, without immediately reaching for the context that makes me look less responsible. They don’t need my context right now. They need to know I can hear them. That’s a thing I can actually do—stay in the room, keep my face open, not make it about me. It’s not everything. It’s what’s available.
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What I want them to know, even if I can’t take it back
I want them to know that I see it. That I’m not in denial about what happened, not minimizing it, not hiding behind my intentions as though they’re a defense. I know what I passed on. I know it’s costing them. I know that the work they’re doing in therapy is real work, hard work, work they shouldn’t have needed to do in quite this way, and that the origin of it lives with me.
I also want them to know—and I’m aware this doesn’t undo anything—that they were loved. Imperfectly, with all my unresolved damage intact, in ways that sometimes missed the mark badly. But loved, genuinely and completely, from the beginning. I was trying to give them something good, even when what I was actually giving them was the thing I hadn’t yet fixed in myself. That coexistence—the love and the harm running together—is the hardest thing about being a parent, and about being a child, and about being human in relation to the people who made you.
I have whatever time I have left to do this differently, to be someone they can bring things to and trust that I’ll hold it well. That’s the work now. It’s not absolution, and I’m not looking for it. It’s just the next right thing, and I’m trying to do it.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.
