If you asked me ten years ago what I thought of my parents, I’d have given you the same answer I’d been giving since I was a teenager. They’re great. They’re really supportive. I’m so lucky.
I meant it. I still mean it now, in my late thirties.
But that answer has gotten more complicated.
The thing I’ve slowly come to understand is that even well-meaning parents fall short sometimes. That’s just life. I’m not blaming mine for anything, and I’d push back on anyone who tried to. They did a lot right. But I’d also be lying if I said the gaps didn’t affect me, because I’ve spent the last few years noticing the shape of them, and there’s no putting that back.
These are eight of the ones I’ve noticed.
1. They poured everything into providing, and thought that was emotionally showing up
My parents worked hard. They paid for everything. They drove me to lessons and games and friends’ houses and never once said it was a hassle.
What I didn’t realize until much later is that they thought all of that was the emotional part. The providing was the love, expressed. They weren’t withholding affection on top of giving me everything else — they genuinely thought the everything else was the affection, said in a different way.
It took me until my late twenties to understand that this was why I kept ending up with men who showed up by paying for dinner, but didn’t know what to do when I cried.
2. They couldn’t stand to see me hurting, so they rushed to make it stop
When I came home upset about something — a friend being mean, a teacher being unfair, a boy not calling — my parents wanted to help.
The wanting was real. I want to be clear about that, because I think if you grew up like this, you spend a lot of time second-guessing whether the love was love. It was. They wanted to help.
What they did with the wanting was try to fix it. They’d offer solutions. They’d tell me I was overreacting, gently. They’d reframe the situation until I felt slightly silly for being upset, and the upset would shrink, and they’d feel like they’d done their job.
I needed something different that I didn’t have a word for then. Someone to sit there with me while I felt it, I guess, without doing anything about it.
I stopped bringing the hurts home around middle school. I don’t remember deciding to. It just stopped being something I did.
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3. They raised me to be polite, capable, and good, and forgot to also raise me to be a person
I knew how to write a thank-you note before I knew how to disappoint an adult.
I knew how to clear a table, make a bed, and behave at a dinner party. I was praised, constantly, for being mature, easy, no trouble.
What I didn’t know how to do was want something inconvenient. I didn’t know how to be in a bad mood without apologizing for it. I didn’t know how to say no to something I’d been asked to do, even when the asking was unreasonable.
I came out into adulthood looking very put-together and being, internally, sort of a stranger to myself. The first time a therapist asked me what I wanted, in my early thirties, I sat there for a minute and then said I didn’t know, and meant it.
4. They gave me more than they got, and that was their limit
My parents had hard childhoods. Not capital-H hard, but not easy. There were things they didn’t get that they made sure I did, and I’m aware, in a way I wasn’t as a kid, that this took real effort on their part.
But I see it more clearly now: the things they hadn’t gotten were also the things they couldn’t quite give. They knew how to make sure I had stuff they hadn’t had — the lessons, the trips, the steady house, the parents who didn’t fight in front of me.
What they didn’t know how to do was the warmer, more day-to-day stuff that hadn’t been part of their own childhoods either. The casual affection. The “how are you really” conversations. The sitting on the bed at bedtime just talking. That stuff wasn’t withheld. It just wasn’t in their vocabulary.
They gave me everything they’d missed. They couldn’t give me what they’d never seen, and I’m trying to be careful not to do the same thing with my own kids.
5. They tried so hard to be okay for me that I learned to be okay for them first
My parents both had things they were dealing with that I only half-understood as a kid.
A stressful job. A complicated parent of their own. Money worries they tried to hide. They didn’t want any of it to land on me, and they worked at not letting it land.
I felt them working. That’s the part they didn’t realize. I felt them being careful, and I started being careful back. I noticed when my mom was having a hard day, and I made sure not to bring her anything else to carry. I noticed when my dad was quiet at dinner, and I told a funny story to lift the mood.
Nobody asked me to do this. Research has found that parents preoccupied with their own unmet needs often struggle to give their kids attentive emotional care even when they want to, and that landed for me when I read it — I’d absorbed, without anyone teaching me, that their being okay was the precondition for everything else, and I got very good at protecting it.
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6. They couldn’t bear to watch me struggle, so they stepped in before I’d had the chance to learn
If I forgot my lunch, my mom drove it to school. If I had a conflict with a teacher, my dad called the school. If a friendship at recess went sideways, one of them was on the phone with the other parent that night. The interventions were always loving. They were also always early.
I didn’t know, at eight or twelve or fifteen, that I was supposed to be learning how to handle these things. I just learned that someone bigger than me would fix it before it got too uncomfortable. And then I got to twenty-two, and a real conflict landed, and I had no idea what to do with it.
I made a lot of avoidable mistakes in my twenties that I trace back to this. Not because I was incapable. Because I’d never been allowed to be uncomfortable for long enough to figure anything out.
7. They loved me, and being loved isn’t the same as being loved well
This is the one I’m still working out.
My parents loved me. That part isn’t in question, and I’m not trying to relitigate it.
But there’s a difference between loving someone and being good at loving them. For a long time, I think I treated those as the same thing. If they loved me, the rest had to be a misunderstanding, or me being too sensitive, or just how families are. If they loved me, nothing else needed examining.
It did, though. Or it did for me. I needed to look at the gaps to stop carrying them around in ways I couldn’t see. That doesn’t mean I love them any less. It just means I love them with my eyes open now instead of with the kid version of them, and that’s a different kind of loving. I don’t have a clean ending for it. I’m not sure there is one.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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