I was home for Memorial Day weekend, and my mom brought up my weight twice on the first afternoon.
The first time was about a dress I’d worn to a wedding last summer that she’d seen photos of. The second time was about whether I wanted seconds at dinner — she asked in the particular voice that wasn’t really asking.
I told her, gently, that I’d asked her many times not to do this. I kept my tone level. I didn’t make a thing of it.
She put her fork down. “God,” she said. “I guess I’ll just never talk again.”
A few years ago, I would have spent the rest of the visit upset. I would have replayed the exchange in my head over and over. I would have called my best friend and rehearsed the whole thing, and I would have come downstairs the next morning still carrying it. The whole weekend would have been the weekend my mother said the thing and then made me the bad guy for noticing.
This time, I just got up and cleared the plates. I sat in the backyard with the dog for a while after dinner. The next morning, I went for a walk by myself, and by the time I got back, I’d mostly forgotten about it. I didn’t stop caring. I’ve just figured something out about her over the past few years that took me a long time to get to.
If you grew up with a parent like mine, I think you’ll know the shift I’m describing.
You’ve spent years waiting for an apology you’re never going to get
The waiting probably started somewhere in your twenties, when you finally had enough distance from your childhood to see what had actually happened in it.
You started noticing the things your mother said about your body.
The way your father reacted when you cried.
The household where feelings were either ignored or punished never simply received.
You named all of this, slowly, sometimes with the help of a therapist, sometimes just on long walks alone. And once you had it named, a small, unspoken part of you started waiting for them to name it too.
You didn’t want a grand apology or anything. Just an acknowledgment. The smallest possible version of I see what I did, and I’m sorry it hurt you. You didn’t need them to grovel. You needed them to register, even briefly, that the version of childhood they ran wasn’t quite the one they thought they were running.
That acknowledgment is what every visit has been quietly oriented around, for years.
Every phone call. Every holiday. Some part of you has been listening, even when you didn’t realize you were listening, for the one sentence that would make the rest of it land differently. And every time you leave their house, and the sentence hasn’t come, a small part of you logs the absence and resets the meter for next time.
The thing nobody tells you is that the sentence is never coming. They love you, but they genuinely don’t know what you’re waiting for.
They can’t give it because they can’t see it
The reason they can’t give you the apology is that they don’t have the equipment to.
Their parents didn’t model emotional language for them. The culture they grew up in didn’t make room for it. Therapy wasn’t a thing people in their family did, or if it was, it was something kept quiet and slightly shameful.
They learned, as kids, that you handle hard things by handling them — by working, by managing, by being good, by getting on with it. The interior world wasn’t a place anyone in their household visited out loud. So they grew up without a vocabulary for it, and they’re now in their seventies still without one.
Research on intergenerational trauma has found that what parents can’t process tends to get passed down through the quiet daily reality of a household run by people whose own wounds were never named.
The father who couldn’t sit with your sadness is the son of a man who came home from a war he never talked about and disappeared into a garage workshop for the next forty years.
None of this is an excuse. It’s a description of what they had to work with.
So when you stand in their kitchen and try to explain that the food comments hurt you, you’re asking them to use a language they were never taught. They hear the volume of your complaint without quite understanding the content. They register that you’re upset and conclude that they’ve done something wrong, and the wrongness is processed through the only vocabulary available to them, which is the vocabulary of defensiveness.
Fine, I’ll never talk again. That’s not them being cruel. That’s them not having any other word for what just happened.
More Bolde Stories
You absorbed the gap as something wrong with you, and it wasn’t
You’d think the hardest part is realizing your parents can’t apologize. That’s not it. It’s realizing what you did with their inability while you were growing up. Because you didn’t know any of this when you were eight. You just knew that something about you wasn’t quite right — that you needed too much, or felt too much, or were too sensitive, or asked for things in the wrong way. You watched your needs land badly in the room, and the only conclusion a kid can draw from that, again and again, is that the needs themselves are the problem.
As a result, you got smaller. You stopped asking. You learned which parts of you were allowed in the kitchen and which parts to keep in your bedroom. And then you went out into the world with that still running. Into friendships, into relationships, into work — bringing the version of yourself you’d built for the household that couldn’t quite hold the rest.
The good news, if there is any, is that the deficit was never in you. It was in what was given to you. What you read as something is wrong with me was actually something was missing in what they could give, and those two things look almost identical from inside an eight-year-old.
Accepting that you’ve spent your entire adult life walking around with a story about yourself that wasn’t quite the right story, is a hard pill to swallow.
The peace comes when you stop waiting
What changes when you finally stop waiting for the apology isn’t anything earth-shattering. You don’t suddenly stop loving them. You don’t sever the relationship. You don’t cancel Memorial Day.
The food comments still come, and they still land badly, and you still wish they wouldn’t. The difference is that you no longer organize your life around the hope that this time will be the time they see it.
You go in knowing what you’re getting into. You take what’s there. You don’t bring back what isn’t. You can love your parents with full eyes — with full understanding of who they were and are, and probably won’t stop being — and that love is real, and it’s not less than it was when you were waiting. It’s something quieter and more durable, because it isn’t conditional on them becoming people they aren’t going to become.
I drove home on Monday with the windows down. I called my sister, but not to rehearse the conversation. We talked about her dog. We talked about my niece’s swim meet. The mother who said the thing was still my mother, and I still loved her, and the visit was over now, and I had the rest of my own life to get back to.
That’s most of what healing turns out to be. Not transformation. Just a slow giving up of the version of the story where the apology was ever going to come, and a slow learning of how to love her anyway.
