You Don’t Begin to Understand Your Parents Just Because You Grow Up

When you’re a child, you think your parents know everything.

Then you reach your teenage years, and suddenly it turns out they don’t understand anything at all.

They ask too many questions.
They worry too much.
They say “no” too often.
They work too much.

And for some reason, they simply refuse to leave you alone.

Then you grow up.

You move away. You start working. You have your own bills, your own problems and your own decisions to make.

And one day, you discover something strange.

You still don’t fully understand your parents.

But you’re beginning to understand just how difficult it must have been to be your parents.

You notice it even more when you have a child of your own.

You might spend half the night sitting beside a crib because a little person simply refuses to fall asleep.

You have work in the morning.

You’re tired.

Really tired.

But your child doesn’t care.

They don’t care how much sleep you’ve had. They don’t care how much you have to do. They don’t care that tomorrow is going to be a difficult day.

They just want you to be there.

And you stay.

Then, in the morning, you look at them and suddenly think:

“My mum used to stay awake because of me, too.”

Or:

“My dad must have worried whenever I went somewhere, too.”

And suddenly, some old memories begin to look different.

That trip you weren’t allowed to go on.

That conversation that seemed terribly unfair when you were fifteen.

Your mum saying:

“Put a jacket on.”

Your dad saying:

“Call me when you get there.”

And that endless question:

“Have you eaten?”

As a child, it can be irritating.

As an adult, sometimes you wish you could hear it one more time.

There are things you simply can’t explain to a child.

Not because they’re stupid.

But because some feelings only come when you find yourself on the other side.

When there’s no one left to take responsibility for you.

When you’re the one who has to take responsibility for someone else.

When a little person looks at you and genuinely believes you know what to do.

Even though sometimes you haven’t got the slightest idea yourself.

And then it becomes a little funny to remember how certain we once were that our parents had everything figured out.

They were probably learning, too.

They were simply doing what they believed was right.

Sometimes they made mistakes.

Sometimes they were too strict.

Sometimes, perhaps, they made some very serious mistakes.

But many things that seemed ordinary to us as children take on a different meaning as we grow older.

We begin to notice not just what our parents said, but what was behind their words.

Exhaustion.

Fear.

Responsibility.

Love.

Sometimes, all of it at once.

And perhaps one of the strangest things about growing up is exactly this:

We don’t necessarily begin to understand our parents better.

We simply begin to understand, for the first time, what it means to be them.

Have you ever caught yourself realising that, as you got older, something your parents did suddenly started to look completely different?