People Before Parents

At some point, I had to stop pretending you were misunderstood.

I had spent years trying to understand you in ways you never attempted to understand me.

I gave your behaviour context.

I gave your silence explanations.

I gave your failures softer names because they hurt less when I called them something else.

You were young.

You had your own damage.

Nobody gave you a manual.

You were doing the best you could.

I repeated that last one for years.

They did the best they could.

As though saying it often enough might make what I received feel like enough.

But the best someone can do is still a choice.

And eventually I understood something that changed the way I looked at both of you.

You were people before you were parents.

Before I called you Mum and Dad, you had already lived entire pieces of lives I knew nothing about.

You had fears I didn't create.

Wounds I didn't cause.

Things you had been taught that perhaps should never have been taught to you.

Things you had never been given that you were somehow expected to know how to give to me.

I can understand that now.

But understanding is not the same as erasing.

Dad, you could take up space without taking responsibility for what you left behind.

You could be charming.

You could be generous.

You could be present when being present suited you.

But when something broke, you could rarely sit beside the pieces and admit that your hands had been there.

I spent years trying to find the right explanation for you.

Eventually I realised that a pattern repeated often enough stops being confusion.

Mum, you were different.

You stayed.

There was food.

There were clothes.

The visible jobs were done.

But children need things that cannot be put on a plate.

I needed softness.

I needed reassurance.

I needed somewhere safe to put a feeling without wondering what reaction it would receive.

You loved practically.

I needed to be loved emotionally too.

And for years, I kept returning to the same empty place expecting to find something there simply because I needed it badly enough.

That was perhaps the hardest thing to accept.

Not that you wouldn't give it.

That maybe you couldn't.

And still...

I was a child.

Your limitations might explain the empty spaces, but they did not make those spaces any less empty for the little girl standing inside them.

I was your firstborn.

Your first attempt at something neither of you had ever done before.

I got the unfiltered learning curve.

The stress before you knew how to manage it.

The fear before you understood where to put it.

The mistakes before anyone had admitted they were mistakes.

I learnt to read rooms before I should have needed to.

I learnt when to speak.

When not to.

When to make myself smaller.

When to sense that something had changed before anybody had said a word.

Perhaps later you knew more.

Perhaps later you understood things you hadn't understood with me.

That is one of the strange griefs of being first.

Sometimes another child receives the lesson your childhood had to teach.

And there was a time when that made me angry.

Maybe part of me will always find it sad.

But I don't need to punish you for it anymore.

I also don't need to pretend it didn't hurt.

Both things can be true.

You were human.

And you hurt me.

You were learning.

And I lived with the mistakes.

You had wounds.

And some of them became mine.

You may have done the best you knew how.

And sometimes...

it still wasn't enough.

I used to think closure would arrive through you.

An apology with enough weight behind it.

A conversation where everything was finally acknowledged.

A moment where one of you looked at me and said,

Yes. I remember.

Yes. That happened.

Yes. It hurt you.

And yes, I should have done better.

I waited for conversations you were never capable of having.

Then one day, I stopped.

And strangely, that was where closure began.

Not with forgiveness.

Not with forgetting.

With acceptance.

You are people.

Complicated, limited, imperfect people whose lives did not begin when mine did.

I can see that now.

I can understand your past without carrying it for you.

I can acknowledge your fear without making it responsible for my future.

I can recognise the things you never received without spending the rest of my life grieving because you couldn't give them to me.

And I can love whatever parts of you I choose to love without rewriting the parts that hurt.

Accepting your humanity does not require me to decide you were good parents.

That distinction set me free.

Because I am not your translator anymore.

I am not the buffer.

I am not responsible for finding kinder explanations for things that hurt me.

And I am no longer that little girl waiting for one of you to become what she needed.

I grew up.

Eventually, I learnt to give myself some of what I had spent years waiting to receive from you.

And perhaps this is the closest we will ever come to peace.

I see you now.

Not as the enormous figures children believe their parents to be.

Not as monsters.

Not as heroes.

Just people.

People before parents.

Two people trying something for the first time.

And me...

your first attempt.