My mother apologized to me on a video call last week. Julien was on my lap, gnawing on the corner of a board book, and Elise was somewhere behind me dismantling a couch cushion fort. My mother’s face filled the screen of my phone, propped up against the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter, and she said — quietly, almost rehearsed — “I need to tell you something about when you were seven.”
She told me about a school play I’d been in. Apparently I’d had a small speaking part, two lines, and she’d promised to be there. She wasn’t. She said she’d gotten caught up at work, that she’d told herself it didn’t matter, that kids didn’t remember these things. “But you remembered,” she said. “I know you did, because you stopped asking me to come to things after that.”
I didn’t remember the play, specifically. But I remembered the stopping. I remembered learning, somewhere around that age, that wanting someone to show up was a setup for disappointment. I learned to not want it. And I carried that into my twenties, my friendships, my early relationship with Camille — this instinct to never ask for what I needed, because asking meant risking the specific pain of not receiving.
My mother cried. I almost cried. Julien bit the book. And I sat there in my kitchen, thirty-something years after a school play I can’t even picture, feeling something I didn’t expect to feel: not anger, not vindication, but a deep, aching compassion for the woman on the other end of that call.
Because here’s what I realized, watching her face through the screen: she wasn’t trying to be distant. She was parenting with the tools of someone who had never really been parented herself.
The generation that raised us was also raised — just differently
There’s a tendency in millennial parenting culture to frame our childhoods as something that happened to us. And to some extent, that’s fair. Many of us grew up in homes where emotional attunement wasn’t modeled, where “I love you” was implied but rarely spoken, where independence was prized and vulnerability was treated as a problem to solve. There’s a reason so many of us are still working through things in therapy that our parents considered completely normal.
But what I keep coming back to — especially now, as a father who messes up daily and desperately wants to do better — is the question of where our parents’ tools came from. What were they given?
Most of our parents were raised in homes shaped by postwar norms, where children were expected to be seen and not heard, where physical punishment was standard, where emotional language barely existed in family contexts. Research on the intergenerational transmission of attachment patterns, including foundational work by Mary Main and colleagues, has shown that a parent’s own attachment history — how they were cared for, responded to, and emotionally held — is one of the strongest predictors of how they’ll parent their own children. Not income. Not education. Not intention. History.
My mother grew up with a father who loved her but never said it, and a mother who equated affection with making sure the house was clean and dinner was on the table. She didn’t have the language for emotional presence because no one had ever spoken that language to her.
Distance wasn’t cruelty — it was survival
I think what’s hardest for our generation to sit with is the ambiguity. Our parents weren’t, in most cases, abusive. They weren’t, in most cases, neglectful in any way that would have raised a flag. They showed up in a hundred practical ways — they drove us to school, they paid for things, they kept the house standing. But there was a specific kind of emotional distance that many of us internalized as a message about our own worth.
The thing is, that distance wasn’t a choice made against us. For most boomer parents, emotional distance was a coping strategy inherited from their own childhoods. Research published in Attachment & Human Development has explored how adults who experienced dismissing or avoidant caregiving in childhood often develop what’s called a “deactivating” attachment strategy — a way of managing relationships by minimizing emotional closeness. Not because they don’t care, but because closeness itself feels unsafe.
When my mother skipped my school play, she wasn’t thinking, I don’t care about Adrian’s feelings. She was thinking, He’ll be fine. Kids are resilient. I was fine. Because that’s the story she’d been told about her own childhood. That she was fine. That it didn’t matter. That feelings were a luxury you couldn’t afford when there were bills to pay and a household to run.
She parented me the way she’d been parented — by keeping things running, by showing love through logistics, by assuming that presence and emotional attunement were the same as being physically in the same house. And for decades, she genuinely believed that was enough. Not because she was cold. Because no one had ever shown her what warmth actually looked like in a parent-child relationship.
The apology that changes the pattern
What struck me most about my mother’s apology wasn’t the content — it was the fact that she made it at all. Because apology requires something that her generation was almost never taught: the ability to look at your own behavior, name it as harmful, and say so out loud to the person you harmed.
That’s extraordinary. And I don’t think we talk about it enough.
We spend a lot of time in parenting spaces discussing the ways emotionally unavailable parents shaped us — and that conversation is necessary and real. But there’s a parallel story that gets less attention: the boomer parents who are, right now, in their sixties and seventies, doing the hard, late-life work of examining their own patterns. Who are calling their adult children and saying, I think I got that wrong.
My mother isn’t doing this because she read a parenting book or listened to a podcast. She’s doing it because she watches me with Elise and Julien and sees something she recognizes — not as something she did, but as something she wanted to do and didn’t know how.
The research on this is actually hopeful. A study published in Developmental Psychology found that parents who are able to develop a coherent narrative about their own childhood experiences — including the painful ones — are significantly more likely to form secure attachments with their children, even if their own attachment history was insecure. In other words, it’s not the trauma that determines the outcome. It’s whether you can make sense of the trauma. Whether you can look at what happened and say, That was real, it affected me, and I don’t have to pass it forward.
My mother, at seventy-something, is building that narrative. Late, yes. But she’s building it.
What I’m doing with what she gave me
I think about this every night at bedtime. When Elise asks me to stay “just one more minute” and I sit on the edge of her bed even though I’m so tired I can feel it in my teeth. When Julien wakes at 6:15 and I hold him against my chest and whisper things he can’t understand yet but that I need to say anyway. When I tell Camille, during one of our evening check-ins, that I feel like I’m failing at something I can’t name, and she doesn’t try to fix it — she just sits with me in it.
I’m not a better person than my mother. I have more tools. I have language she didn’t have. I have access to frameworks for emotional communication that simply didn’t exist in mainstream parenting culture when she was raising me. I have therapists and books and a partner who grew up in a household where Grandmère said “I love you” like it was punctuation — casually, constantly, without ceremony.
But my mother gave me something, too. She gave me the awareness that something was missing. And that awareness — that quiet, persistent feeling that there had to be more to connection than just being in the same room — is what drove me to seek out what she couldn’t model.
I don’t think she failed me. I think she gave me exactly what she had, and it wasn’t enough, and she knows that now, and she called me on a Tuesday evening to say so.
The hardest part of compassion
Here’s what I want to say carefully, because I know not everyone’s story looks like mine: compassion for our parents doesn’t erase the impact of what they did or didn’t do. Understanding why my mother was emotionally distant doesn’t undo the years I spent unable to ask for what I needed. Those things can coexist. The wound and the understanding. The grief and the grace.
What I’ve found, though — and what family systems research consistently supports — is that when adult children can hold complexity about their parents, when they can say you hurt me and I understand why in the same breath, the intergenerational pattern starts to shift. Not overnight. Not perfectly. But perceptibly.
There are grandparents who understand this instinctively — who have figured out how to become irreplaceable in their grandchildren’s lives by offering the emotional presence they couldn’t quite manage as parents. My mother is becoming one of them. She reads to Elise over video calls. She asks Julien questions he can’t answer yet and waits, patiently, as if he might. She is learning, at an age when most people have stopped, how to be emotionally available.
And I watch her do it with a lump in my throat, because I can see what it costs her. Every gentle moment with my kids is also a confrontation with what she wasn’t able to give me. Every “I love you, Elise” is also an acknowledgment of the silence that filled my childhood.
What the school play taught me — eventually
Last Sunday, Elise asked me to watch her jump off the back step. Not a performance. Not a recital. Just a four-year-old wanting a witness. She said, “Papa, watch. Watch me.” And I put down the spatula — mid-pancake, batter pooling on the griddle — and I watched.
She jumped. Maybe four inches. She looked at me to see if I’d seen.
I had.
That’s such a small thing. It’s also the entire thing. The willingness to stop what you’re doing and be a witness to your child’s existence — not their achievements, not their milestones, just their aliveness. That’s what I didn’t get, and what I’m trying to give, and what my mother is now, decades later, trying to give retroactively through an apology on a video call and a willingness to keep showing up even though showing up has never come naturally to her.
The boomers who raised us weren’t villains. Many of them weren’t even negligent, not in any way they could see. They were people parenting from a deficit — people who had never been given the emotional vocabulary their children needed, because their own parents had never given it to them.
That doesn’t make it okay. It does make it human.
And if we can hold both of those truths — the hurt and the humanity — maybe we can raise kids who don’t need to wait thirty years for the apology. Maybe we can just stay for the play.
