I need to tell you something that’s been sitting in my chest for weeks now, and I’m still not sure I’ve fully processed it.
A few Sundays ago, I was standing in my kitchen making bone broth—stirring the pot, listening to Milo babble from his high chair—when my mom called. We got to talking about how I handle bedtime with the kids, and she said something like, “Well, we never did all that back-rubbing and singing business, and you turned out fine.”
And normally, I’d let that roll off. I’ve heard versions of it a hundred times. But this time, something clicked. Or maybe something finally broke open.
I realized, standing there with the phone between my ear and my shoulder, that the woman I’d spent my whole life measuring myself against—the mother I thought had it all figured out—was just a person. A tired, anxious person who did her best with what she had and then called it a philosophy.
My parents weren’t the moral anchors I built my entire value system around. They were two people who got really good at performing certainty while making it up as they went along.
And if you’ve ever had that realization hit you mid-adulthood, you know it doesn’t feel like freedom. Not at first. At first, it feels like the floor just disappeared.
The pedestal we don’t know we’re building
I grew up in a small Midwest town where things were done a certain way and nobody questioned it much. My mom was a homemaker who made everything from scratch—bread, soap, you name it. My dad worked long hours and provided well. We ate dinner together every single night.
From the outside, it looked like a family that had answers.
But here’s the thing I couldn’t see as a kid: those nightly dinners never went deeper than “How was school?” and “Pass the potatoes.” My dad was emotionally distant in that way a lot of men from that generation were—present in body, absent in everything else. And my mom, for all her competence in the kitchen, carried a low hum of anxiety that touched everything she did. She checked the locks three times. She worried out loud about what the neighbors thought. She loved us fiercely, but she loved us from a place of fear.
I didn’t recognize any of this until I became a mother myself.
When you’re small, your parents are the sky. They’re not people with wounds and blind spots and unresolved stuff from their own childhoods. They’re just… the rules. The way things are. You absorb their values like breathing, and you don’t think to question the air.
So when you finally do? It’s disorienting in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t been there.
When the cracks start showing
Have you ever caught yourself doing something your parents did—something you swore you’d never do—and felt that jolt of recognition?
I have. More times than I’d like to admit.
Last winter, Ellie was having a meltdown about her shoes. She wanted the muddy ones. I wanted her in the clean ones. And before I could stop myself, I heard my mother’s voice come out of my mouth: “Because I said so, Ellie. End of discussion.”
The look on her face—confused, a little hurt, like she’d just been shut down by someone she trusted completely—it wrecked me. I knelt down, took a breath, and said, “I’m sorry. Let me try that again. Tell me more about why those ones matter to you.”
But that moment stayed with me for days. Because it forced me to look at where that reflex came from. It came from a house where children’s feelings were something to be managed, not explored. Where the goal was compliance, not connection. And my parents weren’t being cruel—they were parenting the only way they knew how, repeating patterns handed to them by their own parents.
As Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell write in Parenting from the Inside Out, making sense of your own life story is one of the most important things you can do as a parent. That really resonated with me—because you can’t rewrite a pattern you haven’t first been willing to see.
The grief nobody warns you about
Here’s what surprised me most about this whole unraveling: the sadness.
I expected relief. I expected clarity. And yes, those came eventually. But first? There was grief. Deep, weird, hard-to-name grief.
Because when you realize your parents were improvising—that their confidence was a costume, that their rules were often just their fears dressed up as wisdom—you lose something. You lose the version of childhood where someone had the map. Where someone knew the way and was guiding you there on purpose.
You start to see moments differently. The strictness that felt like safety? Maybe that was anxiety. The silence around hard topics? Maybe that wasn’t strength—it was avoidance. The surface-level conversations that passed for closeness? Maybe that was all they knew how to offer.
And none of that makes them bad people. That’s the part that tangles you up. You can hold two truths at once: they loved you, and they also didn’t have the tools to love you in all the ways you needed.
I spent a lot of evenings sitting on the porch after the kids were in bed, just… sitting with that. Matt would bring me tea and ask, “You okay?” And I’d say, “Yeah, just thinking.” He’s good like that—he doesn’t push, but he doesn’t disappear either. He just stays close.
What this means for how we raise our own kids
Once the initial shock settled, something shifted in how I parent. Not in some dramatic overnight transformation—more like a slow turning toward honesty.
I stopped trying to project certainty I don’t have. When Ellie asks me a hard question and I don’t know the answer, I say so. “I’m not sure, but we can figure it out together.” When I lose my patience—because I do, more than I’d like—I circle back and repair it. I kneel down and say, “I’m sorry I raised my voice. That wasn’t okay. You deserve better from me.”
I think what changed is that I stopped trying to be the unshakable authority my parents pretended to be. Instead, I’m trying to be the honest, present, imperfect person I actually am.
And honestly? My kids seem to trust me more for it, not less.
Milo’s only two, so he’s mostly interested in whether I’ll let him climb the bookshelf (no) and whether there are crackers available (usually yes). But Ellie, at five, is watching everything. She notices when I admit I was wrong. She notices when Matt and I talk through a disagreement instead of going silent. She’s learning that adults don’t have to be perfect to be safe.
That’s the thing I never got as a kid. I learned that certainty equals safety. So I became a people-pleaser and a perfectionist—because if I could just get everything right, I could keep the world from falling apart. I’m still untangling that one, honestly. Probably will be for a long time.
Letting them be human without letting yourself off the hook
I want to be careful here, because I think there’s a trap on both sides of this realization.
One trap is bitterness. You see your parents clearly for the first time and you catalog every failure, every missed moment, every way they fell short. You build a case against them in your head and you carry it around like a bag of rocks.
The other trap is premature forgiveness—rushing to “they did their best” before you’ve actually let yourself feel the loss.
I’ve done both. Neither one works.
What’s helped me is something Brené Brown describes as the process of “rising strong”—the idea that we have to reckon with our emotions and get curious about what we’re feeling before we can move through a hard story and come out the other side. You don’t skip the uncomfortable middle. You walk straight into it.
So I’m walking. Some days clumsily. Some days with more grace.
I’ve started having slightly deeper conversations with my mom. Not confrontational ones—just honest ones. When she says something dismissive about how I parent, instead of going quiet or getting defensive, I try saying, “I hear you, and I’m doing it differently because I need to.” It’s not always comfortable. But the conversations stay surface-level only if I let them.
The part that actually sets you free
If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing, it would be this: your parents not having all the answers doesn’t mean your childhood was a lie. It means your childhood was human.
They made meals and paid bills and showed up to school events and kept the house standing. They also avoided hard emotions, let silence fill the spaces where vulnerability should have been, and passed along patterns they never examined. Both things are true. Both things shaped me.
The freedom isn’t in deciding they were wrong about everything. The freedom is in finally getting to choose for yourself. In looking at the values you inherited and asking, with real honesty: do I actually believe this? Or did I just never think to question it?
Some of what my parents taught me, I’m keeping. Hard work. Resourcefulness. The value of a home-cooked meal and a family around the table. My mom’s ability to stretch a dollar and grow something beautiful from almost nothing—that lives in me every time I’m out in the garden with Ellie, showing her how to press seeds into soil.
But the emotional silence? The perfectionism? The idea that asking for help is weakness? Those I’m putting down. Gently, but firmly.
What I want my kids to know someday
I think about this a lot now. When Ellie is grown and looking back at her childhood, what will she see?
She’ll probably see some things I got wrong. She’ll probably have her own moment of realizing that her mom was just a person—a person who tried really hard but still made mistakes. And that’s okay. In fact, that might be exactly the point.
Because what I want her to know—what I want both my kids to know—is that I never pretended to have it figured out. I showed up with my whole messy, imperfect heart and I stayed honest about what I didn’t know. I let them see me apologize. I let them see me learn. I let them watch me choose vulnerability over the performance of certainty.
As Brené Brown has said, “when we deny our stories, they define us—when we own our stories, we get to write the ending.”
I don’t want my kids to inherit my unexamined stories. I want to hand them something lighter. Something more honest. Something that says: you came from people who were brave enough to look at themselves and keep growing.
That’s not a small thing. In fact, I think it might be everything.
One last thought
If you’re in the middle of this realization right now—if the ground feels shaky and you’re not sure what to hold onto—I just want you to know: you’re not ungrateful. You’re not betraying anyone. You’re doing the brave, necessary work of becoming a conscious parent instead of an automatic one.
Your parents gave you what they could. And now you get to decide what you give your kids.
That’s not a burden. That’s a gift—even when it doesn’t feel like one yet.
Be patient with yourself. Progress, not perfection. That’s what I keep telling myself on the hard days, and most of the time, I almost believe it.
