Your parents were first-time humans too — that’s the grace. What you do with the hand they dealt you is on you now — that’s the responsibility.
When we were kids, our parents seem like gods to us.
They know everything, they have every answer, they never fail. Then you grow up, and somewhere along the way — usually when you’re tired and out of answers yourself — you see them clearly for the first time: they are/were people too. Figuring out life, love, money, and faith, just like you. Maybe just a little ahead of you on the road, dealt a different hand by a harder era.
It was their first time living too.
I understood it the night Olivia, my first, got sick as a baby. I stayed up holding her upright so she could breathe, watching her chest rise and fall, afraid to sleep, with no idea what hour it was. Somewhere in that long night it landed on me: my parents did this for me, more than once, and never let me see their fear.
No Google. No podcasts. No parenting course. They just did what they could with what they had.
That’s the first half, and it’s the easy half: most parents were doing their best with less than we have — less money, less knowledge, less emotional vocabulary than we throw around today. Grace doesn’t excuse what they got wrong. It just sees the whole person. They were trying to build something better than what they’d been handed. That’s worth honoring.
But here’s the half almost nobody says out loud.
Grace for them is only one side of the ledger. The other side is responsibility for yourself — and there’s a kind of adult who collects the first and never picks up the second.
You’ve met them.
People in their thirties, forties, fifties — educated, employed, housed — still itemizing every way mum and dad fell short, as if their whole life is a refund they’re owed. And past a certain age, “my parents didn’t—” quietly stops being an explanation and turns into an alibi.
There’s a real difference between acknowledging pain and living in blame.
One of them heals you. The other keeps you stuck, bitter, and strangely comfortable — because blame is the most convenient drug there is. It hands you a reason for everything that’s wrong and asks nothing of you in return.
Here’s the test I actually use, on this and on most things: what can I change, and what can I only ruminate on?
The childhood you got is fixed. It’s done. It’s data you cannot edit. What you do with it from here is the one variable still in your hands. So when you spend your adult years blaming, you’re taking the single lever you actually control — your choices, forward — and burning it on the one thing you can’t.
I can’t imagine a worse trade.
I’m not willing to spend fifty years furious at someone for what they couldn’t give, when the thing that’s actually broken is something I could be fixing today. The baton has already passed. You’re running your own race now. At some point you have to stop shouting at the coach who trained you thirty years ago, and just bloody run.
If they’re any decent parents, you’d probably miss them when they’re gone. You’d miss
- their food
- their naggging
- their specific worry
- their always being there or finding ways to worry about you
So the mature path isn’t blame, and it isn’t denial either. It’s both at once: honor what was genuinely given, and take full ownership of what’s yours now. Honor your father and your mother — and then go build the better thing they couldn’t, without spending your life billing them for the gap. Don’t perpetuate the bad. Don’t litigate it forever either. Take the baton.
That, to me, is the whole of cycle-breaking. Not pretending the cycle didn’t hurt. Not avenging it. Just refusing to pass it on.
Now, the hard exception —
Because it’s real, and I won’t pretend it isn’t. Not every parent was safe. Some did genuine harm, the kind “they tried” doesn’t cover. Honoring a parent has never meant staying within reach of someone who’s still dangerous. You can honor from a distance. Walking away from a hardened, harmful situation isn’t dishonor; it’s wisdom. Sometimes love doesn’t mean staying close — it means staying clean. Forgiveness and proximity are two different decisions, and you’re allowed to make them separately.
But for most people, most of the time, the parent in question wasn’t dangerous. Just imperfect. Just human. And imperfect-but-present still earns honor, even when it doesn’t earn a medal.
The part that humbles me: the same impatience I once judged in my parents, I now watch leak out of me when I’m tired with my own three. The same shortfalls. One day Olivia, David, and Josh will look at me and wonder why I fell short where I did. I’m learning to give my parents the exact grace I’m going to need from my own children. We really are all first-time humans — me included, still figuring out love and patience and forgiveness, usually clumsily.
So the better question was never “who’s to blame.”
It’s “who’s going to break the cycle?”
Honor the effort.
Take the baton.
Our forefathers and lineage all the way up, ALWAYS wanted the next generation to do better than them and their generation…and it has taken so many generations and years and now, it’s YOUR time, you generation.
They did their best…now is your turn.
Build better than you were given — and hand that down, not the wound (drop all the bad stuff), to the ones coming after you.
And while your parents are still here to call — call them. The time is shorter than it feels. One day the only thing left of the small irritations will be that you’d give anything to be irritated by them one more time.