Our Parents Are Just People

A story about memory, forgiveness, and loving what I've come to understand

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She was five, cross-legged on the carpet, flipping through a sticker book she had already half-emptied. Her head was bowed in the serious way only small children manage, her tongue caught gently between her teeth while she concentrated. Then she looked up and asked, in that offhanded, sky-blue way kids ask everything important:

“Was your mom nice to you when you were my age?”

There was no warning. No build-up. Just that one question, light and direct. She was five. I was in my thirties. And I didn’t know what to say.

Because the truth doesn’t always sit neatly inside an answer. Especially when it has more than one layer. My mother was not an easy woman. She loved us fiercely, but she could be frightening in ways I didn’t have language for back then. Even now, when I think of her from those years, I see a kind of hot wind - volatile, unpredictable, and always moving.

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She married too young, before she knew who she was or what life outside her parents’ house might ask of her. I arrived too soon after. She never said it outright, but I felt it. I was not unwelcome, exactly, but I came into her life at a moment when she hadn’t yet come into her own. Her love wasn’t absent—it was just sharp-edged. Some days it looked like overcooked food and tucked-in shirts, and questions about school. Other days, it arrived as shouting, sudden rage, objects flung across the room, silence so heavy it made the ceiling seem lower.

I was a scared child, more often than I care to admit. And yet, I never once doubted that she loved us. She just didn’t know how to make that love soft.

For years, I tried to separate the versions of her - was she the caring mother who walked me to the gate every morning and made the world’s best pickles, or the angry woman whose voice could crack open the day? I thought I had to choose. What I’ve come to understand is that they were both her. She was whole, not divided. Complex, not cruel. She didn’t always know how to be kind, but she showed up every single day. And that counts for more than I gave her credit for back then.

Now, decades later, I sit across from her at the dining table and watch her peel a banana with trembling hands. The same hands that once scared me now look impossibly small. Her voice, once a force of nature, is softer, sometimes even hard to hear. She wants me to call more than she used to. Tells me she loves me at the end of every conversation. Asks when I’m coming home.

The years have blurred her edges. Or maybe mine. I no longer need her to be different. I no longer wait for her to explain herself or make up for what wasn’t. Something shifted along the way.

Maybe it was watching her grow old.

Maybe it was becoming a parent myself.

Maybe it was realizing that holding onto resentment didn’t protect me; it just kept me from holding her in her entirety.

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My father was a different story. Quieter, steadier. A senior engineer in the Indian Railways who rose through intelligence and decency, not politics or performance. He suffered for that honesty. He was overlooked in places where he should have been respected. Came home with quiet dignity and tired shoulders and never once let us feel the weight of the unfairness he endured.

He was gentle. Reserved. You had to watch carefully to know what he felt. But he was always there - at the table, in the car, walking us to the bus stop, reviewing schoolwork, folding his shirts with a kind of reverence that felt like ceremony. I didn’t realize until much later that he was hurting too. Not loudly. Not obviously. But in the quiet ways good men do when the world doesn’t reward their goodness. He was everything the world claimed to admire, but never quite promoted.

I never saw him complain. He just continued on, sleeves rolled, voice even. He didn’t tell me how to feel. He taught me how to stay standing.

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Now that I’m older, I see him everywhere. In how I speak in meetings. In how I fold my shirts. In how I hesitate before asking for help. In how I carry disappointment as though it were a secret that didn’t belong to anyone else.

These days, I think more about who they were outside of being my parents. Not just as “Mom” or “Dad,” but as people. People with childhoods I never saw. With fears they never named. With limits they never got to set for themselves.

We inherit more than habits or mannerisms. We inherit their unfinished stories—their reactions, their shame, their ambition, their inability to rest. And for a while, I thought that in order to become myself, I had to reject all of that. Cleanly, fully.

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But that’s not how love works. Or forgiveness. The older I get, the more I see that letting go isn’t about forgetting or erasing. It’s about understanding. About being able to say: this happened, and it was hard, and it shaped me, and I still choose to love them.

I never had the neat answers I wanted from them. There were no long, tearful conversations. No redemptive breakthroughs. But the understanding came anyway. In small moments. In late-night walks. In folding my own child’s blanket. In saying “I’m proud of you” without waiting for a reason. In cooking something my mother used to make, and realizing I finally got the spice mix right.

That day, when my daughter asked about my mother, I gave her the only answer that felt honest without being heavy: “She tried.”

And she did.

She tried with the tools she had. With a heart that was learning as it went. With a love that didn’t always come out clean, but was always real.

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We don’t all get perfect parents. But most of us got people who tried. Sometimes badly. Sometimes beautifully.

Now, when I visit my mother, I no longer expect her to be different. I help her with the medicine drawer. I pour the tea. I let her talk about small things. I still feel that heat rise inside me.

She still doesn’t apologize. She doesn’t have to.

I’ve made peace with the whole picture.

Because I am not just their child anymore. I am someone who sees what they couldn’t say. And forgives what they couldn’t fix.

And that, I think, is how we grow up.

Not when we stop needing our parents to be more than they were.

But when we finally see them clearly, and love them anyway.

I love you Mom and Dad and thank you - for all of it!

My readers, I am so grateful you are here. Have a great rest if your Sunday.

Warm regards,

Adi