#dump15
I’m looking at an old Polaroid of my parents from the late nineties. They’re sitting on the hood of a beat-up car, laughing at something off-camera. My mom has these wild, unstructured curls and my dad is wearing a t-shirt that is an aggressively bright shade of orange. They look so effortlessly cool. So certain.
They look like characters in a movie who already know how the plot ends. But then, because my brain is a toxic wasteland of unnecessary calculations, I did the math.
In this photo, my dad was twenty-five. My mom was twenty-three. And I was already alive, probably asleep in a portable crib inside that tiny, rented apartment behind them.
I looked at that photo, then I looked at myself in the mirror, and a cold wave of pure existential dread washed over me. Yesterday, I had a genuine, eyes-welling-up meltdown because the grocery store was out of the specific oat milk I like, and I had to sit in my car for five minutes to emotionally recalibrate my entire afternoon. I am constantly juggling schedules, overanalyzing text messages, and trying to figure out if my life is moving in the right direction or if I’m just spinning in circles in a very nice outfit.
And yet, at my exact age, my parents were navigating a whole-ass marriage, a massive move, and a literal, breathing infant who depended on them for survival.
My cousin Kelly and I were sitting on the porch the other night, just staring into the dark after a brutal, exhausting day. Out of nowhere, Kelly looked over and asked, "Do you think our parents actually knew what they were doing, or were they just winging it as hard as we are?"
That single question completely broke my brain. Because the answer is so obvious, yet so terrifying to accept.
They were winging it. They were winging it so hard
The Great De-Idealization
There’s this beautiful, painful developmental milestone called de-idealization. When you’re a child, your parents are essentially gods. They are ten feet tall, they possess the secrets of the universe, and they are the absolute authors of what is right and wrong. If the house makes a weird noise at night, you go to them, because obviously, they can defeat whatever monster is in the walls.
But then you grow up. You hit your twenties, and you start to see the seams in the costume.
You realize that the hospital just... lets you leave with a baby. There is no test. You can get rejected for a apartment lease or a credit card, but the universe is just like, "Oh, you made a human soul? Cool, here’s some swaddle blankets, don't drop it, see ya."
My parents weren't born with an instruction manual on how to raise me. They were literally figuring out how to be adults while they were trying to keep me from eating pennies off the floor. They were playing house with real, high-stakes consequences.
Once you realize this, you start looking back at your childhood through a completely different lens, and honestly, this is the part that might make your chest ache a little bit.
I think about the times my dad would come home from work and just sit in his truck in the driveway for ten minutes before coming inside. When I was a kid, I thought he was just listening to the end of a sports broadcast. Now? Now I realize he was probably staring at the steering wheel, gripping it tightly, exhaling the crushing weight of a day of financial stress, and gathering the emotional energy to step inside and be "The Man with All the Answers" for a family that had no idea how close they were to the edge.
I think about my mom staying up until midnight deep-cleaning the kitchen counters. She wasn't just obsessed with clean surfaces. She was likely having a quiet, lonely panic attack because bills were due, or because she felt like she was losing her own identity in the endless cycle of laundry and grocery lists, and scrubbing the grout was the only thing in her life she could actually control.
They were so young. They were the age that we are right now.
Imagine being twenty-three or twenty-four, feeling the exact same internal chaos you feel today—the insecurity, the fear of the future, the relationship doubts, the imposter syndrome…but you aren't allowed to collapse on the floor and watch three hours of cat videos because a tiny person is crying in the next room, and you are the only buffer between that person and the harshness of the world.
They couldn't tell me they were scared. Because if the gods are scared, the universe falls apart. So they hid it. They wore the armor of "Because I said so," which we thought was authority, but was actually just a shield protecting their own vulnerability.
The Unsettling Trade-Off
Here is the raw truth that’s hard to swallow: our parents had to kill parts of their own youth so that we could have ours.
While they were holding our hands through our first heartbreaks, our school failures, and our existential crises, who was holding theirs? They were mourning the loss of their own twenties in real-time while watching us begin ours. They were dealing with the death of their own parents, the fading of their earliest dreams, and the stark reality of aging—all while pretending they had it completely figured out.
It’s a weirdly unsettling thought. We spend the first half of our lives wishing our parents would understand us, and the second half of our lives realizing we never truly understood them.
We treated them like static characters in the movie of our lives, forgetting that they have an entire independent film running in their own heads.
I looked at that Polaroid again before I started writing this. I looked closely at my mom’s eyes. She’s smiling, but there’s a tightness there. A little shadow of fatigue. I never noticed it when I was ten. I see it perfectly now.
We are all just a bunch of confused kids passing the baton of confusion down to the next generation, hoping we don’t drop it.
So if you’re currently spiraling about your career, or your relationships, or the fact that you still don't know how to properly file a claim or choose a mature avocado... give yourself a break. The people who raised you were just as terrified as you are. They just didn't have TikTok to post about it.
I think I’m going to call my parents tonight. Not to ask them for advice, and not to complain about my week. Just to ask them what their favorite song was when they were twenty-three, and actually listen to the answer.
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