The Older You Get, the More Your Parents Start Feeling Like People.

When you’re a kid, your parents don’t really feel like people. They feel like parents. They know when bills need paying, what to do when you’re sick, why you need to take a jacket, and somehow always have an opinion about how much electricity you’re using.

You assume that’s just what being an adult is. At some point you grow up and apparently start knowing things.

Then you actually become an adult and discover the scam.

You don’t know what you’re doing either.

You make important decisions while half-confident they’re the right ones. You worry about money. Work ruins your mood sometimes. You avoid phone calls you don’t want to make. You wonder whether you’re doing enough with your life. And eventually a thought appears that feels embarrassingly obvious: your parents probably felt like this too.

I think it becomes especially strange when you reach an age you remember your parents being. Maybe your mum was 30 when you were little, and 30-year-old Mum seemed like a fully established adult. Then you turn 30 and think, She had a house, children and responsibilities at this age? I still need to Google how long something lasts in the fridge.

It changes the way you remember things. Maybe some of their strictness was actually worry. Maybe silence after work was exhaustion. Maybe decisions that looked completely confident from the outside involved two people sitting up late wondering if they were making a huge mistake.

It doesn’t mean parents were secretly right about everything. They weren’t. Parents can make bad decisions, misunderstand their children and carry their own problems into a family. Seeing them as people doesn’t mean excusing everything they did.

It just adds context.

And then there’s the slightly surreal realisation that they had an entire life before you. There are photographs where they’re younger than you are now, standing beside people you’ve never met, wearing questionable clothes and having absolutely no idea that one day you’d be looking at that picture.

They had people they loved, people they couldn’t stand, stupid arguments, ambitions, embarrassing phases and probably completely different ideas about where their lives were going.

At some point, the relationship starts changing too. They tell you things they wouldn’t have told you as a child. You ask them about their lives instead of only asking them for things. Occasionally, horrifyingly, they ask you for advice.

Maybe that’s one of the nicer parts of getting older.

Your parents don’t stop being your parents.

You just slowly get to meet the people they were underneath that title all along.