Seeing My Parents as Flawed Humans Was the Beginning of Real Love

My parents in Bengaluru had been, through my childhood and adolescence, the fixed stars around which my understanding of the world had been organised - not perfect in a way I had consciously believed, but stable and authoritative in a way that I had never fully questioned.

I had opinions about their decisions and their relationship with each other, but they were opinions held from a position that still implicitly assumed a parental competence I had not examined. In my early twenties, two things happened that began to dismantle that assumption.

The first was proximity - I moved back to Bengaluru at 23 after two years of independent living and shared a flat with them for six months, which meant I was now watching my parents as daily presences rather than as the weekend or holiday version of themselves.

What I saw was not what I had imagined. My father, whose advice I had always sought on professional matters, was managing his own career anxiety in ways that made me understand he was operating on uncertainty rather than the authority I had attributed to him.

My mother, whose relationship with my father had always seemed to me like the stable bedrock of the household, was clearly managing significant unhappiness in ways she had been managing for years without my fully registering it.

I found both of these discoveries destabilising in the way of learning that the ground has always had more give in it than you believed. The second thing was a conversation I had with my father at 25 that he had clearly been waiting to have for some time - about his own life before he had become my father, about the choices and losses and compromises that had produced the person who had raised me.

He told me things about his twenties that I had not known, about a career he had wanted and had set aside, about the specific ways the life he had ended up with was different from the one he had imagined. I heard him differently than I would have at 20.

I heard him as a person rather than as my father. The disappointment I had been carrying about who my parents were dissolved, not because they had changed but because I had stopped expecting them to be the idea I had held of them rather than the actual people they were.

What replaced the disappointment was something considerably more durable.