Sometimes good parents make mistakes.
There might come a day when you look at your parent who loves you, tries their best, never abused you, and realize that they don’t always know best. And it’s a weird thing to come to terms with. To know you were loved but there were still bad things that they did accidentally. But even if it’s small you’re allowed to struggle with it. You don’t need to have been through the worst kind of abuse to question your parents.
This isn’t a post about abusive and/or manipulative parents. It’s about things like your mom leaving you with an irrational fear of germs or your dad trying to get you on a diet when you’re a kid because he believes the studies about weight affecting health. Not intentional harm and not abuse. Just garden variety mistakes.
Everyone leaves their kids a little fucked up. Goal is to just leave our kids less fucked up than we were and not demand they thank us for it.
I have a very good dad. He’s supportive, he’s kind, he never yelled at me, he accepted me coming out without so much as a thought, all of that.
He also didn’t really understand my depression, because I was very young when it first started, and thus told me to ‘just get yourself together’ and that ‘being an adult is hard, but you’ll work it out’.
He didn’t mean to, he didn’t know what to look for, and I moved away very young to go to school. He was still a good dad, I wouldn’t trade him for the world, and I know that if he’d been better educated about mental health he would have helped me. Because that’s what it is, most of the time, a lack of education.
There’s a difference between harm caused by ignorance, like this, or malice, where you’ve told your family repeatedly what’s wrong and they keep doing it anyway. You should be aware of the difference.
