The Inevitable Misunderstanding

What I keep returning to lately is the uncomfortable realization that children often build entire narratives about their parents from incomplete information. Not intentionally. Not maliciously. Simply because children interpret love through the narrow lens of their own pain, longing, and understanding at the time.

Setting aside the modern obsession with "my truth," I've been wondering how much of what we carry about our parents is emotionally true versus factually complete.

I've spent years quietly judging my mother for being emotionally distant and unaffectionate. But lately I've started asking myself a difficult question: is that entirely accurate? Or is it the memory of a child trying to make sense of what she needed and did not fully receive?

The thought unsettles me because I can already see how easily my own son could someday misunderstand me in similar ways.

I hardly hug him anymore. Not because I stopped loving him. Quite the opposite, actually. I still feel the impulse constantly — to smooth his hair back from his forehead, to pull him toward me, to hold his face in my hands and tell him I love him the way I did when he was little. But somewhere in those preteen years came the subtle withdrawal most boys eventually make. Nothing cruel. Just small signals. A stiffness. Mild embarrassment. The gentle establishment of personal space.

So I stepped back out of respect for him.

What if one day he remembers only the absence of hugs and not the reason for them? What if he concludes that I became cold or unaffectionate when in reality I was carefully trying to honor the boundaries he seemed to need in order to become himself?

That possibility bothers me more than I can explain.

I tend to think in overly factual terms in a world that is rarely factual at all. Emotion reshapes memory. Longing edits history. Hurt simplifies complicated people into singular roles: loving, distant, attentive, neglectful. But real relationships are almost never that clean.

Long before adolescence, I had already stopped carrying my son on my hip, though there were still endless side hugs, kisses on the cheek, and casual affection woven into ordinary days. Then gradually even those gestures began to fade beneath the weight of his growing independence and my desire not to embarrass him. He is becoming a man now, broad-shouldered and self-contained in ways that both impress and quietly devastate me.

And still, beneath all my restraint, I ache to reach for him the way I once did without thinking.

Lately I've wondered if I've done something similar to my own mother — reducing her in my mind to the places where I felt emotionally hungry while forgetting the thousands of acts of devotion that happened before I was old enough to consciously remember them.

I keep thinking about my father too.

I can remember with painful clarity the last day I let him hold my hand. It was the summer before eighth grade. We had gone to B. Dalton Bookseller during one of his usual weekend bookstore trips. My father always bought me a book, no matter what, and I loved the ritual of searching quickly for the perfect choice while he marched directly toward whatever hardcover bestseller he had come for.

That day, as we walked out of the store carrying our books, he reached for my hand the way he always had.

And for the first time, I pulled away.

Not dramatically. Just enough to slip from his grasp while muttering something about friends possibly seeing me. I still remember the immediate guilt that flooded me. Even at twelve years old, I understood there was something heartbreaking about the moment. I think he understood it too. I was his youngest daughter. He had already lived through this kind of separation before.

But now, fifteen years after his death, I understand the moment in an entirely different way because I have finally lived long enough to stand on both sides of it.

That may be one of the strangest parts of aging: realizing your parents were once moving through emotional terrain you could not possibly comprehend as a child.

And now here I am, standing at another threshold entirely.

It feels increasingly clear that I need to turn toward something new in my own life, though the idea fills me with equal parts longing and dread. Being an idea person is both gift and burden. My mind feels crowded with unfinished projects, abandoned concepts, creative starts that never fully materialized — not necessarily because I lacked discipline, but because so much of my life energy went toward caring for family, building stability, and tending to everyone else's needs before my own.

Now I find myself wondering what remains after the active years of mothering begin to loosen their grip.

Maybe you are wondering the same thing.

Perhaps there is an idea quietly waiting for you that has been postponed for years. Or perhaps you feel completely untethered and uncertain, unable to imagine what could possibly come next.

I'm beginning to suspect there may not be a single correct answer.

Maybe the first step is simply becoming honest about where we are standing now, without rushing ourselves toward reinvention and simply pondering possibilities.