Growing up, I thought adults had everything figured out.
They were the decision-makers.
The rule-makers.
The people who always seemed to know what was right and what was wrong.
As a child, it never occurred to me that they might be struggling too.
I spent much of my childhood being raised by my grandparents.
My parents were around, but they were rarely present in the way I imagined parents should be. Work, responsibilities, exhaustion, and life seemed to pull them elsewhere.
At the time, I didn’t question it.
It was simply normal.
My grandparents became the people who fed me, watched over me, and filled the spaces my parents couldn’t.
Children are remarkably good at adapting to whatever reality they’re given.
We don’t compare our lives against an invisible standard.
We simply assume that whatever we’re experiencing is how life works.
So I grew up believing adults were strong.
Adults were certain.
Adults knew what they were doing.
It took me many years to realize that wasn’t entirely true.
As I grew older and eventually became a parent myself, I started seeing my childhood through a different lens.
I began noticing something that had been invisible to me as a child.
The adults were tired.
Not just physically tired.
Emotionally tired.
Mentally tired.
Financially tired.
The kind of tiredness that settles into your bones after carrying responsibilities for years.
The kind of tiredness that leaves little room for self-reflection.
My parents didn’t talk about emotions.
They talked about behaviour.
Children were expected to listen.
To obey.
To comply.
If you were upset, the focus wasn’t usually on understanding why.
The focus was on stopping the behaviour.
Looking back, I don’t think they were trying to be cruel.
I don’t think they were deliberately choosing emotional distance.
I think emotional regulation was simply something they never learnt themselves.
How do you teach a child something nobody taught you?
How do you model emotional safety when you’ve never experienced it?
How do you guide a child through big feelings when you’ve spent your own life pushing those feelings aside just to survive?
Those are questions I never asked as a child.
But I find myself asking them now.
Because adulthood has a funny way of revealing the humanity of the people who raised us.
The older I get, the less I see my parents as authority figures and the more I see them as people.
People who were trying.
People who made mistakes.
People who carried burdens I knew nothing about.
People who were raising children while still carrying the wounds of their own childhoods.
That realization doesn’t erase the things I wish had been different.
It doesn’t magically heal every hurt.
But it has given me something unexpected.
Perspective.
As a mother, there are days when I am exhausted.
Days when patience feels harder than it should.
Days when I catch myself wanting compliance when what my child really needs is connection.
And in those moments, I understand something about my parents that I never understood before.
They were human.
Not perfect.
Not prepared.
Not emotionally equipped for every situation.
Just human.
Maybe that’s one of the strangest parts of growing older.
One day, you stop seeing your parents as giants.
You start seeing them as people.
And sometimes, if you’re lucky, that understanding softens something inside you.
Not because the past changes.
But because your perspective does.
The adults who raised us weren’t always right.
They weren’t always emotionally available.
They didn’t always know what we needed.
But looking back now, I think many of them were doing the best they could with what they had.
And perhaps the greatest gift adulthood gives us is realizing that the adults were tired too.
Ummi Noi