Seeing Our Parents As People

Somewhere between the teen years and becoming a young adult, my view of who my parents were changed. It wasn't necessarily drastic, and I'm not implying that all these years they were somehow different than who I now knew them to be. However, when young adulthood came to me, something in how I saw my parents changed. They were no longer just my parents; they were really just people.

As a young woman, I now saw and related to my mom as a woman. Yes, she will always be my mom, and I will always have my memories of her as I grew up under her watchful care and tutelage. That had not changed. But I now saw her more as a woman, a wife, and a mother, and I was now able to relate with her in a completely new way than I ever had before.

There is much value that can be found in seeing our parents just as people. We may struggle with the reality that they are not perfect, that they have many areas to grow and improve upon, that maybe they aren't as patient or understanding as we once might have thought. But we can also see them just as people, which is what all of us are - full of our imperfections and all in much need of grace to change - and we can begin to understand who they really are. Seeing our parents as people connects us in ways that we never were able to be connected, because we relate as women, as men, as mothers and fathers, and it is through this relating that we are able to live with compassion and understanding of all that they have experienced in life.