Your Parents Were Normal for Their Time. That Doesn't Mean You're Wrong to Hurt.

The Clue: Estrangement has always existed. What’s new is the language, the permission, and the choice to stop passing the pain forward.

Reading Time: 10 minutes

I’m Gen X.

I was an only child, and by the time I was in my early twenties, my parents were separated.

So when I didn’t speak to my mother for nearly a year, it wasn’t just a break in one relationship. It felt like the already-small family I came from got even smaller.

Eventually, I was the one who reached out to break the silence.

Nothing changed. No healing conversation followed. No great understanding arrived. We just moved into a pattern many families know well: on again, off again, close enough to function, distant enough to ache.

Being an only child made that silence feel even stranger. There was no sibling to call afterward, no one else who had grown up inside the same house and could say, I know. I saw it too.

It was just me and her. And my therapist whose line today I can remember, “Would you keep opening a door if you knew there was a snake behind it to bite you?” The symbolism of referring to my mother as a snake felt good at the time, but it didn’t help anything except give me permission from a professional to go “no contact”.

When my first child was born, she was happy to become a grandmother.

At least at first.

For a few months, maybe six at best, there was a kind of hope around it. A new baby can do that. It can make everyone imagine a softer version of the family. A fresh start. A reason to come closer.

But it didn’t last long.

A new baby can make a family look healed for a little while.

But a baby cannot repair what no one is willing to name.

She didn’t offer much. And by then, I had learned to expect less.

She came to the hospital when my second child was born, a daughter, and I let her in for that.

But after she left, five months passed before I saw her again.

She lived two and a half miles away.

I didn't have language for it then. I didn't call it estrangement or trauma or the result of anything in particular. I just knew I needed distance and couldn't fully explain why, even to myself. What I knew was that something in me had never quite been reached, and that the not-reaching had a shape, even if I couldn't name it yet.

Years later, I would find the words.

What I couldn't have known then — couldn't have seen from inside my own pain — was that I was standing in the middle of a story that didn't begin with me and wouldn't end with me either.

Two Things Can Be True

My mother was not a villain.

She was a woman who loved me in the only languages she knew, who did more than her own mother had done, who broke certain cycles even while perpetuating others. She was ordinary. And ordinary, it turns out, is sometimes enough to leave a mark.

This is the part of the estrangement conversation that almost no one wants to have honestly.

Because today, adult children today are naming real pain. Pain that was invisible to the generations before us. Pain that got absorbed and passed down because no one had words for it. Pain that is finally, finally being witnessed.

That witnessing matters. It changes lives. It changed mine.

And despite this, what I’ve noticed is that many parented better than they were parented. They broke cycles their own parents didn't even know were cycles. They gave what they were never given.

And now they are being held accountable to a standard that did not exist when they were raising children. Yes, they parented better, but from an unhealed place.

Both of these are true.

The wound is real. The parent is not automatically a villain.

Most families get stuck because no one has language for both truths in the same sentence.

The Bar Moved

The bar for acceptable parenting has risen, and it has risen fast.

Three generations ago, physical discipline was standard. Children were expected to be seen and not heard. Emotional attunement was not a household phrase. Providing food, shelter, moral instruction, and a roof was the job. A parent who did those things reliably was considered a good parent.

Fathers were not expected to be emotionally present. Mothers were not expected to be emotionally fulfilled. A child's inner life was largely their own business, and if it wasn't going well, the remedy was usually character building — which often meant more of whatever was causing the suffering.

None of this was hidden. None of this was controversial.

It was water. It was the medium people swam in so completely they could not see it as a choice.

Then, slowly and then quickly, it became visible.

Therapy stopped being a secret. Attachment research entered the mainstream. Books about childhood emotional neglect began showing up on bestseller lists. Podcasts gave people language for their nervous systems, their boundaries, their trauma responses, their family roles.

A generation began to articulate experiences their own parents had no framework for.

And in articulating them, they named what had been missing. What had always been missing. What had been missing for generations, but silently.

This is where the gap opens.

Because when the cultural bar rises faster than a single generation can adapt, adult children end up measuring their parents against a standard those parents never knew existed.

The parent feels ambushed.

I did everything right by the rules I was given. I did more than my parents did. Why am I the bad guy?

The adult child feels gaslit.

Why can't you see what you did? Why do I have to keep explaining the obvious?

Neither is lying. Both are telling the truth from inside their own frame.

Estrangement Has Always Existed. It Just Had Fewer Words.

My mother had her version of this too.

She may never have used the word estrangement, but there were people in her own family she held at arm's length, silences that lasted years, relationships that were present in form and absent in feeling. She didn't call it anything. She just lived it.

Families have always had distance. They have always had children who pulled away, parents who didn't understand why, siblings who stopped speaking, holidays that became complicated, grief that everyone carried but no one knew how to name.

But it looked different.

A daughter may have hated her mother and still lived five minutes away. A son may have spent his whole adult life feeling unseen by his father and still showed up every Sunday.

People stayed close geographically while being miles apart emotionally. They visited. They cooked. They sat in the same rooms. They did what was expected.

And they stuffed it.

They swallowed the resentment. They made jokes. They complained to a sister, a spouse, or no one at all. They carried the pain in their bodies, in their marriages, in the sharpness of their voices, in the way they parented the next generation.

It got stuffed into kitchens. Into Sunday dinners. Into sarcasm. Into depression no one named. Into resentment no one was allowed to admit.

And eventually, into the next generation.

That does not mean they did not cause pain. It means they caused pain inside a world that had not yet given them much language for their own.

I Was Standing in the Middle of It Too

Here is what I could not have seen in my early twenties, sitting in that hospital room, quietly pulling away:

I was not only a wounded daughter.

I was also becoming a mother.

And the story was not going to stop with me.

By the time my children were in their formative years, I was squeezed from every direction. I was married to a good man who had been shaped by a different era — one where women were expected to hold everything together quietly, without complaint, and often without acknowledgment.

I was also caring for aging parents. I was trying to heal my own wounds while raising children who needed me to be steady, present, and whole.

But I wasn’t whole.

I was in process.

And in that pressure, I can see now that I parentified my children in certain ways. Not maliciously. Not consciously at first. But I leaned on them when they should have been able to lean on me. I let them carry emotional weight that belonged to the adults in the room.

I did it because I had learned it.

Because when you have not been fully held, you can reach for whatever is close.

Because being aware of a wound does not automatically make you immune to passing it on.

When I finally saw it clearly, I did the only thing I knew to do.

I told the truth.

I apologized. Not once, but over time, in the specific ways the specific moments called for. I took responsibility not only for what I had done, but for how it had affected them. I did not ask them to minimize it, excuse it, or reassure me that everything was fine.

I named it.

And I stayed.

Even now, there are moments I remember — things I said, ways I reacted, times I made my pain too present in their young lives.

I forgive myself.

But forgiveness does not mean pretending.

So when those memories surface, I still say the thing out loud when it needs to be said:

Wow. I said that. I can see how that landed on you, and I am sorry. You did not deserve to have to hold that for me.

My adult children have been gracious with me, but their graciousness is not something I am entitled to. They are not props in my healing story. They are human beings with their own memories, their own healing, and their own right to name what was true for them.

They deserve respect.

They deserve acknowledgment.

They deserve a mother who does not confuse forgiveness with being finished.

And here is what I learned:

The words were only part of it.

My children were not just listening to me.

They were watching me.

They were watching me then, as they were growing up. And they are still watching me now — watching how I handle truth, regret, aging, accountability, and vulnerability in this next stage of life.

Children, whether young or grown, track this with a precision that is almost uncanny. Not always consciously, but deeply. They know the difference between a parent who says the right things and a parent who becomes someone different.

Over time, they trust what they watched far more than what they were told.

My children are adults now. We came through the hard years, and we are still close, genuinely close, not performatively close. There is honesty between us. There is forgiveness that was earned rather than assumed. There is a quality of conversation between us that I do not take for granted.

That did not happen because I was a perfect parent.

It happened because when I saw what I had done, I chose repair over defense.

Children may stop asking for advice. But they do not stop watching.

No matter how old they are, they are still watching how we live, how we love, how we apologize, how we age, and how we tell the truth when the truth costs us something.

That may be the real repair. Not saying the perfect thing.

But becoming someone who can be vulnerable, accountable, and tender to make the conversation and/or apology believable.

The Trap on Both Sides

There is a trap on each side of this conversation.

The trap on the adult child's side is retroactive judgment without context. Applying today's standards to yesterday's parenting can become its own kind of injustice, especially when it forecloses the possibility that the parent was doing repair work the child never witnessed, carrying weight the child never knew about, or simply did not have access to what we now take for granted.

Toxic can close a door that might have opened. Narcissist can flatten a whole person into a diagnosis. The vocabulary that was meant to liberate can become a way of refusing to see the parent as fully human.

But the trap on the parent's side is using era as a shield.

That was normal then can become a way to avoid ever hearing the grievance. A way of saying: the rules changed, so I don't have to account for what happened under the old rules.

But the adult child is not asking for a history lesson.

They are asking to be seen.

And that was normal then is not the same as: I see what happened to you, and I'm sorry it hurt.

Neither trap gets families home. What gets families home , when anything does, is the willingness to hold both truths without using either one to silence the other.

Some Pain Does Not Need a Villain

Healing begins, I think, with letting the hurt be real without needing the other person to be a monster for it to count.

This is quieter than it sounds. And harder.

Most of the cultural scripts available right now require villainy. The parent has to be toxic, has to be a narcissist, has to meet some threshold of abuse before the pain is considered legitimate.

But ordinary pain from ordinary parenting is also legitimate.

A childhood can be largely good and still have left something missing. A parent can have loved well and still have wounded. The wound does not need to be upgraded into abuse for it to deserve tending.

And for parents — for those of us on that side of it — healing looks like being able to say: I didn't know that was harmful. I can see now that it was. I'm sorry. Without immediately reaching for the defense, the context, the explanation of how hard things were.

The defenses may not be wrong. They may simply be premature.

The adult child needs to be believed before the parent's explanation can land. Everything else can come after.

I know this because I have been on both sides of that sentence.

The Real Inheritance

I am almost sixty years old. I have processed my own mother. I have raised two children who are now adults. I have apologized for the ways I fell short and watched those apologies do real work in real relationships. My guess is that as they grow, more acknowledgments may be needed.

What I realize is simple.

The goal was never to decide who was right. It was never to litigate the era, indict my mother, or pretend my childhood was something it wasn't.

The goal was to stop making the past prove itself before the present could heal.

I know that my mother had pain I will never fully understand. I have pain my children may never fully understand. And one day, my children will have pain their own children won't fully understand either.

That is not a tragedy. It is the human condition, moving through time.

What changes the shape of it, what I believe actually interrupts the inheritance, is someone in the middle of the line deciding that naming the wound and destroying the person are two different things.

That it is possible to tell the truth and keep your humanity.

That repair is not weakness. That apology is not defeat. That you can hold what hurt you without turning it into the only true thing about the person who caused it.

And that your children are not just listening for all of this.

They are watching for it. They need it.

They are watching whether you live what you say you believe. Whether you can sit with discomfort without making it someone else's fault. Whether you are willing to be wrong. Whether the person you are becoming is someone they might want to become too. Someone they can feel proud of too.

That is the real inheritance. Not the words you pass down, but the way of being you embody in front of them, in the ordinary moments, when no one is performing and everything is just life.

And if you are somewhere in the middle of this, still processing your own parents, still raising children who will one day process you, I want you to know that the middle is exactly where the work happens.

Not at the beginning, when everything is raw.

Not at the end, when everything is resolved.

But here, in the complicated middle, where you are both the child and the parent, both the wounded and the one who wounded, both the person who needed more and the person who sometimes gave less.

That is where the cycle can change. Where generational trauma can be healed.

Not with silence. Not with resentment. Not with a diagnosis that closes the door.

But with enough honesty, and enough humility, and enough courage to stay in the room.