Before explanations, before blame, before memory, I want to share something life taught me slowly. For those whose parents are still here, let forgiveness find them and let love find you. Anger doesn’t make us stronger, it only makes us heavier. I learned this too late to save years, but not too late to save my heart.
We forget that our parents were once just people. Not mothers. Not fathers. Just human beings with dreams, wounds, fears and unfinished stories of their own. Imperfect people who became parents without instructions, without guarantees, without knowing how the story would unfold. There is no manual for loving a child. The pages are written slowly, painfully, beautifully, chapter by chapter, mistake by mistake, apology by apology. Speaking for myself I did the best I could with what I knew at the time and with the love I understood.
Parents are not gods. They are people carrying their own broken places. Punishing them for their imperfections does not heal you. It only creates hollow spaces, in them and in you, where love once could have lived and grown.
As someone who has lost both my parents, nothing in the world feels the same again. It changes you. You lose the person who would stand behind you even if they had nothing left to stand on. The one who loved you before you had a name, before you had a personality, before you had achievements, before you had anything to offer except your breath.
I wish I had understood sooner how little time we’re ever really promised.
In this life, you will only ever have one biological mother and father. They may not have been what you needed them to be. They may not have known how to love you the way you deserved. But if you can learn to see how deeply they loved you in the ways they knew how, maybe just maybe, you can become what you once wished they had been.
I write this as a mother and who once was a daughter, who learned through loss. As someone who understands that a mother’s love is not loud, but constant. Her worry lives in the quiet places, in her prayers, the ones you never hear that stain her lips and live in her breath. When you are in pain, she is in pain. When you turn away, she carries it everywhere, like a weight she never sets down.
And still, she waits.
Minutes become hours. Hours become days. Days become weeks. Weeks become months. And still she waits, not in anger, not in accusation, but in hope. Hoping you are safe. Hoping you are happy. Praying God will soften your heart. Praying you will come home. The saddest part is not the distance. It is the time lost forever, the conversations that never happened, the laughter that could have been and the love that had nowhere to land.
But a mother understands something we often forget, sometimes her son or daughter needs distance to heal wounds they don’t yet know how to name. And so she waits, patiently. And when you return, if you ever return, she will be there, just as she always was. Your biggest fan. Your silent warrior. Your home.
No matter how much you lash out, she absorbs it, because she knows you need to. Because she believes you will heal and you deserve to. Because her love does not depend on your behavior, it purely depends only on the fact that you exist.
And this is what I know now:
Love your parents while you can. Forgive them while you can. Say the words while there is still time to hear them back.
Because some losses do not come loudly. They come quietly, in distance, in silence, in time.
And time, once gone, never returns.
Katerina Avraamides