When Our Parents Become Human

Chanukah is a time when families get together, tell familiar stories, and memory feels closer to the surface. This year, it found me thinking not only about my children, but also about my parents, particularly my relationship with my father, and how that relationship has shifted since I’ve grown older. There is something about adulthood, about carrying responsibility ourselves, that quietly changes the way we look at the people who once carried it for us.

I often think about the line attributed to Otto Frank after he read his daughter Anne Frank’s diary, that he never really knew his child, and wondered how well parents ever really know their children. For many years, that line has stayed with me from the perspective of a parent. Only recently have I begun to feel its weight in the opposite direction. How well do we truly know our own parents?

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Israel with my father and two of my sisters. We had never really spent time together with him like that before, without spouses, without children, without the familiar roles and distractions of daily life. I’ve taken trips with just my mother in the past, trips that felt emotionally natural and deeply formative, trips I still cherish. This experience felt different. Quieter. Less rehearsed. I did not quite know what to expect from the experience.

What surprised me most was not a single conversation, but how quickly old roles tried to reassert themselves. I noticed how instinctively I still saw my father through the lens of who he had been to me growing up: steady, dependable, somewhat removed from the emotional center of my life. At the same time, I felt that the story was asking to be reconsidered.

It was in the quieter moments, sitting together in the hotel lobby late at night, gathered around the fireplace, talking without an agenda, that something began to shift. He spoke about his past, about decisions he’d made when he was younger, about work, pressure, responsibility, and uncertainty. He spoke simply, without drama or self-importance. As I listened, I felt a kind of internal resistance. Not because what he was saying was difficult, but because it didn’t fit neatly into the version of him that I’d carried for so long.

At one point, he mentioned an accomplishment almost in passing. I remember thinking why I didn’t know about it. And then, more honestly, why I never asked about it.

I began to notice how intelligent he was, how much history he carried, how clearly he saw the world. I realized that for much of my life, I had known him primarily through function, as a provider, a presence, his stability, but not through his story. Not through struggle. Not through the inner life that shapes a person over time.

The relationship between a father and a daughter is rarely simple. As the years pass, I find myself questioning not only how well he knows me, but how well I have ever taken the time to know him. There was a quiet grief in that realization, not for something lost, but for something postponed.

For much of my life, my mother stood at the center of my emotional world. She was the one I traveled with, confided in, leaned on. My father was present, committed, and consistent—but quieter, often in the background. Not absent, just less examined. Like many children, I understood my parents through the roles they played and the emotional space they occupied, not through the full complexity of who they were as people.

As a therapist, I spend much of my time sitting with individuals who are trying to make sense of how their childhood shaped them. One of the most influential approaches in therapy today is Internal Family Systems. This model invites us to understand ourselves as comprised of different parts, wounded parts shaped in childhood, protective parts that learned how to cope, and a core that is capable of curiosity and compassion.

Sitting with my father, I found myself thinking about Internal Family Systems, not just in the therapy room, but in real life. I began to wonder how much of what we carry about our parents comes from the parts of us that learned who they were at a young age. Parts that formed impressions quickly, without context. Parts that filled in gaps the only way children know how.

Internal Family Systems teaches that our parts are not wrong. They are adaptive. They learned what they needed to learn in order to survive emotionally. But those parts are also frozen in time. They do not automatically update as we grow older. Unless we intentionally revisit them, they continue to interpret the present through the lens of the past.

Children do not know their parents as whole people; they know them in fragments, through needs, interactions, and moments of presence or absence. They do not know the pressures their parents are under, the fears they carry quietly, or the choices they made with limited options and even less support. Yet these partial understandings often become the foundation of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and where we come from.

Adulthood complicates these stories. As we move through our own challenges, grief, loss, exhaustion, disappointment, and responsibility, something begins to soften. Life humbles us. We begin to understand how narrow the margins can be, how impossible it is to be fully present everywhere, all the time. In that understanding, we start to wonder how our parents were able to survive stages of life that now feel overwhelming to us. We wonder how they kept going and what they carried without naming it.

Sitting across from my father, listening to him speak about his life, I felt the tension between the parts of me that still knew him through childhood roles and the adult part of me that could finally take in the complexity of who he is. It did not erase old feelings. It did not rewrite history. It added dimension.

Internal Family Systems teaches that healing does not come from getting rid of parts, but from helping them feel seen, understood, and updated. Perhaps the same is true of our relationships with our parents. Closeness may grow not when we argue with our childhood experience, but when we allow our adult self to bring in new information, new stories, new context, and new compassion.

That realization followed me home into my own parenting. I began to wonder how my children will one day remember me, which parts of me will take center stage in their memories, and which will fade quietly into the background. I wondered what stories they will tell about who I was, based on what they needed from me at the time. What parts of me they may only understand much later, when life gives them context I cannot yet offer.

There is something deeply humbling in recognizing that our parents, like us, were navigating their lives without a map. There is also something quietly healing in allowing our understanding of them to evolve alongside our understanding of ourselves.

Maybe this is part of adulthood, realizing that our parents were human long before we were ready to see them that way. n

Tamara Gestetner is a certified mediator, psychotherapist, and life and career coach based in Cedarhurst.  She helps individuals and couples navigate relationships, career transitions, and life’s uncertainties with clarity and confidence. Through mediation and coaching, she guides clients in resolving conflicts, making tough decisions, and creating meaningful change. Tamara is now taking questions and would love to hear what’s on your mind—whether it’s about life, career, relationships, or anything in between. She can be reached at 646-239-5686 or via email at [email protected]. Please visit www.tamaragestetner.com.