Growing up includes realizing your parents were people before they were roles in your life.

Your parents existed before you as complete people with fears, ambitions, disappointments, and a marriage they were figuring out in real time. To a child they can only be roles. The shift to seeing them as people is disorienting because it means their decisions were made by someone as uncertain as you are now, doing their best inside a life you only saw a fraction of.

If they are still here, ask about a period before you existed. What they were afraid of, what they wanted, what they thought would happen. The answers change what you understood about your own childhood, sometimes gently and sometimes completely.