A parent’s old report card can interrupt the myth that they arrived fully formed.

Parents arrive in your life already finished, so it is easy to believe they were always that way. Then something surfaces from before you existed, a report card, a bad school photograph, a teacher’s blunt comment, and it interrupts the story. They were once uncertain and mediocre at something and being judged for it. That does not diminish them, though it does complicate the version of them you built as a child.

Ask about a specific period rather than for stories in general, a particular year, a particular job, what they were afraid of at twenty. The answers are usually more interesting than the family’s official account. Seeing a parent as a person who was once unfinished tends to soften a lot of things.