There is a very specific Zillennial skill that no one really prepares us for: being emotionally self-aware enough to analyse our entire childhood while simultaneously asking our mom how long to bake chicken thighs.

We are the generation that can say, “I think that moment in 2009 shaped my attachment style,” and then immediately follow it with, “Also, do we have parmesan?” And somewhere in that contradiction lives a new kind of relationship with our parents, one that is more open, more honest, sometimes more fragile but also more curious than ever before.

Because we love our parents. Deeply. Loudly. Frequently in group chats. But we are also slowly realising something strange and kind of beautiful: We only know them as our parents, not as who they were before they became that. We know the “mom who always worries,” the “dad who doesn’t say much,” the “parent who repeats the same story at every family dinner like it’s a Netflix series with one season.” We know their roles so well, we forget they were ever anything else.

But before the roles, there were people. Young people. Wild, uncertain, slightly chaotic people with entire lives we were never present for. And that realisation changes everything. Because somewhere between our therapy TikToks and existential walks at 2 a.m., we start imagining it: our parents at 25, at 30, at 35. Not as authority figures. Not as “mom” and “dad.” But as people who once had no idea who they were going to become. 

And suddenly, they are kind of relatable. We begin to picture our mother not as the person who always has the grocery list memorised, but as someone who once didn’t know what to do with her future. Someone who may have made impulsive decisions. Someone who laughed too loudly in kitchens with friends who don’t exist in our memories. Someone who had a life that wasn’t centred around us yet.

We imagine our father before he became the person who fixes things, pays bills, or sits quietly in rooms holding entire worlds of responsibility. A version of him who might have been unsure, maybe even a little reckless, maybe even a little freer than we ever expected. And it’s not about romanticising them into strangers. It’s about realising they were never just one thing. They were young before they were “parents.” And that changes how we understand everything.

Because suddenly, their preferences make sense in a new way. The stubbornness. The habits. The fears. The insistence on saving things, repairing things, and keeping things stable. The discomfort with uncertainty. The desire for structure. The emotional restraint that sometimes confused us growing up.

It all starts to look less like personality traits dropped from the sky and more like survival strategies shaped by their own younger selves. People who had to figure things out without Google. Without therapy, being a normal conversation. Without podcasts gently explaining attachment styles at 1.5x speed while we cook pasta.

They built their understanding of the world in a completely different environment. And somehow, they did it while becoming responsible for us. That part is still a little hard to fully comprehend. Because we are also trying to become adults in a world that feels very different, but we are doing it with constant self-reflection, group chats, and voice notes that function as emotional regulation tools.

We unpack childhood experiences while sending memes to our siblings. We analyse generational patterns while asking for lasagna recipes. We set boundaries while still coming home for Sunday dinner. It is tender. It is confusing. It is sometimes hilarious. And in the middle of it, we are slowly realising something important: Our parents are not frozen versions of themselves. They are people who have changed, too.

We tend to meet our parents at their most established version, the version that has already made choices, settled into roles, built routines, and accumulated years of responsibility. But we rarely meet the version of them that was still becoming. And that version matters. Because when we start imagining it, something soft happens in the way we relate to them.

We begin to understand that their decisions were not made from a place of perfection, but from a place of trying. Just like ours are. We begin to see that their fears are not so different from ours, just expressed in different decades, different languages, different expectations. Stability instead of flexibility. Security instead of exploration. Consistency instead of experimentation. Not because they lacked curiosity, but because the world they navigated asked different things of them. And suddenly, the distance between “them” and “us” feels smaller. Not gone. Just more human.

This doesn’t erase the complexity, of course. No family story is that simple. But it does soften it. Because when we see our parents as people who once stood in their own version of uncertainty, we stop expecting them to be unchanging answers to everything. We start seeing them as evolving humans who also had to figure things out without a map. And maybe that’s where something healing happens.

We stop asking, “Why were they like this?” as a final judgment, and start asking it out of curiosity. Not to excuse, but to understand. Not to rewrite the past, but to make space for the full story. And in that space, love becomes a little more spacious, too. Because we don’t just love who they are now.

We start to love the idea that they were once messy, young, hopeful, unsure, just like us. And that somehow, from that same starting point, they became the people who raised us. That is not a small thing. That is actually kind of extraordinary.

So yes, we still ask for lasagna recipes between conversations about emotional awareness. We still joke about childhood memories while quietly reinterpreting them. We still navigate the beautiful contradiction of loving our parents deeply while slowly understanding them more clearly than ever before.

But maybe that is what growing up together looks like. Not fully solving each other. Just finally seeing each other a little more completely. And realising that before they were “mom” and “dad”, they were a guy listening to psychedelic jazz, smoking Mary Jane, and a gal doing aerobics, driving a white VW Golf with the roof open.

With Love, Chaos, and Jazz. Always.