The Sh#% Your Parents Should Tell You

Your Parents Love You

Your parents love you.

They do, and with a depth and complexity they can never fully articulate. This love may not be fully accessible to their conscious mind. They may never express this love to you in words that are clear and unequivocal. They may do things that make you feel as though the very opposite is true, that they don't love you or that you don't matter. But that does not change the fact that you do matter to them. Very much.

It might help to remember that your parents have mounds of emotional baggage from the before-you times, baggage that they may or (most likely) may not have acknowledged, much less come to terms with. Baggage that probably makes them ill-equipped to deal effectively, sanely, gently with another human's needs. Baggage that you, as their child, easily drag out of their dark, musty closets not because you intend to, but for the simple fact that you do, in fact, mean so much to them. Children are living, breathing, talking, walking, pooping, sleeping, eating reminders of how powerless, anxious, and clueless we often are and how much more confident and powerful we long to be.

Parents say "I love you" in a multitude of ways, though perhaps not often enough in the language that their children understand. Parents say "I love you" by worrying and being overprotective. They say it by setting unrealistic expectations or pushing you to achieve. They say it by nagging and pressuring you in a usually futile attempt to get you to avoid all the mistakes they made or to guarantee you don't experience failure or loss or pain. They even say it by getting angry at you. Not just anyone can make them angry.

As you've undoubtedly noticed, these are dumb ways to say "I love you." Better ones would be to listen, to accept, to support, to make time. To (obviously) just say "I love you." But being mere mortals, parents take a long time to learn this, and some regrettably never do.

I won't say accept or put up with it or even forgive the seriously messed up ways your parents may say they love you. I won't say be okay if they never say it in some way. I just know (believe, hope) that understanding this will help you understand that even if they don't express their love or they express it poorly, it's not because you're deficient somehow. It's not because you failed in some critical way. You're only human, just like they are. You are lovable and worthy of love.