Flawed Love

Dear Delyara, I used to think gratitude had to be simple. But family is rarely simple. My parents were not perfect people. They were tired people. Limited people. Wounded people. They loved us in the language they had, not always in the language I needed. For a long time I focused only on what was missing. Lately, I have started noticing what was there. The rides to school in silence. The late-night pharmacy runs. The food left outside my door when I was too upset to talk. The way my father fixed things with his hands because emotions were never his first language. The way my mother remembered every tiny detail, even when we fought. I still carry pain from home. But I also carry tenderness. Today I am grateful not for perfection, but for the flawed, human ways I was held.