I still want the kind of comfort my parents never learned how to give

Dear Delyara, Not because they were monsters. They weren’t. They worked hard. They sacrificed. They worried. They provided. They expressed love in food, practical help, criticism disguised as concern, and the assumption that you were strong if you kept going. But the kind of comfort I still ache for was something else. It was emotional recognition in a softer language. It was being held in feeling, not only corrected in function. When I struggle now, I can still feel that original absence under the present moment. I can understand my parents’ limitations with my adult mind and still feel the child in me looking for a form of tenderness that never fully existed in our house. That is the complicated grief of family, I think. Love can be real and still leave certain parts of you underfed.