There are no easy words for how complicated your relationship with your parents will get as they age.
You’ll think about bedtime stories and scraped knees and school concerts.
You’ll try not to think about stubbornness and doctors’ offices and bruises that don’t heal.
Before all of that, there was this:
My parents gave me a foundation built on love, resilience, and grit.
I grew up lucky.
Not perfect — but lucky.
I had parents who loved me fiercely, who sacrificed in ways I didn’t even notice until I was grown.
I was raised on hard work, bad jokes, scratch-made dinners, and the promise that life, even when tough, could be tackled with grit and a little stubborn joy.
Mom taught me to read by four, handwritten flashcards on index cards and filling every car ride with trivia games.
Dad taught me how to listen — how to shift a pickup truck by ear, how to tie a fishing knot and bait a hook, how to really see people.
Mom wasn’t just strong. She was fierce.
She marched for what she believed in, built things with her own two hands, and taught me never to back down from a bully — to stand up with words if possible, with fists if necessary.
Dad wasn’t just loving. He was loyal.
He knew every customer by name, remembered their children, their surgeries, their hopes. He sang Bruce Springsteen off-key across the prairie with me, a Dr. Pepper in the cupholder and the sun burning gold over amber waves of grain outside the window.
I grew up watching my mom work two jobs and still make time to sew Halloween costumes from scraps so I could feel like I had the best costume in the school parade.
I grew up watching my dad write down every detail about his customers — their kids, their heartaches, their birthdays — not because it was good business, but because it was good humanity.
We didn’t have much.
We had enough.
And that was everything.
I didn’t know then that someday I would be the one tucking them in, lifting them when they fall, fighting for their dignity the way they once fought for my future.
I didn’t know that the lessons they taught me — patience, perseverance, the fierce tenderness of care — would come back around in ways none of us could have predicted.
_________________________________________________________
I’m writing this now, not just because of what has happened, but because of who we were before.
Before the falls, before the oxygen tanks, before the tears and the long nights and the guilt that drips into your coffee like a second cup of cream.
I’m writing this because it’s important to remember the before.
Because without it, you don’t understand the weight of the after.
You don’t understand why I keep fighting for dignity, for small freedoms, for moments of joy tucked into long afternoons.
This is the story of what happens when the people who taught you to stand strong — begin to need you to steady them.
It’s messy.
It’s beautiful.
It’s real.
And it started here — in the golden light of a childhood filled with books, worn-out boots, coffee-scented kitchens, and the fierce, stubborn love of two people who never stopped trying.
We’ll come back to these golden days. Later, when we are ready to process how they have shaped where we have come.
But now – this is the part of the story where everything changes.
