Grieving Both Parents in Adulthood

Anger, Compassion & the Forgiveness I Never Received

For most of my life, I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be angry.

Anger felt dangerous.
Disloyal.
Ungrateful.
A betrayal of the people who raised me.

But healing has shown me something I never expected:

True forgiveness doesn’t come from bypassing anger —
it comes from finally letting yourself feel it.

Not to punish anyone.
Not to rewrite history.
But to reclaim yourself.

1. The Anger Toward My Dad

I used to think:

“Why didn’t you protect me better?”
“Why didn’t you stand up to her?”
“Why did you let the house feel so unsafe?”
“Why did you leave so early?”

And these questions still rise up sometimes.

But now I understand something deeper:

My dad couldn’t protect me because he couldn’t protect himself.
He was cornered, emotionally broken, outmatched, unsupported, and slowly dismantled.

His anger wasn’t his nature.
It was his only remaining outlet.

I can be angry at his behaviour
and compassionate toward the man underneath it.

Both can coexist.

That’s true emotional adulthood.

2. The Anger Toward My Mum

This one is sharper.
Cleaner.
More coherent.

I’m angry that:

she triangulated me and my father
she used guilt as a leash
she reframed her own control as generosity
she positioned herself as the eternal victim
she created dependency and called it love
she never apologised for anything
she punished independence
she shaped the emotional climate of the house
she eroded my father
she shaped my attachment wounds
she taught me to feel responsible for her emotions

This is not bitterness.
This is clarity.

3. Compassion Doesn’t Erase Responsibility

Seeing my mother clearly doesn’t mean I want revenge.
It doesn’t mean she’s “evil.”
It doesn’t mean I’m rewriting her into a villain.

It means this:

She never developed the emotional maturity needed to raise children safely.

She wasn’t equipped.

She didn’t grow.

She didn’t reflect.

She didn’t evolve.

And that is sad —
but sadness doesn’t erase the impact.

Compassion helps me understand her,
but it doesn’t require me to let her close enough to repeat the harm.

4. The Forgiveness I Never Received

Neither of my parents ever apologised for:

their projections
their mistakes
their emotional immaturity
the roles they forced me into
the guilt they passed down
the chaos they created

They couldn’t.
They didn’t know how.

My forgiveness has to come from clarity, not from being convinced their behaviour was acceptable.

Forgiveness, in my case, means:

not carrying their wounds anymore
not reenacting their patterns
not living in the stories they created
breaking the cycle
letting myself live differently
protecting my son from what I lived through

Forgiveness is not reconciliation.

It’s release.

5. The Child in Me Needed This

The child version of me needed:

safety
someone to say “this wasn’t your fault”
someone to hold my anger
someone to validate what I lived through
someone to tell me my perceptions were real
someone to honour my grief
someone to witness my story

Writing these posts —
putting them out in the world —
isn’t oversharing.

It’s reclaiming a narrative I was never allowed to speak.

It’s making permanent something that was always hidden.

It’s giving my inner child a place in the world where his truth is finally seen,
softly, quietly, and without apology.

How I Carry All This Now

I carry:

softness for my dad
boundaries with my mum
clarity about my childhood
compassion for myself
grief for everything lost
acceptance of what cannot be changed
anger that moves, not anger that festers
the desire to live differently
the commitment to parent my son with the emotional safety I never had

This is what it means to grieve both parents:

Not to erase what happened,
not to justify it,
not to stay stuck in it —

but to finally see it clearly enough
to step out of the story
and into my own life.