a member

I don’t think my parents ever wanted to be parents. A little background first. From around 2015 to 2018, my family went through one of the hardest periods of our lives. My dad lost his father, and at the same time, my parents’ marriage was falling apart. They fought constantly and were close to getting divorced. Because of that, my sister and I spent most of our childhood living with our grandparents instead of our parents. Sometimes we’d only stay at home for a few days before going back to our grandparents’ house. The longest we lived with our grandparents continuously was about six months. Looking back, my parents were barely around. We hardly spent time together, and when we did, it usually lasted less than a week before everything went back to how it was. Fast forward to recently. We were out eating together when we somehow started talking about the past like those years between 2015 and 2018. Out of nowhere, my mom said, “I miss those times.” I remember looking at my sister because we both seemed to think the same thing. How could you miss that? Those years were full of arguments and instability. To us, they were some of the saddest years of our childhood. The only explanation my mind could come up with was that maybe… those were the years when they didn’t really have the responsibility of raising us. Maybe life felt easier because we were mostly with our grandparents. Neither my sister nor I asked what she meant. Things are better now, and neither of us wanted to reopen old wounds. Today, we live with our parents full-time. They don’t really fight anymore, which I’m grateful for. But somehow, it still feels like we don’t have them. They’re always working or travelling together, and we rarely spend meaningful time as a family. They’ve missed so many of my important moments growing up, and even when they were there, they often seemed distracted like on their phones or talking about work. It feels like they’re emotionally absent Word limit noooooo