I’m 38 and I love my parents and I also resent them, and I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to decide which feeling is the real one — and last month I finally accepted that they’re both real, they’ve always both been real, and the exhausting part of being their son is only performing the half they can handle.

I had a thought, last month, while I was washing a single coffee cup at my kitchen sink in Bangkok.

It wasn’t profound. It wasn’t preceded by a therapy breakthrough or a long meditation. It just arrived, the way the real thoughts do, between the rinse and the drying rack.

The thought was: I’ve been performing for my parents for thirty-eight years.

And then, almost as an afterthought: I’ve been performing the version of love that doesn’t include the resentment, because the resentment is the part they can’t hold.

I put the cup down. I sat on the floor of my kitchen for about twenty minutes. The dogs came over and looked concerned. I was fine. I was just, for the first time in a long time, telling myself the truth about something I’d known for a very long time.

The lie I’d been telling myself was the small one

I want to say something carefully, because the topic is mined.

I love my parents. This is not a qualified love. It’s not a damning-with-faint-praise love. They are good people who tried, often in difficult circumstances, to raise a child they didn’t always understand. I would be at their bedside in a heartbeat. I am, in many of the ways that matter, deeply lucky to have had them.

I also resent them. There are specific things—decisions, silences, repetitions of patterns I asked them to break—that have cost me real years of my adult life to work through. The resentment is also not qualified. It’s not a passing mood. It’s been in the room with me, in some form, since I was about fourteen.

For most of my adult life, I treated these two facts as if they were in a fight, and one of them had to win.

I’d have stretches—usually after a good visit—where I’d decide the love was the real feeling and the resentment had been a kind of adolescent residue I needed to outgrow. Then I’d have other stretches—usually after a bad phone call—where I’d flip the verdict. The resentment was the truth. The love was a kind of cultural obligation, a thing I’d been raised to perform without knowing it was a performance.

I bounced between these two verdicts for two decades. Each time I switched, I was sure I’d finally arrived at the honest version.

What I didn’t see, until last month, is that the bouncing itself was the lie. The bouncing was me trying to flatten two real things into one acceptable thing, because I’d absorbed somewhere along the way the idea that you couldn’t hold both at once. That holding both was a kind of moral cowardice. That a real adult would, eventually, decide.

You don’t decide. You stop trying to.

The exhausting part isn’t the feelings

I’ve talked to enough friends my age now to know I’m not unusual in this. Most people in their late thirties, if you get them honest enough on a second drink, will tell you some version of the same thing. They love their parents and they resent their parents and they’ve been running themselves ragged trying to figure out which feeling gets to be the official one.

And here’s the thing I want to say to anyone in that loop, because it took me until thirty-eight to figure it out:

The exhausting part is not the contradiction. The contradiction is fine. Human beings hold contradictory feelings about important people all the time. You can love a sibling and find them difficult. You can adore a partner and want to be alone for a weekend. The mind is a big enough room for both.

The exhausting part is performing only the half your parents can handle.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. That’s the ten thousand hours of low-grade depletion that follows you home from family dinners. It isn’t the resentment. It’s the daily, hourly, unconscious work of editing yourself in real time so that your parents only ever encounter the half of you they have the equipment to receive.

What the editing actually looks like

Let me describe this, because I think most people who do it don’t quite see what they’re doing.

You answer the phone. You modulate your voice into a slightly more cheerful register than you’d use for anyone else. You don’t mention the thing that’s actually on your mind, because you know how it’ll be received. You skip the parts of your week that don’t fit the story your parents have about who you are. You mention the success at work and not the conflict with the colleague. You ask after their health with full attention. You answer questions about your own life with about thirty percent of the truth, lightly seasoned for palatability.

You hang up. You feel exhausted in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone, because—from the outside—you just had a perfectly nice fifteen-minute call with your mum.

What happened in that fifteen minutes was that you were two people. The actual you, who was having actual feelings. And the curated you, who was being beamed down the line for someone who, you decided long ago, couldn’t handle the full bandwidth.

The curating is the cost. Not the call. The call is fine. The cost is what it takes to be only half of yourself, on demand, on a recurring schedule, for thirty-eight years.

Why we do it

I want to be fair to the impulse, because I don’t think it’s a flaw, exactly.

Most of us learned to edit ourselves around our parents very young, for reasons that were entirely sensible at the time. Some parts of us got reactions we didn’t enjoy. Some parts got silence. Some parts got actively punished. By the time we were ten, we had a fairly precise map of which of our internal states were welcome at the dinner table and which weren’t, and we’d already started the lifelong project of running the welcome ones through the front door and sneaking the unwelcome ones in around the back.

This is not pathology. This is just how children adapt to the specific adults in front of them.

The problem isn’t that we did it as kids. The problem is that we never updated the map. The same edit that protected us at eight is still running at thirty-eight, except now we’re not protecting ourselves from anything real. We’re just protecting our parents from the version of us that grew up while they weren’t, in some ways, looking.

And the resentment, in my case, has a lot to do with that. Not with anything specific my parents did. With the simple, dull, accumulated fatigue of having spent decades curating myself for an audience that, I increasingly suspect, would have survived the unedited version just fine.

What I’ve actually changed

I want to be honest about what’s possible here, because I’m wary of self-help that promises a clean ending.

I have not, in the last month, told my parents I resent them. I’m not sure I ever will. I’m not convinced it would be useful. They’re in their seventies. The behaviors I resent are, at this point, pretty much fixed. Confronting them with the receipts of forty years of fatigue feels less like honesty and more like vandalism.

What I have done is stop doing the editing for myself.

I no longer pretend, in my own head, that I love them simply. I love them complicatedly. The complication is allowed to exist. I no longer try to settle the verdict. The verdict isn’t there to be settled. It’s a permanent two-column ledger, and that’s just what the ledger is.

On the calls, I’ve started letting more of the real me through. Not the resentment—that wouldn’t land—but more of the texture. The week that was actually hard. The thing I’m actually thinking about. I’ve found, to my surprise, that they handle more than I’d been giving them credit for. Not all of it. But more.

The performances are shorter now. The exhaustion afterward is less. The love hasn’t gone anywhere. The resentment is still there too, sitting beside it, no longer asking to be chosen.

If this is you

You don’t have to pick. You never had to pick. The decades you’ve spent trying to decide which feeling about your parents is the real one—they were real years, and you’ll get some of them back, but you don’t get them all back, and the only thing you can do is stop spending the remaining ones the same way.

The love is real. The resentment is real. They have always both been real. They will, in all likelihood, both be there at the funeral, sitting next to each other in the pew, neither one cancelling the other out.

What you can stop doing is performing only the half they can handle.

You can let yourself, in the privacy of your own head, hold the whole thing. You can stop running the edit. You can stop apologizing—internally, silently, for years—for the parts of your feelings that don’t fit the script.

That’s the only honest way I’ve found to be a son to people I love and resent in roughly equal measure.

It’s a quieter way to live. The coffee cup gets washed. The kitchen floor is, it turns out, a perfectly fine place to figure things out.