By the time I’d done about twenty of these conversations, I’d stopped being surprised by the anger.
The anger was expected. What I hadn’t anticipated was what sat beneath it, something quieter and more persistent and harder to name on first articulation. Most people I spoke with had language ready for the anger and the grief. Fewer had language for the thing that seemed to be running underneath both of them the whole time.
The word that came up most often, in different forms, was tired.
But it wasn’t the tired of conflict or the tired of active grief. It was the particular tiredness of sustained hope, the kind that accumulates from spending years in a low-level state of waiting for someone to become a version of themselves that you needed them to be.
A quiet hope. The kind that gets quietly renewed at birthdays, at the start of phone calls, at holiday tables, at any moment that briefly holds the possibility that this time might be different from the last time.
What I kept hearing is that this hope doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t feel like hope in the way we usually think about that word. It feels more like a slight physical bracing before contact, the anticipation of whether the other person will show up in the version of themselves that you’ve needed, or in the one you’ve mostly known. And the renewal happens automatically, without decision. You don’t choose to hope again after a disappointment. The hoping persists on its own schedule, independent of whether you’ve invited it back.
The tiredness of this is different from other kinds. Grief has a recognizable shape: a weight that tends to move and shift. Anger at least has direction. The tiredness of long-sustained hope has neither. It accumulates the way low-grade physical pain accumulates, not dramatically, but persistently, and in a way that eventually changes your baseline without your quite noticing.
By the time many of the people I interviewed were sitting across from me, they had been carrying this specific kind of tired for decades. Some of them hadn’t recognized what it was until they were in the middle of describing it.
One thing I noticed consistently: people described their parents in past tense even when the parents were alive. “She was someone who couldn’t…” “He was the kind of person who…” It happened without apparent decision, and when I pointed it out people often paused.
I think it reflects something true about what this tiredness eventually produces. The parent who exists continues. The parent you needed, the one you kept waiting to meet, gets quietly past-tensed. That’s a different kind of loss from the ones that have established names for themselves, and it tends to go unwitnessed for a long time.
When people arrive at some version of recognition, that the person they were hoping for may not be coming, it rarely looks like a turning point. The people I spoke with mostly described it as gradual, something that settled over time rather than broke open.
And the feeling afterward tends to be a continuation of the same tiredness, just without the weight of the specific expectation. Which may be its own kind of relief, eventually. But almost nobody described a clear moment of letting go. The letting go, if it happened, happened slowly and without announcement, in the spaces between conversations and visits.
I’m not sure what to do with this as an observation, except to say it seems worth naming. The cultural narrative around difficult parents tends to center the dramatic moments: confrontations, estrangements, the decision to walk away or the decision to stay.
But most of the people I interviewed weren’t living in those dramatic moments. They were living in the ordinary ones. The weekday afternoon phone calls. The birthday cards with careful handwriting. The Christmas visits where everyone was trying.
They were quietly tired in ways that didn’t have an obvious outlet or a clear resolution. When I asked what they needed most, the most common answer, in various forms, was simply to have that tiredness recognized as what it actually was, rather than filed under something easier to name.
