Seeing the Human in Our Parents

The very thing that can set us free.

Photo by Pavlo Semeniuk on Unsplash

Today would have been my dad’s 64th birthday. I can’t even imagine the person he would have been if he was still around in human form. He died at 43, taking himself off alone to the country of his birth, Pakistan, and away from all of us. It’s like he knew what was about to happen. He left in a wheelchair, and returned in a sealed, light brown wooden box.

I’m not sure how a human being deals with that. But somehow, we did.

In the hours before he passed, I remember my grandmother clutching the telephone through white-knuckled fingers, tears streaming down her face, while she tried her best to reassure him that all would be okay. I remember his last words being, “I need oxygen. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” I was 14 when he died and all air left my body. It took me a long time to breathe again.

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I had a bizarre upbringing. The older I get, the more aware I have become of that. For a large period of my earlier years, I didn’t live with my parents or siblings. I instead chose to live with my grandmother and two aunties and subconsciously began to believe that my mother didn’t love me. My dad was close to his mother, my beloved Mamma as we endearingly called her, and would visit every day. But I hardly saw my mother. I didn’t really know my mum. And she didn’t know me.

I struggled with the death of my dad for a very long time. Severe panic attacks tormented me for years to come. Every time I’d hear particular Punjabi songs I’d break down into pieces and spend weeks - months - picking them all back up again. Every birthday, every celebration, every results day was tainted with his absence. Much like I didn’t really know my mum, I didn’t know him either - but I just missed him so much. I missed my father. I did.

God woke me up when I was 22 - the catalyst to that awakening being another major death in my family, along with a multitude of other things that cracked my world right down the middle, so that the light could break through. 

At 24, I discovered my spiritual path and found myself walking with a Spiritual Master. And this is when everything changed.

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As I embarked on peeling back the layers of my own conditioning, I began to see the trauma and toxicity in my family for the very first time. I started to see the pain in my mother's eyes. I began to understand the extent of the hardship she had been put through by marrying into my father's family, and I became aware of the burdens of trauma and pain that every single member of my family was carrying in their own way. I could even see the afflictions my father was weighed down by before he passed; I understood that his obesity for a large portion of his life, his multitude of health problems and his anger and frustration at life and the world, were all just symptoms of the diseases he was homing in his soul.

And then, God threw a spanner in the works. It was time to level up. 

In 2019, some deep and dark family secrets were unveiled to me, centring around my father. I was disgusted. Hurt. Betrayed. I suddenly realised I didn’t ever really know my father. At all. I was just attached to this ideal of what a father should be and was angry that that had been snatched away from me, so early in life.

I was drowning in this sea of new information, the darkness of its dregs filling my lungs until I once again found myself unable to breathe. Clutching for air in between life, I called my Spiritual Master, who seemed to know what I was going to share before I even shared it.

He, in his complete presence and Truth, gently spoke the words,

You might be thinking what does that even mean? But in the moments he shared those words with me, I felt like God was speaking through him and directly healing a broken part of my soul. Even today, years after those words were shared and after the transition of my teacher and guide from this world to the next, I am gleaning more and more wisdom and truth from them. 

You see, by telling me that my father is not my father nor is my mother my mother, what my Spiritual teacher was helping me to understand was that each of my parents is just another human being in their own right. Through these words, he helped me to remove them both from the pedestals I had placed them on as my parents and see them through the eyes of a stranger, or perhaps even through the eyes of God Himself: naked, in all their humanness.

Through doing this, I slowly began to see my father as a man who had made grave mistakes, a man who was bound and traumatised by his own conditioning and life experiences, and a man who, despite whatever he had done, could be forgiven. I began to realise that just because he was the man who aided in helping my soul to come forth into this world, he, in fact, owed me nothing. He didn’t have to have been a certain way or have lived a certain way — and everything he had done in his life didn’t have to pass through to me, nor did it have to impact my life negatively even long after his death.

Fast forward to 2024, and my mother’s cancer diagnosis in March of this year (which I’m yet to write about). A diagnosis that brought up so many wounds within me that needed to be healed. The anger and resentment I felt towards her for not protecting me as a child. For not fighting harder for me. For not seeing me. Not hearing me. Not loving me the way I needed to be loved. 

But again, I was reminded of the words now imprinted on my heart,

“Your father is not your father. Your mother is not your mother.”

And in the time since her diagnosis and now, I am realising more and more that my mother is human. Only human. Just like me.

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Whether we revere them and place them on pedestals consistently out of reach; whether we loathe them, detest them and wish they were never even ours in the first place, or whether we feel indifferent by their presence or absence, perhaps this is the reason we have parents in the first place. To learn what it means to be human at the very deepest level, without expectation, without attachment. To love, unconditionally.

Parents fuck up. Parents aren’t always what (we think) we need them to be. Our parents had a life before we came through them. And just as we are figuring out our shit, they are too.

Learning to see the human in my parents - one who is dead, and one who is alive - is helping me to see the human in myself as a parent now, too. They deserve my love and forgiveness simply for being human, just as much as I deserve my own.

I no longer expect my mother to be a certain way. I no longer expect her to be the mother I always wanted her to be. I am no longer impacted by the absence of a father in my life, and I am no longer attached to the pain of a life without him.

I learn from their lives. And I choose to do better and break the cycles.

I see their humanity. I love them for their humanity. And I forgive them.

Seeing the human in our parents may be one of the hardest things we ever have to do…

And it is also the very thing that can set us free.

With Light, Love & Peace,

Sabah x

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