The most painful thing about having parents who love you but don’t quite know you is that they will spend the rest of their lives describing a son they invented to people who will never meet the one you actually became.

The cousin called on a Tuesday. She had been at a dinner party my mother also attended, and she wanted me to know how proud my mother had sounded when my name came up. The phrase she used was “absolutely glowing.” I sat down on the floor of my apartment somewhere around the second sentence and stayed there for a while.

In my mother’s telling, I was a confident young man who had built a successful business through sheer drive, who lived a glamorous life abroad, and who was probably about to meet someone wonderful and settle down. The dinner party guests, the cousin reported, had been impressed. My mother had been beaming. The portrait was warm and admiring and clearly painted with love.

Almost none of it was true.

I had not built the business through sheer drive. I had stumbled into it, panicked through most of it, and sold it during the pandemic in a state somewhere between burnout and quiet desperation. The life abroad was less glamorous than reported and considerably lonelier. And I was not, by any reasonable measure, about to meet someone wonderful and settle down. I was, at the time of that dinner party, mostly trying to figure out how to sleep through a full night.

The cousin meant well in passing it along. She thought I’d be flattered. I was, instead, sitting on the floor for a long time, holding a story about myself that someone who has known me my entire life had told to a room of strangers, and trying to work out why it landed in my chest the way it did.

It took me a few years to find the words. I think I have them now. The thing that hurt wasn’t that the story was wrong. The thing that hurt was that the story was being told by my own mother, with full conviction, to people who would never meet me, and that for the rest of her life, the version of me being introduced into rooms I’d never enter would not be me. It would be a son she’d invented and never quite stopped believing in.

The kindness of the invention

I want to be careful here, because I’m aware of how this could read.

The invention isn’t malicious. It almost never is. Parents who love a child they don’t quite know are not engaged in some sinister act of erasure. They’re doing something much sadder and more human, which is constructing, over decades, the version of their child they can hold. The version that fits inside the story they tell themselves about their family. The version that justifies, retroactively, the choices they made as parents.

My mother’s son in that dinner party story was a son she could be proud of without complication. A son whose choices made sense to her. A son whose life followed an arc she recognized. He was, frankly, easier to be the mother of than the actual son standing across from her at Christmas, with his complicated career and his expat life and his quiet refusal to follow any of the templates she had ready.

So she’d built him. Slowly, over years, brick by brick, out of selected facts and rounded edges and the sincere belief that this was who I really was, underneath whatever I happened to be doing on a given Tuesday.

I want to resist the easy move here, which is to call this a kind of love and leave it at that. It isn’t, quite. Loving a child you don’t fully understand is one of the harder things a person can be asked to do, and most parents handle it by gently editing the child into someone more legible. That editing is a coping mechanism dressed up as affection. The affection is real. The person it’s directed at isn’t.

The strange grief of being two people

For most of my twenties, I didn’t know there were two of me.

I knew, vaguely, that my parents and I had different ideas about who I was. I knew certain conversations went better than others. I knew there were topics that landed and topics that didn’t. But I assumed this was just the normal friction of being a grown child. My parents had an outdated version of me in their heads, the way all parents do, and with enough patience and updating I’d eventually get them to see the current version.

That’s not what was happening. They weren’t holding an outdated version. They were holding an alternative version. The updating I was trying to do was, from their end, a kind of static they were politely tuning out, because the son they loved was already complete in their minds, and the man on the phone was just occasionally interfering with the signal.

The grief of this, when it finally landed, was a specific and quiet kind. It wasn’t the grief of being unloved. They love me, very much. It was the grief of being loved in absentia. Of realizing that the warmth they directed at me was real, but that a fair amount of it was passing through me and landing on someone else. Someone who shared my name and my face but was, in the parts that matter, a different person entirely.

I have heard versions of this from a lot of friends my age. The artist whose parents introduce him as a businessman because his small gallery confuses them. The lesbian whose mother tells her aunts she’s just “very career-focused” thirty years in. The recovering addict whose father describes him to old friends as if the addiction never happened, because the version of his son who never struggled is easier to introduce. None of these parents are villains. All of them are loving people doing the best they can with the equipment they have. And all of them have, in some quiet way, broken their children’s hearts by loving someone slightly to the left of who they actually are.

What can’t be fixed

I want to say something hard, because I think a lot of self-help on this topic gets it wrong.

You probably can’t fix this. Not entirely. Not by trying harder.

For years I assumed the answer was a kind of relentless honesty. If I just kept showing up as my actual self, kept correcting the record, kept gently insisting on the real version of my life, eventually my parents would update. The portrait in their heads would gradually adjust until it matched the man in the room.

It didn’t work. It barely moved the needle. My parents, like most parents in their seventies, are not in the business of doing a major reconstruction of their child’s identity at this point in their lives. The portrait was hung a long time ago. They’ve lived with it. Their friends know it. Their stories about me are organized around it. The cost, for them, of taking it down and replacing it with something more accurate is enormous, and the upside, from their perspective, is unclear. They love the painting. The painting is their son.

You will spend a lot of energy if you decide to fight this. The energy mostly comes out of you, not them. They will absorb your corrections politely and then, the next time someone asks how you’re doing, tell the same story they always tell, the one that makes sense to them, the one that fits the frame.

This is, I think, one of the harder facts of being an adult child. The parents who can’t quite see you now are probably not going to start. The dinner party stories will keep being told. The version of you being introduced to rooms you’ll never enter will not be you. That’s the deal.

What you can actually change

What you can change is the cost of all this on you.

The pain of being misdescribed by the people who raised you is real, but it gets a lot worse when you’re still hoping, secretly, that the description will eventually be corrected. The hope is what does most of the damage. Each time my mother told the inaccurate story, what hurt me wasn’t the story itself. It was the small, hopeful part of me that kept expecting, this time, the story would shift. It never did. Hoping it would was just lengthening the bruise.

Once I let the hope go, the pain got smaller. Not gone. Smaller. The story she tells about me at dinner parties is no longer a verdict I’m waiting on. It’s a thing my mother does, the way some mothers garden and others knit. It says quite a lot about her and surprisingly little about me.

The other thing that helps is finding people who do see you. Not as a replacement for your parents. That’s not a substitution that really works. But as a corrective to the slow distortion that happens when the people who’ve known you longest are also the people who know you least accurately. A few friends who can describe you to a stranger and have it actually sound like you. A partner, if you’re lucky, who has met the real version and prefers it to the painted one. These relationships are not bonuses. For people in our situation, they’re load-bearing.

What I’ve made peace with

My mother is going to keep telling stories about a son she invented. She will tell them at dinner parties I’m not at, to people I’ll never meet, until the day she stops telling stories at all.

I have stopped trying to correct her. I haven’t, exactly, made peace with it. The man she’s describing is not me, and the fact that he is real to her, vivid to her, beloved by her, does not quite redeem the arrangement. It just describes it. There is a son who lives in my mother’s mouth, and there is the one typing this, and they are not going to meet.

What I notice, on the harder days, is that I still want to be known by her. Not corrected into legibility. Known. That want hasn’t gone away just because I’ve accepted it won’t be answered. It sits there, quiet, most of the time. Some evenings it doesn’t.

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