Some feelings do not arrive neatly. They arrive as gratitude and resentment in the same breath. As pride and disappointment in the same memory. As love for someone you are still, quietly, trying to forgive.
Dear Mom, Dear Dad is a work of creative nonfiction organized around the emotions most of us never find the words for, the complicated, layered, often contradictory feelings that grow up alongside us inside the homes where we were raised.
Written in two parts, the book moves through the emotions of childhood, safety, joy, grief, anger, shame, and into the harder work of adulthood: acceptance, distance, forgiveness, and legacy. Each chapter is an honest reckoning with what it means to have been loved imperfectly, and to have loved imperfectly in return.
This is not a book that asks you to forgive your parents. It does not ask you to hold onto resentment either. It only asks you to sit, for a little while, inside the feelings you have been carrying, and to finally give them a name.
Dear Mom, Dear Dad was written for the adult child still trying to reconcile the parent who hurt them with the parent who loved them. And it was written for the parent holding this book wondering if their child feels the same way. For the ones who loved deeply but did not always know how to show it. For the ones who were loved deeply but did not always know how to say it.
For both sides of the same silence.
If you have ever loved a parent imperfectly, or been loved by one imperfectly, this book was written with you in mind.
Genre: Creative Nonfiction / Memoir / Family & Relationships
