Viewpoint: The Stories That Look Different From the Other Side

There is something my mother said often when we were growing up.

When you become a parent yourself, you’ll understand.

At the time it sounded like a convenient way to end a conversation. One of those sentences adults reach for when they don’t want to explain themselves, or have decided you won’t get it even if they do. I was fairly sure I wouldn’t agree even when I did understand. That felt important to establish, even just to myself.

I have been a parent for fifteen years now.

And I do understand. Some of it, at least. I still argue with some of it. But I understand it.

The instinct to protect. The quiet calculation running constantly in the background. The push toward discipline, toward doing things properly, toward not taking chances that don’t need to be taken. I can see where it came from now, especially when I place it against the frame of 80s and 90s parenting, which was not subtle about its priorities. Academics first. Obedience. Structure. Deviation managed rather than encouraged. It makes sense from here.

That doesn’t mean it made sense from there. And understanding where something comes from is not the same as agreeing with where it goes. I know this because I find myself, fairly regularly, on the wrong side of that distinction.

When I became a mother I had a very clear idea of the kind of parent I would be. That idea did not survive actual children.

The chill one. The one my daughter’s friends would speak to easily. An extension of the group rather than the authority hovering at its edges. That was the plan. Detailed, considered, based on everything I had observed about what not to do.

Somewhere along the way I became the strict one.

Not dramatically. Just enough to be noticeable. Just enough that it has been said out loud more than once, in a tone that suggests I should know better. I confiscate phones and then negotiate their return in stages, as if I am a small claims court. I have said last warning at least three times in a row before anyone, including me, takes it seriously. And recently, in a moment I would like to not think about too closely, I heard myself say something my mother used to say, in her exact cadence, and kept talking as if it hadn’t happened.

It had happened.

It took me a while to understand that my definition of chill had a reference point, and that reference point was my own mother. Compared to her, I probably am chill. Compared to other parents in the group, apparently not. The story didn’t change. The position did.

For the most part, different versions of the same story can coexist. You learn that other people are working from different benchmarks, different histories, instincts that feel just as correct to them as yours do to you. Most of the time you adjust, disagree quietly, and move on.

But most of the time we don’t actually cross over. We just stand where we are and call it clarity.

I remember a moment from work. A senior leader told a much younger team member, I can sympathise with you, but I can’t empathise with you. I remember the immediate, clean certainty of what I thought about that. A polite distance dressed as depth. An unwillingness to actually step into someone else’s difficulty, especially convenient given that the leader had some hand in creating it. What I thought was considerably sharper than what I said, which was nothing, which is its own kind of position.

It felt obvious. It usually does.

There are stories we grow up with that carry the same quality of obviousness.

Surpanakha appears briefly in the Ramayana, desires something she is not supposed to, and is punished for it. The story moves on without pausing to consider what that moment felt like for her. I never thought to ask. Her role was clear, a catalyst, an excess, a problem that triggers consequences, and that reading arrived so complete that it didn’t leave room for questions.

And then someone tells it from where she was standing.

Meenakshi, Kavita Kane’s retelling, does this. The camera moves. And when it does, desire looks different when it is yours. Humiliation does too. The punishment doesn’t shrink. It just stops being a footnote. Nothing about the events changes. But the story does, entirely, and you realise the original version wasn’t neutral. It was just told from somewhere specific, by someone standing somewhere specific, and that position had been so consistent for so long that it had started to look like the view from nowhere.

This is the part I keep returning to.

I understand my parents better now. I can see decisions that felt unnecessary at the time and trace exactly where they came from. I catch the same instincts in myself before I have had the chance to question them, and sometimes after. I see where it comes from. I don’t always like where it goes. Both things are true at the same time and I have mostly stopped expecting them to resolve into something cleaner.

The leader in that meeting may still have been wrong. Or limited. Or simply speaking from a position that looked entirely reasonable from where they were standing, the same way my certainty about them looked entirely reasonable from where I was. I don’t know. What I do know is that I was very sure in that moment. And that the sureness belonged entirely to the position, not to me.

The story arrives finished, from wherever you are. It doesn’t feel partial. It doesn’t announce the parts it left out. It is only when you move that you realise how much of it depended on where you were standing. And even then, you’re not always sure you’ve moved as far as you think.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.