Respect for Parents Day: A Thank You, A Little Late

There’s a particular kind of gratitude that only really arrives once you’re old enough to understand what you were actually given. Not the bicycle, not the school shoes, not even the roof — those are easy to notice and easy to thank someone for. I mean the quieter things. The ones you don’t spot until years later, usually at the exact moment you catch yourself doing or saying something and think: that was them.

Today is Respect for Parents Day, and I find myself thinking about mine — both gone now, but never really absent, if I’m honest.

My mum and dad didn’t sit me down and lecture me about morals. Nobody does that, not really, or if they do, nobody listens. What they did instead was simpler and far more effective: they just were the thing they wanted me to become. Kindness wasn’t a rule in our house. It was just how the house worked. You said thank you. You noticed when someone else was having a hard day. You didn’t walk past someone who needed a hand, even if helping meant being a few minutes late for something more important-seeming at the time.

I used to hear my dad call my mum “Frip” when I was younger, despite her name being Mary Elizabeth — Betty, to her friends. As I got older, I asked them both what it meant and where it had come from, and neither of them could quite remember. Just a name that had stuck, somewhere along the way, through however many decades of marriage. My dad called her Frip when he told me to take care of her, the day he died.

Photo: Mum and Dad on their wedding day, Sept 11th 1948

There was humour too, plenty of it — the kind that got wheeled out at exactly the wrong moment, which somehow always turned out to be exactly the right moment. They always told me it was love at first sight, and I believed them completely when I was young. It was only much later that my grandad let slip the truth — that my dad first “met” my mum when she was a few days old and he was all of ten months himself. I think that was their little gag on me, kept running for years without either of them cracking. I think that’s a gift in itself, actually — being raised by people who didn’t take themselves, or life, too seriously, while still taking you seriously enough to shape you properly.

It’s a strange thing, growing into an adult and slowly realising your parents weren’t just looking after you — they were quietly building you. Piece by piece, without a manual, without much thanks at the time, and usually without you noticing it was happening at all. You don’t get to properly say thank you for that kind of thing in the moment. You’re too busy being twelve, or seventeen, or thirty-four and convinced you’ve got it all figured out yourself.

So this is a bit of a late one. But some thank-yous are worth sending anyway, even years after the person who earned them has stopped being around to receive it.

Mum, Dad — thank you for the good set of morals, the kindness you handed down without ever making it feel like a lesson, and for setting me off into life pointed in a decent direction. I hope I’ve done alright with what you gave me.

I still catch myself doing things exactly the way you did. I’ve stopped being surprised by it. I rather like it now.

Happy Respect for Parents Day — to anyone lucky enough to still say it to their parents directly, and to anyone, like me, saying it a little more quietly instead.

I’d love it if you could share memories of my parents, if you knew them, in the comments below or share your own memories of your parents on this special day?