Blog – “I Was a Better Parent When I Didn’t Have Kids” – July 2026

“I Was a Better Parent When I Didn’t Have Kids”
On growing up twice — once as the child, once as the parent.¹

Michele S. Piccolo, PhD – July 2026

That punchline usually gets a laugh, the way old jokes do—familiar enough to feel true before we have even worked out why. And there is real truth tucked inside it. While watching someone else’s children, perhaps at a restaurant, most of us carried a complete theory of parenting, never once field-tested. We knew, with total conviction, that we would never raise our voice, never hand over a phone to buy five minutes of peace, never let a tantrum in a supermarket aisle win. We had, in other words, a parent inside our heads who had never once been tested by an actual child. That parent was magnificent. That parent was also entirely imaginary.

This is where the joke opens onto something worth sitting with. Long before we become parents, if we ever do, we spend years as the other party in the story: the child. And when later we walk into a therapist’s office, that is the file we bring with us. We arrive holding one half of a two-sided history, told entirely from the smaller chair.

I think here of a patient who spent months circling a particular memory: a birthday with a cake that stayed untouched on the table due to family conflict, parents who had promised a celebration and then, in the chaos of a difficult marital moment, “didn’t stay with me.” What lingered for decades was not the cake. It was the sentence the patient had quietly written underneath the event: “I am the kind of child that gets forgotten.” Another patient recalled the opposite trouble—an early memory glowing almost too warmly, a father’s affection remembered as constant and total, until, piece by piece, the surrounding facts made that warmth harder to locate. We are, at times, remarkably good at manufacturing the very love we needed and did not fully receive, filling the gap with something bright enough to live by. Not lying, exactly. More like a kindness we do for ourselves, so that the past becomes survivable.

A wise clinician once observed that there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a baby—only a baby together with someone holding it. The infant does not exist as a separate story; there is a unit, a “good enough” pair, before there is an “I” and a “you.” And yet by the time we can narrate anything at all, the pair has already split in our memory into a single observer: us. The one doing the holding drops out of frame, or is present only as a shadow, felt but not fully seen. We remember being held. We do not remember what it costs someone to hold.

Even when therapy invites us to imagine the parents’ side—to consider that a mother was exhausted, or a father frightened, or a household simply short on resources of every kind—we still do this imagining from where we sit. We remain, structurally, the beneficiary trying to be generous about the giver, rather than the giver ourselves. And there is, often, an early insistence on this generosity, almost a preemptive one. Patients arrive wanting to make clear, before anything else is said, that they will not be fitting the cliché of bad-mouthing their mother to a stranger. “Doesn’t Freud claim to make everything about my mom,” one patient asked, half-joking and half-not, “without even hearing how my mom is the exception?” The defense of the parent, in other words, often arrives before the complaint does, as if empathy had to be declared up front, on the record, before the harder material could be risked at all. It is an attempt at empathy, and a real one. Still, it is not yet being actually in that parent’s shoes.

Then comes the long corridor. Childhood closes and adolescence opens its noisier rooms. Then college, or whatever version of it a life affords, invites a kind of “doing my thing” that has very little room in it for anyone else’s interior life—certainly not a parent’s. These are, properly, years organized around the self: who am I apart from where I came from, what do I want that no one handed me, who would I be if I wrote the story instead of inheriting it. It is not selfishness. It is the work assigned to that stage of life, and it tends to keep the parents’ own story—their fears, their marriage, their disappointments, their own unfinished childhoods—politely out of view—until we enter therapy perhaps a decade after college.

There is something almost architectural about what we carry forward from this period. The parents we hold inside us are not simply memories, filed away and occasionally retrieved. They are more like load-bearing walls: internal presences we go on relating to, arguing with, measuring ourselves against, long after the actual people have changed or are gone. Much of what we call our own personality turns out, on closer inspection, to be a negotiation with these internal figures, an ongoing relationship rather than a finished inheritance. This is part of why therapy so often becomes a kind of mourning, not because someone has died, but because we are asked to let the idealized or demonized version of a parent settle into something more modest, more human, and more accurate: a work that can happen by walking down the memory lane in the consulting room, and cannot be rushed.

But not all therapy reaches those walls at the same depth, and the difference is worth pausing on. I think here of a middle-aged colleague, seasoned by decades on the other chair: the one who asks the questions, who has spent half a working life listening for the anecdote that will finally crack a life open. Then that same clinician enters psychoanalysis themselves and lies down on an analytic couch. At first, the material behaves the way it always has for their own clients: tidy anecdotes, buttoned up, chronological, rational—the kind of story we tell sitting upright, facing another person, aware of being heard and, in some sense, judged. A week goes by. The clinician expects the familiar rhythm: “I’ll see you next week.” But psychoanalysis does not run on that rhythm. A second session arrives the same week. Then a third. A fourth. No pause long enough to let the week’s story settle into its usual, presentable shape.

Somewhere around the third or fourth session in a single week, something gives way. “What do I tell you next,” they wonder, “after I thought I’d already emptied the bucket?” But the bucket, it turns out, was never the container. Beneath the week’s worth of rational material—the part a person can retell once, cleanly, sitting up—there is a second layer that only surfaces under repetition and frequency, the way insomnia at 3AM surfaces thoughts that never once appeared at 3PM. Adda passa ‘a nuttata, as the old Neapolitan phrase goes: the night has to pass through you; there is no shortcut around it. Some nights it is dread that keeps a person awake. Other nights, it is hope, piling up wishfully in the dark. Other nights, it’s an old argument replaying with better lines than the words we used at the time. Sometimes it is a rehearsed conversation with someone long gone, or long estranged, or never quite confronted at all. Sometimes, less comfortably, it is desire. Sometimes it is a private shame that daylight has never once been offered. Either way, what comes at that hour is not the same material that comes at 9AM across a desk. It is blur rather than fact, static rather than story, not because the person is being any less honest, but because a different frequency reaches a different depth.

Here it is worth pausing on what psychoanalysis actually asks of the person doing the listening, since the discipline is easy to mistake for something it is not. Psychoanalysis is not reading Freud, and it is not signing on to a Freudian, post-Freudian, or anti-Freudian catalogue of notions. It is, more plainly, a way of staying present with a certain kind of fog—the fog that rises when a story is unclear not only to the listener but to the person telling it. It is what happens when a dream is recounted and seems, on the surface, to carry no meaning at all. When a nightmare arrives at a volume clearly too loud for the actual event it is dressed in. When a patient laughs while describing something that should, by any ordinary account, produce tears. When a sentence breaks off just before the one word that would have given the secret away. In all of this, the analyst offers an interpretation not because one school of thought supplies better answers than another, but because that analyst has themselves made the same crossing: has themselves sat, or laid down, through the passage from the tidy weekly story into the four-times-a-week fog, and out somewhere on the other side. The authority does not come from a theory held. It comes from a night survived, more than once.

***

It’s understandable, but a bit poignant, when a new candidate arrives to train as an analyst without ever having passed through that second half themselves. Call it a kind of not-yet-ness. Nobody’s fault, but it shapes what they can and cannot hear in the room, at least until they’ve lived through something like a demanding parenthood (not necessarily biological), or some other ordeal that keeps repeating until it breaks the rehearsed story apart. But it is okay, if the candidate is lacking that experience at the beginning of training, as long as they will not lack it by the time they come to train the next generation of candidates. A theory read is not the same as a night lived through. A person can hold every concept in the literature and still, without that passage, be offering interpretations from the wrong side of the couch—technically correct, and somehow still standing outside the very fog being described.

This, I think, is the same shape as the joke this piece began with. A once-weekly counseling relationship is to a four-times-weekly analysis what the first half of life is to the second. In the first half—rational, upright, buttoned-up—we build a coherent account of our childhood, told once a week or once a lifetime, sturdy enough to live by. Then, for those who become parents, a second frequency opens, uninvited, usually at 2AM: a bottle in one hand, an infant’s weight in the other, and without warning, your own childhood begins mixing itself into the formula. Not remembered exactly; more like re-entered. The upright account from all those years of once-a-week storytelling turns out to have left something out, something that only a repeated, unglamorous, middle-of-the-night proximity to a small dependent creature could finally surface.

Said again, because it bears repeating in the way the 2AM feeding itself repeats, night after night, until it teaches something the daytime account never could: the weekly story and the nightly story are not the same story. One is available sitting up, on schedule, with a beginning and an end. The other only appears under frequency: four sessions instead of one, four half-asleep feedings instead of a bedtime story, the sleepless repetition that finally lets the fog surface through the cracks of the tidier account. We do not get the second story by trying harder at the first one. We get it only by showing up again, and again, and again, at the hour when the buttoned shirt has already come off.

What parenthood adds, then, when it arrives, is not more information about one’s own childhood. It is a second vantage point on the same ground. The view does not replace the child’s-eye view; it stands beside it, often in open disagreement with it. A patient described trying to explain to her own mother, decades later, why a particular rule had felt so wounding as a child. Her mother, visibly moved, answered, “I did that because I was terrified I’d lose you the way I lost my sister.” The patient told me afterward, half-laughing, half-undone: “All those years, I had the wrong villain.” Not the wrong facts—the facts stayed exactly as they were—but the wrong shape around them.

It would be tidy to end here with the sentiment that becoming a parent finally lets us see the “whole” story. It does not. It only adds a second incomplete vantage to the first incomplete vantage, and asks us to hold both without letting either one cancel the other out. The child’s version does not become false. The parent’s version does not become the truth. What changes, if anything changes, is our willingness to let the story stay two-sided and slightly unresolved, rather than settling for the single, cleaner narrative we could manage as a child, when one chair was the only one we were allowed to sit in. So the joke keeps its sting, and also earns a second line. I was a better parent when I didn’t have kids—because I had never yet been handed the half of the story that makes the theory collapse. What replaces the theory is not failure. It is simply contact with the part of the story that was always there, waiting on the other side of the table, for whenever we happened to sit down in it.

1. This is the fourth in a series of blog posts that will deliberately set aside scholarly references in favor of a more familiar and easygoing language. And yet, between the lines, one may still glimpse psychoanalytic ideas, sensing their presence without needing to name them outright. ↩︎