Over the course of a life, when children look at their parents, they pass through six stages.
At five, their parents represent everything that is good in the world.
At fifteen, their parents represent everything that is bad in the world.
At twenty-five, mother and father are no longer responsible for global warming, but they are obviously to blame for everything that is wrong with me and everything I am failing at.
At thirty-five, you begin to absorb the fact that your parents are simply not perfect, and that this is all right.
At forty-five, you register that your parents were only human beings, and that they did the best they could.
And at fifty-five, one morning, you look in the mirror.
And you see your parents there.
The end.
Perspective. It is all perspective — and the thing worth noticing about that list is that nothing in it is caused by the parents changing. They are, for most of the sequence, exactly the same people doing exactly the same things. Every one of those six revisions happens inside the person doing the looking.
Which is worth holding on to at whichever stage you are currently standing in, because it is almost certainly not the last one.