I was twenty-two when my father asked me how to attach a file to an email.

He sat at the computer, glasses pushed up on his forehead, staring at the screen with the expression of a man facing an unsolvable problem. “Show me again,” he said. There was something in his voice I had never heard before. Uncertainty. Almost embarrassment.

I showed him. Click here, then here, then select the file. Simple. Something I had done a thousand times without thinking. He watched carefully, nodding, trying to memorize steps that my fingers knew automatically.

That night I could not sleep. Something had shifted. The man who had answered every question of my childhood, who had seemed to contain all knowledge within him, did not know how to attach a file to an email. And if he did not know that, what else did he not know?

This was the beginning of a collapse I was not prepared for.

When I was a child, my father was omniscient. I believed this completely. Every “why” I asked received an answer. Why is the sky blue? He knew. Why do people die? He knew. Why do some families have more money than others? He knew that too. His answers may not have been scientifically accurate—I learned later that some were simplified, some were wrong, some were invented on the spot—but they were delivered with such confidence that I never doubted them.

My mother was the same. She knew which medicine cured which illness. She knew how to fix anything that broke. She knew what to do in every crisis. When I was sick, her hand on my forehead was diagnosis enough. When I was scared, her presence was sufficient protection. She was not a woman with limitations. She was a force that could solve any problem.

I lived inside this mythology for two decades. I did not know it was mythology. I thought it was simply how the world worked. Parents knew things. Children learned from them. Eventually children would know things too. The knowledge was real, solid, transferable.

Then my father sat in front of that computer, and the mythology cracked.

I started noticing other things. My mother asking me to explain her phone bill. My father uncertain about which investment to choose. Both of them Googling things I assumed they knew. Medical symptoms. Tax procedures. How to fix the washing machine. They were searching for answers just like I searched for answers. They did not have a secret reservoir of knowledge I lacked access to. They were improvising.

This realization came in waves. Each wave knocked something loose.

I remembered my father choosing my school. At the time, it seemed like a decision made from complete knowledge—he had evaluated all options, understood all implications, selected the optimal path. Now I understood he had guessed. He had taken incomplete information and made a bet. It could have gone wrong. It almost did go wrong. He did not know what he was doing. He just acted like he did.

I remembered my mother deciding I should study science instead of arts. She had spoken with such certainty. Science had future. Arts had no jobs. I had obeyed because she knew. But she did not know. She had heard things from relatives, absorbed opinions from neighbors, made a decision based on secondhand information and personal anxiety. She was not guiding me from wisdom. She was guessing from fear.

Every major choice of my childhood—where we lived, what I studied, who I was encouraged to befriend, what values I was taught—all of it was improvisation. My parents had no manual. They had no training. They had only their own confused childhoods and the pressure to appear confident for their children.

They were actors. Brilliant actors, convincing actors, actors who believed their own performance so deeply that even they forgot they were performing. But actors nonetheless.

This should have been liberating. If they did not know, then my own not-knowing was normal. If they improvised, then my improvisation was acceptable. We were all in the same condition—humans stumbling forward, pretending certainty we did not possess.

But it was not liberating. It was terrifying.

Because if my parents did not know, who did? If the ultimate authorities of my childhood were guessing, was anyone not guessing? I looked at teachers, bosses, government officials, experts on television. Were they all performing the same confidence my parents had performed? Was everyone improvising? Was the entire adult world a conspiracy of people pretending to know what they were doing?

The answer, I slowly realized, was yes.

This is the secret no one tells children. Not because adults are cruel, but because the secret would be unbearable. Children need to believe someone knows. Someone is in charge. Someone has the answers. Without this belief, the world is too frightening to navigate.

So adults perform. They answer questions with confidence they do not feel. They make decisions with certainty they do not possess. They create the illusion of competence so that children can feel safe. And they do this so well, for so long, that children grow up believing the performance was real.

Then one day your father cannot attach a file to an email. And you understand that the safety net was always imaginary.

I am a father now. My daughter is eight. She asks me questions every day. Why do people fight wars? What happens when we die? Why did you and Mama argue last night?

I answer with confidence. I speak as if I know. I perform the way my father performed, the way his father performed before him. I create the mythology she needs because the truth would be too heavy for her to carry.

But I know what I am doing now. I know that I am guessing. I know that my certainties are constructed, my wisdom is borrowed, my answers are provisional. I know that one day she will sit across from me as I struggle with some technology she finds trivial, and she will feel the same collapse I felt.

This is the inheritance we pass down. Not knowledge, but the performance of knowledge. Not answers, but the confidence to deliver answers we do not fully possess.

Perhaps this is not tragedy. Perhaps this is simply human.

None of us received a manual. None of us knows what we are doing. We are all improvising—in our careers, our relationships, our parenting. The people who seem most confident are often simply better performers. The people who seem wisest are often just older improvisers.

My father is seventy now. He still asks me for help with technology. But other things have changed. He asks my advice about decisions that once he would have made alone. He admits uncertainty he would never have shown when I was young. The performance has relaxed. He no longer needs to be omniscient for me. He can simply be a man who does not know everything, which is to say, he can simply be human.

I find I love him more now than when he knew everything. Because now I know what it cost him to pretend. Now I understand the weight he carried so that I could feel safe.

He was never omniscient. He was only brave.

And that, I am learning, is more than enough.