The Day the Architecture of My Childhood Collapsed
The revelation came on a Tuesday when I was seventeen, standing in the kitchen doorway, watching my father stare at the broken washing machine with the same bewildered expression I wore when faced with calculus homework. For twenty minutes, I watched him pace, mutter, and consult the manual like a prayer book he couldn’t quite translate.
“Dad?” I finally asked. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
He looked up with eyes that seemed to carry the weight of every parental decision he’d ever made and said, with startling honesty, “Son, I’ve been making it up as I go along since the day you were born.”
In that moment, the fundamental architecture of my childhood collapsed. The adults—those mythical beings who seemed to possess a secret manual for navigating existence—were just as lost as everyone else. They were improvising their way through mortgages and marriages, careers and child-rearing, pretending certainty while feeling anything but certain.
How had I never noticed the signs? The way my mother would pause before answering my questions about life, as if she were solving equations in real time. The way my parents would discuss my future in hushed tones, their voices carrying the weight of decisions they weren’t sure how to make. The way they always seemed to be learning the rules of the game while simultaneously playing it.
I had assumed that becoming an adult meant receiving some kind of cosmic orientation packet—a comprehensive guide to managing money, understanding relationships, knowing when the washing machine was truly broken versus just having a bad day. I imagined that eighteen or twenty-one or thirty came with clarity, with certainty, with the answers to questions I was still too young to know how to ask.
But here was my father, fifty-two years old, as puzzled by household appliances as I was by everything. Here was my mother, who I’d watched navigate neighborhood politics and school board meetings with apparent confidence, admitting she sometimes made dinner decisions by standing in front of the refrigerator until inspiration or desperation struck.
The most devastating realization wasn’t that my parents didn’t know everything—it was that no one did. The teachers who seemed so authoritative were making educated guesses. The politicians who spoke with such conviction were often bluffing. The experts on television were frequently just people who’d gotten comfortable with uncertainty and learned to speak about it confidently.
This wasn’t a failure of my parents’ generation—it was the human condition. Every generation inherits a world their parents barely understood and must figure out how to live in it with whatever combination of inherited wisdom, trial and error, and desperate improvisation they can muster.
But why had they hidden this uncertainty from me? Why the elaborate performance of adult competence?
Maybe because they were afraid that admitting their confusion would frighten me, would rob me of the security that children need to believe they’re being guided by people who know where they’re going. Maybe because they were afraid that revealing their uncertainty would diminish their authority, would make them seem less worthy of respect or trust.
Or maybe because admitting they were making it up would have meant admitting it to themselves—and that admission would have been too terrifying to bear when they were responsible for other people’s lives, other people’s futures, other people’s wellbeing.
What I couldn’t see then, but understand now as a parent myself, is the profound courage it takes to make decisions without certainty, to guide others while still finding your own way, to provide security while feeling insecure. My parents weren’t failing by improvising—they were succeeding despite having to improvise.
They were doing what humans have always done: making the best decisions they could with incomplete information, learning from mistakes, adapting as they went, and somehow managing to raise children who would be functional enough to continue the great improvisation for another generation.
Now, when my own son asks me questions I can’t answer, I try to remember that moment in the kitchen. I try to balance honesty with reassurance, to admit uncertainty without creating anxiety, to model the truth that competence isn’t about knowing everything—it’s about being willing to figure things out as you go.
Because perhaps the real gift my parents gave me wasn’t the illusion of their competence, but the eventual revelation of their humanity. They showed me that it’s possible to function, to love, to build a life, to raise children, and to maintain dignity while improvising your way through the impossible task of being human.
The washing machine eventually got fixed—not because my father suddenly became an expert in appliance repair, but because he kept trying until something worked. Which, it turns out, is pretty much how everything important gets done.
We’re all making it up as we go along. The only difference between children and adults is that adults have gotten better at improvising with confidence.