We are often very mean to our own history. Think about it: if a friend told you about a mistake they made five years ago, you would probably give them a hug. You would tell them, “It’s okay, you were tired,” or “You didn’t know any better.”
But when we look at our own past mistakes, it’s entirely different. We look back at our old choices and wonder how we could have been so foolish, so blind, or so weak. True kindness cannot just be something we give to other people. We have to send it backward in time to ourselves. To grow into better people, we need to learn a special kind of gift: the gift of letting go.
Nowhere is this harder to practice than in parenting. No other role hands you so many decisions, made in real time, with a small person’s whole heart on the line, and then judges those decisions for the next eighteen to twenty years. If we are our own harshest jury anywhere, it is on the witness stand marked “parent.”
The Inspiration Behind This Post
I am inspired to write this post after reading the verse in the Qur’an:
“Indeed good deeds remove those that are evil.” ~ Hud:11:114.
Every time I recite this verse, I am filled with a lightness that is hard to describe. To me, it’s about coming to terms with my past mistakes by doing as much good as I can moving forward.
Driving Forward While Looking in the Rearview Mirror
To be clear, looking back at your life is not a bad thing. In fact, it is important to recall the past so you can learn from it and avoid making the exact same mistakes again. Your memory is like a warning sign that says, “Hey, we tried this before and it hurt. Let’s choose a better path this time.”
Think of the parenting choices you second-guess: the sleep training you tried or didn’t try, the year you let the screen do more babysitting than you’d like to admit, the time you raised your voice over something that, in hindsight, didn’t deserve it. Remembering these moments so you can parent differently tomorrow is wisdom. Reliving them on a loop, calling yourself a bad parent at 1 a.m. while your child sleeps peacefully down the hall, is just suffering with no destination.
There is a huge difference between remembering a mistake to grow, and ruminating on it until you drown in guilt. When you replay your worst moments over and over in your head, you aren’t fixing anything. You are just wasting your precious time and energy today. Prolonged guilt is an expensive emotion. It steals your focus, drains your productivity, and robs you of the resources you need to build a better future right now.
Why We Get Stuck
The biggest reason we get stuck drowning in this guilt is because we already know the ending of the story. Today, you know that the relationship was going to fail. You know that the job was a dead end, or that the big risk wasn’t going to pay off. Because you know the final score, you feel like your past self should have seen it coming.
But that is not fair. When you judge your past self, you are using the wisdom you have today. You are judging a beginner by the standards of an expert. The only reason you are smart today is because your past self lived through the mistake to teach you the lesson. In a way, your current wisdom is a gift that your past self paid for with tears. Punishing yourself for not knowing everything back then just doesn’t make sense.
The Parenting Book You Didn’t Have Yet
This trap is especially cruel in parenting because the “expert” you are judging yourself against doesn’t even exist yet. You didn’t have this child’s personality, this age, this particular hard week, mapped out in advance. You were building the plane while flying it, the same way every parent before you did. The version of you who now knows that your toddler needed more structure, or that your teenager needed less pushing and more listening, only learned that by living through the version that didn’t know it yet. You cannot borrow tomorrow’s understanding to judge today’s exhausted, doing-their-best parent.
Seeing Yourself with Kind Eyes
Being kind to your past self starts with understanding the situation. Think about a moment you still feel bad about. Instead of just thinking about what you did wrong, ask yourself what was happening at that time. A lot of times, the things we call “stupid mistakes” were just ways we tried to survive. When you look at your history this way, things change. You stop seeing a list of failures. Instead, you see a human being who was just struggling with what they had at the time.
Try this the next time a parenting memory stings. Instead of asking “why did I handle that so badly,” ask “what was I running on that day.” Maybe you hadn’t slept in a week. Maybe you were parenting through your own stress from work, or grief, or a marriage going through something hard, with none of the support you needed. A tired, overwhelmed parent snapping at a child is not proof of a bad parent. It’s proof of a human parent, doing an impossibly hard job with whatever they had left in the tank that day.
Why Inner Kindness Matters Today
When you finally forgive your past self, your present life gets better. You stop living in guilt and fear. People who are terrified of their past mistakes usually become afraid to try anything new. They worry too much about small choices and stay stuck in one place. But when you make peace with who you used to be, you realize that making a mistake is not the end of the world. It is just how we learn.
Teaching Your Children the Gift You Give Yourself
There is one more reason to practice this, and it isn’t just about you. Children are always watching how we treat ourselves, and they file it away as a model for how to treat themselves someday. A parent who spirals into self-punishment over every misstep is quietly teaching a child that mistakes are shameful and unforgivable. A parent who says out loud, “I got that wrong earlier, I’m sorry, and here’s what I’ll do differently,” is teaching something far more valuable: that a mistake is a moment, not an identity, and that repair is always possible.
This is, in the end, the gift of letting go of your past mistakes as a parent: it doesn’t just free you. It hands your child a valuable inheritance, the knowledge that they, too, will get things wrong one day, and that getting things wrong was never the same thing as being unlovable.
Featured image courtesy of Ron Lach on Pexels
