Formative Years
I have been very vocal my whole life about my mother’s absence. I don’t have too many memories of her, and the ones I do have are ones I wish I could forget. I don’t associate good things with my mother. My whole life, I studied patterns more than words. Words rarely catch me slipping because my mother taught me early how not to trust people.
Her actions never matched what she said. I learned to protect myself from her, and to do that, I needed to read her. She was my first teacher in sympathizing with the aggressor. She has a beautiful way of painting herself as the victim, and with an entourage of enablers, she really doesn’t have to work hard to sell her stories.
However, no matter how she tried to downplay the trauma she inflicted on me, my memories hold a different story. I mostly remember my mother during my formative years, which is socially normal, even when what a child remembers isn’t good for them. I don’t remember my mother having any real goals or ambition. What I can’t forget is walking on eggshells, constantly trying to avoid her temper.
I remember the fear of making a mistake or becoming an inconvenience in her life. Have you ever gotten hit with the phone for interrupting a hours-long phone conversation? Or gotten a whooping for breaking a glass ornament or damaging expensive furniture? I have.
My mother had an innate way of caring more about the aesthetics of her house than she did about nurturing a healthy relationship within our home. I remember countless days hiding under my queen-size bed with the mirror. Sometimes, I even fell asleep under there.
I was too young to understand that my father was absent because he was working to provide. I just knew that I was angry with him for being away because he was never there to witness her behavior. It was always her word against mine, and after a while, I stopped trying to convince him to believe me.
I remember avidly praying for her to just go away. Eventually, my prayers were answered. She wouldn’t have much of a place in my life—or in my memories—until I was much older. But the damage had already been done. I’m pretty sure I developed trauma symptoms as a child, and that mixture of having to walk on eggshells while also being my own protector fanned the flames of rebellion in me. I didn’t listen to anyone but myself.
Communication with my mother was always difficult and rarely ended without an argument. It always felt like a constant attack on my train of thought or my character, and I found that insulting because, as much as I loved my mother, I knew I had a gift for observing and analyzing people.
Her life wasn’t the life I wanted. I didn’t think of her as exceptionally wise, and her advice would often go against my natural instincts, only to become something I later regretted listening to. My mother never respected my boundaries or the way my mind worked. She would often pressure me until she overrode my natural instincts, which led to years of second-guessing every decision I made.
I learned young that my mother would always be my number-one accuser of bad intentions and bad behavior. I always felt the need to over explain myself and prove my decisions to her. My life forever felt like it was on trial. The bad seasons—when I really did make the wrong decision—were the worst. Especially if, by some miracle, she happened to be right for once.
The gloating was crushing. Yet I kept showing up. I kept giving her the benefit of the doubt and hoping that one day we would reach a place of mutual love and respect. Life would create moments as I got older where she would somehow convince me that she had achieved some level of growth. But overexposure to her presence would always lead us back to the same place.
She was abusive to me as a child, and she proved to be abusive to me as an adult. My mother assaulted me at the age of 36, damaging my eye. Sit with that. Imagine a parent thinking they have the right to hit their adult child because their child cursed in their presence during the escalation of an argument they didn’t even create.
Imagine what it feels like to never have the freedom to express yourself fully to the parent who gave birth to you simply because they lack the emotional intelligence to look past your delivery and engage with what you are actually saying.
Yet that same mother, who doesn’t curse in public—she uses selective curse words privately—was my first teacher in pretending. She would tell me about people she didn’t like, but I watched her put on a smile and hold entire conversations with those same people. I think that’s why I always wanted to learn how to take care of myself from a young age.
The less I had to depend on her or interact with her, the better. Leaving home at 18 gave me the illusion of escape. But all the trauma that had become a major part of my core memories came with me. And over the next 18 years, it started spilling out in ways I didn’t understand.
During that time, I learned to collect people who reminded me of my mother without ever really connecting with most of them. I was forever studying them, reading them, and adjusting my own reality accordingly. I schemed, experimented, and trial-and-errored my way into success until I hit a season in my life that required tools I didn’t have.
My mind drew a blank at the worst possible time. Here I was—a mother and a wife—and I didn’t know how to navigate the roadblocks effectively. When your mind has no solutions and you don’t know where to start looking for them, you go back to what you know.
Unfortunately, what I knew wasn’t the kind of principles that build a home. I struggled profoundly for a long time before deciding to start therapy. I woke up every day feeling like I was in the fight of my life, and the person I was fighting was myself.
There was the me who wanted to be the safe parent, and then there was the me who was triggered by threats to my children’s safety because the child inside me was still very much unhealed. Everything about how I raised my children used to trigger me into rumination about my own childhood, and that rumination would stir up all the suppressed anger.
The silenced child started to come out. And she was loud. She was angry. She was ready to fight. But she wasn’t just pouring out onto my mother and her cohort of enablers. She was pouring out into every other area of my life. Trying to control her without therapy brought me to the edge of myself.
That’s how I realized I was in trouble. No one starts off being self-destructive. Trauma changes people. Childhood trauma can be especially damaging because it shapes the very framework through which we learn to understand ourselves, relationships, safety, and trust.
My life experience has made me a firm believer that people who lack the ability to be accountable and self-reflective should think very seriously about whether they are equipped to raise children. It has also given me a deep affinity for those who have suffered any form of abuse, especially children.
My desire to share pieces of my life is rooted in the hope that it helps validate someone else’s reality and makes more people take child advocacy seriously. Your child’s childhood is more important than your adult experience. You owe it to them to be the best possible version of yourself while raising them.
The person you are is shaping their formative years. Listen to your children. Get curious about their perspective and their life experience. See yourself through their eyes. A child’s honesty can be the most honest mirror of your shortcomings you will ever have reflected back at you.
Children are your inheritance, and the legacy you imprint on them will speak for itself. So make it a legacy you can be proud of. Face your demons so your children don’t have to. The more I share my story, the more I realize that my ability to pivot and self-manage for as long as I did is, in itself, rare.
I’ve worked with a lot of people with similar stories who didn’t achieve any form of success or stability until they received major intervention. I am forever humbled by that. But I still don’t recommend it. To the moms who are walking a similar journey as me, I want to remind you to celebrate the small wins, even when no one else is clapping for you.
I know how hard it is to rebuild your life and raise children at the same time. I am deeply versed in the guilt that arises when you realize your children may have to heal from the parts of you that were broken before you started doing the deep work.
Hold tight to the visible impact your willingness to change is making. It will give you hope to keep going on the days when you feel like you aren’t doing enough. Remind yourself that you are doing something you’ve never seen done. Every step forward is changing your family’s generational inheritance. You may not be able to rewrite what happened to you. But you can change what happens next.