Processing My Own Childhood Through the Eyes of My Daughter
It was comfy, it was safe… it was too ‘safe’? Why everyone should talk through their childhood with a professional.
I have a few friends I’ve hung onto for the long haul, but like most people you can count childhood friends on one hand and I’ve often wondered if it was my fault. I am blessed with some great relationships in my current season as a mom of littles in her early 30s. However, the older I’ve gotten and the more I’ve watched my daughter try to navigate this new world at three year old the more it’s made me introspective to what growing up was really like for me.
When I think back there are a few key moments I remember — meeting my sister for the first time at 3, my bout with pneumonia that wreaked havoc on my body at 7, meeting my closest childhood friend at 10 (she would later pass away from brain cancer), and then moving into the teenage years I remember a lot : watching the above friend start having a seizure mid-competition and the life guards having to save her life, the very lopsided amount of males compared to females that I was around training with every day and the cruel joke that tended to be, being left out from other friend groups and often left alone because I was ‘too busy training’, but there is one moment that sticks out that has always left my curious:
One day I lost it on the pool deck, it was before practice and I remember having a seemingly out of body experience: I lost control of everything for just a few minutes and then came back to… but what caused me to snap?
I’ve been and out of therapy for seasons at a time since for the past 13 years. The first, second, and third rounds were for something traumatic that happened in college. The fourth was for my eating disorder. The fifth and Sixth were for my prenatal and postpartum season. However, I’ve never done a deep dive into my childhood, it was always seemed good and it always seemed safe.
With two loving parents, a strong foundation of family and faith, decent enough relationships with my siblings (I mean we squabbled like any other family, but we have good relationships), nothing catastrophic like divorce, disease, unemployment entering our story growing up, you really would have thought it was perfect. In a lot of ways it was, I don’t want to diminish that, but the high level generalities are only part of the story.
When I went through my pneumonia it sent me on a 15 year journey with my lungs, when I met my childhood best friend at 10 and then for the next 9 years watched her navigate seizures, brain surgeries, and eventually succumbing to cancer I seemingly walked through it with ease, and when I was constantly belittled and made to feel less than by the group of older males who outnumbered us gals 4 to 1 I was made to laugh it off. None of these in of itself are one catastrophic event (although some could debate this), but without parents that were open to going deep into conversation — no matter how great I still think they are — I realized it left me with some baggage I never confronted.
Fast forward to my daughter who has been through so much and I realized when she won’t talk to me, when she freezes as I try to walk things through with her to help her it triggers some kind of anger inside me. I wasn’t ever ‘allowed’ to process these super heavy childhood realities and I never thought they affected me ‘that much’ so I should be fine. It’s simply not true. Now, I’m having to confront these parts of my childhood that were less than ideal so that I can effectively come alongside my daughter and walk her through whatever she is feeling in a healthy way.
So, I implore you, even if you think you have some picture perfect childhood, or hard moments you remember weren’t ‘that big of a deal’, choose to talk through it with someone. You never know what future you or member of your family will be grateful you did.