Catalyst for Change
When my oldest son was born, something shifted inside of me. I don’t know that I fully understood it at the time, but becoming a mother changed the way I looked at my childhood, my experiences, and the people who were supposed to protect me. Things I had spent years minimizing suddenly became impossible to ignore. I would look at my son and wonder how anyone could intentionally hurt someone so small, trusting, and dependent on them. In this episode of Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing, I reflect on how motherhood became the catalyst for my healing and how the children we believe we’re shaping can sometimes become the very people who help us see ourselves more clearly.I think we spend a lot of time talking about how having children changes our priorities, relationships, and identities, but we don’t talk enough about the ways our children hold up a mirror to us. They expose old fears, beliefs, and wounds we may not have realized were still influencing our lives. Sometimes we believe we’re reacting to something our children have done when we’re actually responding to something our nervous system remembers from our own childhood. We don’t leave those experiences behind simply because we become adults. We carry them into our relationships, marriages, and, for those of us who become parents, into the way we raise our children.After my first child was born, I began asking questions I had spent much of my life avoiding. Why had no one protected me? Why had the adults around me remained silent? Why had I learned to normalize experiences that would have devastated me if they happened to one of my own children? For the first time, I spoke to my sibling about the sexual abuse I experienced as a child. Motherhood had changed the way I understood what happened to me. I could no longer look at those experiences only through the eyes of the little girl who had learned to survive them. I was beginning to see them through the eyes of a mother who understood how vulnerable children really are.As my children grew, their milestones often brought my own childhood back into focus. Every birthday reminded me of where I had been at their age. Watching them experience things I never had was both beautiful and heartbreaking. I wanted them to feel safe, loved, understood, and protected. I wanted them to know they could make mistakes without fearing rejection, express their emotions without being shamed, and disagree with me without questioning whether my love for them would change. There were also moments when giving them those things reminded me of everything I had been missing. Sometimes, while I was learning how to mother my children, I was also grieving the little girl I used to be.In this episode, I reflect on what it means to break generational patterns when you weren’t given a healthy example of what parenting could look like. I didn’t grow up in a home where emotional safety, accountability, and repair were consistently modeled. I knew what I didn’t want to repeat, but that didn’t mean I always knew what to do instead. I lost my patience, misunderstood things, reacted from old wounds, and made mistakes. One of the things I committed to was making sure my children knew they could tell me when I hurt them. I wanted them to understand that being their mother didn’t make me incapable of being wrong. That love could include accountability, that apologizing mattered, and that repair was more important than protecting my pride.Each of my four children has taught me something different about myself. They’ve challenged my need for control, my perfectionism, my hypervigilance, and the ways I sometimes confused protecting them with trying to prevent every possible disappointment or pain. They’ve taught me about patience, individuality, kindness, boundaries, and the importance of understanding someone else’s experience instead of expecting them to experience the world the way I do. There have been moments when those lessons were uncomfortable because they required me to recognize behaviors I had spent years believing were simply part of who I was. Healing helped me understand that many of those behaviors were adaptations. They were ways I had learned to stay safe in an environment where safety wasn’t guaranteed.I also explore the difference between understanding where our behaviors come from and allowing them to continue directing our lives. For years, I believed I was naturally anxious, an overthinker, and a perfectionist. Looking back, I can see how much of that developed through survival. Those patterns served a purpose when I needed them, and I have compassion for the version of myself who developed them. But understanding why I became that person also meant recognizing that I had a responsibility to question whether those patterns were still serving me and the people I loved.When I think about where my healing began, I recognize how much therapy, EMDR, and eventually going no contact with my family changed my life. But I also know that motherhood was the catalyst that made me willing to look at things I had spent years avoiding. For so much of my life, I struggled to believe I was worth protecting. I never questioned whether my children were. Somewhere along the way, while fighting to give them the childhood I never had, I began realizing that the little girl I used to be had deserved those same things. My children didn’t heal me. That was never their responsibility. I did the work, and I continue doing it. They were the invitation. They gave me a reason to imagine a life that wasn’t organized around survival.This conversation also explores how healing changes the way we understand love, success, and responsibility. There was a time when I believed success meant proving people wrong, accomplishing enough to justify my worth, or building a life that looked impressive from the outside. Today, I think about success differently. I think about creating a home where my children feel safe enough to disagree with me, where mistakes can become opportunities for understanding, and fear doesn’t have to be the language through which we communicate. I think about being able to recognize when an old wound has been triggered and choosing to respond with intention instead of reacting from instinct. I want my children to remember a mother who was willing to grow, listen, apologize, and change when change was needed.I know motherhood isn’t everyone’s path, and I don’t believe healing requires becoming a parent. Sometimes the catalyst for change is a relationship, a loss, a diagnosis, a difficult conversation, or simply reaching a point where continuing to live the same way becomes more painful than the uncertainty of doing something different. I don’t think the catalyst itself is what matters most. I think what matters is what we choose to do once it arrives. Whether we’re willing to question the beliefs we’ve carried, grieve the things we can't change, and become curious about the ways our past continues to shape our present.For most of my life, I thought healing meant reaching a place where what happened to me no longer affected me. I don’t believe that anymore. I think healing is learning to recognize the patterns we inherited and becoming conscious enough to choose what we want to carry forward. It’s understanding that our pain may explain parts of who we are without having to determine who we become. Motherhood was the beginning of that realization for me. It taught me that love requires presence, accountability, and the willingness to keep growing. Somewhere in the process of becoming the mother I wanted my children to have, I began becoming the adult the little girl I used to be had always needed. Gentle Reminder:This podcast includes conversations about trauma, alcoholism, addiction, emotional abuse, dysfunctional family systems, enabling, hypervigilance...
