It is alarming how many perspectives are changed once you become a parent.
I don’t say this in a way to minimize the weight of perspectives of those without children.
You simply cannot imagine the intense and seismic shift many of the beliefs you’ve had before will be shaken (or questioned) to their core. There are things you thought you knew. Things you thought were a no-brainer and obvious and suddenly not so obvious and actually can take quite a few powerful brains that can’t agree on a definitive answer.
The love for your children, and the way it creates an entirely new organ naked to the human eye, feels almost disturbing in its depth of the actual lack of choice you have in it. You know when you think of having kids you will love them. You know when you’re pregnant or expecting a child, that the love you currently feel is intense and staggering. When you feel their kicks, when you think of names, what they’ll look like, what their personality will be, you feel the burgeoning primal instinct to protect this being at all costs and the unthinkable fear of something bad happening.
What you can’t predict or prepare for is that it’s never quite an option. The vastness feels like a warm possession that you completely succumb to willingly, a free fall that you know won’t last forever but will be worth every second before you crash. All of a sudden, nobody is faceless. There is no child in the news that is unnamed. No disappearance that doesn’t pull a little tighter. No war is waged without tears shed for the children that are impacted. Because you not only have been a child, but because you are part of one. Yet, also not. You are attached but also not in control, and you are the guardian of but not forever chained to them. Your children teach you that whether there is or is not some deity or afterlife, there is a higher purpose. Offering your children unconditional love, comfort, nurturing, stability, and happiness becomes what life is about. Seeing the unbridled joy of a child that feels safe falling into your arms from a couch ledge (often without warning) reminds you of the uniqueness and gift that is life. We know very little about why we’re here, if there is a why. We only know of the before that has been tangible to record, and we only can predict the future that simulations allow. Children root us in the present, and do so in a way that leaves us more vulnerable than we were children ourselves.
While most of us have experienced love or having been loved, some of us, quite honestly, have not experienced this unconditional love from a parent.
Sometimes neither.
I don’t say this as a way to garner pity or win a trauma gold medal. But the love for your own children coming on so strongly when not having it directed towards you ever feels perplexing and adds a layer of frightening trepidation. Sometimes, while looking at my boys with love, I feel a nagging voice to look away.
I’ve felt this a lot lately.
I’ve tried challenging it.
While discussing with my psychiatrist, I hypothesized (as I did in an earlier blog) that it’s due to discomfort with the love as it feels foreign. I thought maybe I’m afraid they’ll reject me. Maybe they’ll see me as the defective individual person I am.
What I felt today, though, and what hit me differently, was that I’m afraid they’ll disappear.
Quite literally.
For mere seconds, I wonder if they will vanish and be replaced by a laughing menace that reiterates I was foolish for believing I had safety in love.
While, logically, I know this won’t happen, the magnetic repulsion is strong enough that I can’t look too long. It is not worth the risk of heartbreak.
I learned too long ago that feeling sorry for myself did nothing. Sitting with sadness feels uncomfortable, even if writing a check to a therapist whose job is to listen to me speak. I find myself acknowledging the privileges I’ve had, the food in my pantry, the bills that are paid, and the warmth from my floor registers in our rented home in a nice neighborhood. My compulsive sanguine tendencies tend to reject creating space for confronting traumas. While I remain deeply sad, hold a permanent state of feeling like a bummer lamb, I have become an expert at recognizing that every situation, no matter the level of derangement, has something to be grateful for. Even my rape as an emerging adult by two men I didn’t know is consistently mentioned alongside my gratitude for access to Plan B the following day. Despite the pharmacist’s judgmental comment about me having had too much fun the night before, I anchor myself to the fact that a child was not conceived as a result. My childhood as an unhoused adolescent turns into gratefulness for my sister and friends that allowed us to sleep on their couch. My years under the control of an abusive stepfather are followed by acknowledgments of my grandmother’s presence stabilizing me. Recently learning I was four when I started to learn I had to get food from neighbors rather than by caregivers is applauded by me for finding out that I’ve always been a survivor. A sexual abuse case against five-year-old Tasha is shrugged away by the fact I don’t recall a thing.
While I continue to cling to small graces as blessings, I still feel the deep wounds of someone who had to learn survival before awareness of death. As I read about me and my sister collecting water from a hole in the ground in the commune (“the hole”) we lived in, I still mentally force the image out of my head to be replaced by the reminder that there are children surviving the chaos of war, and at least then I didn’t need to worry about sirens warning against impending bombs.
There is quite the complexity of waging emotions when you are both a survivor and an optimist. Surviving has kept you alive; being optimistic has given the reason to. We as humans are hardwired to fight for our survival, just as any other species. Even in films of a person begging to be smothered, there is the last instinctual fight to gasp for air in their last moments. Against all odds, the unknowns of death offer most of us resistance to succumbing to the tragedies of life.
My life until now has been survival.
Resting, sitting in silence, or being on my own brings discomfort I can’t explain. Growing up in the situation I did was also a catalyst for generational change since I was born with an ally in my twin sister. Kathleen existed in the same space as me during our gestation, was cut from our mother’s body a mere minute after my own birth, and stood by my side as we went to the dependable neighbors that we knew would feed us. No longer trying, giving into the seduction of substance abuse that allured so many before us, meant abandoning the friend that also stood alongside us. While I have never given myself the luxury of insisting my lack of innocence of the depravity that encroached on us, my sister’s calm and sad demeanor reminded me that there was a purpose behind trying. Seeing her humiliation, her pain, her hunger, or her hurt carelessly thrown upon her made me ache. The most humbling gift I had been given was the presence of the reminder that I was never truly alone.
Because love, affection, and attention were something that was not given without expectations of obedience, our sisterhood felt so much was always left unsaid. Saying things like “I love you,” giving hugs, playing with each other’s hair, or allowing vulnerable feelings to be exposed were against the invisible boundary we had created through familial education on intimacy aversion. While I would, then and now, stand on the front of the battle lines for any of my sisters, to this day, hugging or acknowledging love feels awkward or strange. Not because it’s not felt, but because love was always hand in hand with abuse, gaslighting, neglect, or taunting. Saying “I love you” was what was said, not what was meant when it came to caregivers. This was only said during acceptable times like partings, never randomly or with genuine affection. If it was said in a spontaneous moment of joy, usually intentions would be questioned with annoyed passivity. Quite literally, affection was the mood killer.
When you learn as a child that love is an obligation or irritating community service, you begin to wear that scarlet letter of defectiveness. Obedience is used as a tool of safety. Often, speaking out of turn in class would lead to the inability to stop crying when a teacher reminded me of rules of silence. It wasn’t so much that their reminder was ill-intended or rude in tone, but being centered was hand in hand with danger. If this was preceded with a clipped tone of disapproval, the reiteration of being innately flawed became the flashing alarm bell that you couldn’t ignore.
Love feels neither inherent nor earned. Rather, it feels foreign. It feels as if a genetic component has skipped your conception, and a permanent stain on your being. You start to feel and accept a feeling of rarity in the fact that some, including yourself, are only alive to feel pain and rejection. There is almost comfort in believing this is something coded within you. If you are not capable of being loved, you cannot control it. If you cannot control it, it is not your fault. If it is not your fault, than at least you cannot start to give yourself false hope that it is ever a possibility for you.
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