The year my children learned I was human
"My mother and I grew together, sometimes apart, always colliding, and somehow became women at the same time." - Maya Angelou
This is an excerpt from The Healing Journal, where I share my most intimate pieces with our paid subscribers.
On the last day of 2024, my youngest daughter found her way to the couch where I was lying down and pushed her way into the crevice of my hips and pelvis. Like clockwork, she laid her head back on my belly with her eyes closed. I prepared for the likely demands children often have for their parents, but she spoke no words. Her head slowly rose up and down in sync with my breath, and we embraced the silence that wafted throughout the living room.
After a few minutes in this fusion, I heard her breathing slow and become noisier, indicating her transition to sleep. Tears found their way to the corners of my eyes and I tried to process why they had arrived.
Then it hit me. At this moment, my body was doing what it hadn’t been allowed to do all year- grieve. Yet it was a joyful grief where sadness lingered only from the revelation that this moment had taken too long.
The constancy of crisis in my life had pushed me into a steady state of darting eyes, racing thoughts and perpetually tense muscles. The joy was riding in because of the relief that my body hadn’t completely forgotten how to settle into herself.
The past year was a raging fire that I could not extinguish and so I ran. And when I escaped, hypervigilance consumed me out of necessity and fear. Simply being was no longer safe and reflection even more dangerous. Hoping and wondering were wistful luxuries. Slowly, I had become frantic- someone only concerned with the here and now. Someone who had forgotten how to plan and prepare because the flames were rising too fast.
Amid all of the protecting and providing, I prayed for a moment of peace. And finally at the end of the year, here it was on a sofa. It would be fleeting, but it did come. And the tears flowed because I was reminded, just for an instant, that my body could be a refuge again.
Zora Neale Hurston once said, "There are years that ask questions and years that answer." This year has been one of the answers, revealing every gaping hole in myself, every shaky relationship I built with others, and the lack of emergency planning in my life.
I was shattered.
The broken shards of me were spread out everywhere, and I tried to push everyone away so they wouldn’t hurt themselves. So this was the year, with bloody fingers, I spent trying to pick up the pieces and somehow clean the mess. And I wanted to do it without my girls seeing any of it.
I failed.
This was the year they realized how imperfect, exhausted and angry I was. This was the year they realized I was human.
Raising two girls on the precipice of adolescence while navigating life’s storms instigated an overwhelming amount of self-doubt. So much so that, at times, I felt like I had a third daughter- me- who I was desperately trying to reparent.
This year, my girls saw the incredulity of building a life meant to be seen but not truly lived. A life that took decades to construct but could be demolished in one year. This year, they saw my fallacies, my weaknesses, and how quickly I fell.
And with the disappointment, it has been hard to understand how they still love me despite it all. How could they still see me as their refuge when the ground is so rocky?
This has been especially difficult to grasp as I contend with many whose love was clearly conditional. I had not heard their silent ultimatums, where if this untenable life I’ve constructed falls, then so would the connection.
I would constantly replay all the moments that shook my foundation. It was as if I was watching a documentary called “My Life”, where I lived in performance for others. I watched as the main character believed she would cease to exist unless she were in constant service to others. And in return, she would feel something close to love but not quite—so long as she maintained her subservience.
When loved ones revealed their connections were temporary, it reinforced a belief I am trying to release: the need to be immaculate to hold my world in place. Yet, as I watched those who loved me love me despite my inconsistencies, my introversion, and my anxiety, I watched myself emerge.
This year has been one of sloughing off a skin that was so heavy, I never realized it had made me immobile, mute and emotionless. I watched her slither out, leaving so much behind.
I didn’t look back once.