For years, you convinced yourself it was in the past. You were fine. Then you became a parent.
Sometimes the things we thought we had moved past aren't actually gone.
We've just gotten really good at living around them.
We find ways to function. We keep ourselves busy. We learn how to push through. We figure out what works well enough to get by.
And for a while, that can be enough.
Then you become a parent.
Parenthood has a strange way of bringing old patterns closer to the surface. Suddenly, the things you could keep at a comfortable distance are showing up in your everyday life—and sometimes in the moments when you have the least capacity to deal with them.
I see this often in my practice.
A client becomes a parent and realizes, “I thought I had already dealt with this.”
And honestly?
It happened to me, too.
Before kids, I could work around it.
Before becoming a parent, I had more room to manage my patterns without having to look directly at them.
I could push through when I was tired.
I could ignore my needs.
I could use anger when I wanted connection.
I could run myself into the ground and tell myself I'd rest later.
And if I was the only one paying the price, it was pretty easy to convince myself that maybe this just wasn't a priority right now.
I knew these weren't necessarily the ways I wanted to live.
They didn't really line up with my values.
But there was always another reason to put the work off.
I'll deal with that eventually.
I can handle it.
It's not that bad.
There are more important things to work on right now.
Then I had children.
My first child didn't completely expose it.
After my first, I still had enough opportunities to recharge that I could keep some of those old habits going.
I could run myself into the ground and then tell myself I was doing what every new parent does.
Rest when the baby rests.
Sleep when you can.
Keep going.
I honestly didn't feel like it was catching up with me that much.
Then I had my second.
Everything changed.
There was no “rest when the baby rests.”
Someone was always awake.
For the first year and a half, there was almost always someone who needed something.
And eventually, the rest I had been depriving myself of for years stopped being something I could put off.
It caught up with me.
I was exhausted.
I was yelling at my kids.
I was escaping into my phone.
I was rushing through our days because I didn't have much left in me.
And I remember thinking,
This isn't the parent I want to be.
That was my sign.
Something had to change.
Parenthood didn't create the problem.
It just took away some of the distance I had been able to keep from it.
The patterns that had helped me function for years weren't necessarily bad or broken.
They had served a purpose.
Pushing through helped me keep going.
Disconnecting helped me get a break.
Anger gave me a way to express needs I didn't know how to ask for.
But those strategies weren't working anymore.
And now there were little people experiencing the effects of them, too.
That's a different kind of motivation.
Not shame.
Not “What is wrong with me?”
More like,
“Okay. What is happening here?”
This is often where the real work begins.
Not with judging ourselves for the ways we've coped.
With getting curious about them.
What did I learn about needing other people?
What happens in me when I feel overwhelmed?
Why is it so hard to slow down?
Why does asking for help feel so uncomfortable?
Why does anger come so quickly when what I actually want is closeness?
Those questions can take us somewhere very different than shame does.
Because the parts of us that learned to push through, disconnect, people-please, or protect ourselves with anger aren't failures.
They learned something.
And sometimes becoming a parent is what finally makes us curious enough to figure out what that was.
Our children don't need us to have everything figured out.
They need us to notice.
To repair.
To keep growing.
And sometimes, becoming the parent we want to be means finally becoming the person we needed, too.