Can You Parent Yourself?

It all started when I was a few months old.  My mom went back to work after her maternity leave, and she dropped me off at my grandmas for her to watch me.  I was a pretty normal baby until granny daycare started.  Most babies spit up, I began to projectile vomit.  Like something out of a horror film, shooting formula across the room.  My grandma was not up for this challenge, so my mom took me to the doctor. 

He asked what had changed in my life.  My mom told him that she had gone back to work and that my schedule was different, and she had to wake me up really early every morning.  I used to sleep in until around 9am or 10am (even as a tiny baby) and she was waking me up at 6am to take me to granny daycare.  

The doctor told her that this disruption was too much for my system and that she should stay home with me so I could sleep and wake on my own schedule. 

The doctor actually told my mom she should quit her job because I needed more stability!  Imagine that!  He was the first and only person to understand that I have very physical reactions to stress.  

So, my mother quit her job and the two of us stayed home a happy pair, and the projectile vomiting became a thing of the past.  I returned to a normal weight and my health was good for several years.

Then the shit hit the fan, quite literally.

I was seven years old when my parents got divorced, and my mom went back to work. Both of my parents started new lives. I learned that grown-ups do what grown-ups want to do and kids just have to get dragged along.

The way my parents behaved had a direct and immediate effect on me, and my mental health and physical health were very closely linked.

I had to change schools five times in 9 years. I was suffering, and boy, did it show. I developed IBS in the first grade. Not one single adult ever considered that my chronic diarrhea was another physical manifestation of my inner stress.

I was hanging off the toilet like a stocking holder every single morning before school.  I was in and out of the bathroom constantly in elementary school, wiping with toilet paper squares that felt like crushed tin foil on my bottom. I would quietly cry sitting on the potty at school every single day.

I saw tons of doctors who did lots of tests and nothing ever showed why my weight was so low.  It was nothing “medical” and in those days no one considered what was going on with me mentally.

Finally, when I started middle school, things started to get better. My mom figured some things out. We stayed in one place, and I was able to control my stress, or at least surf on top of it. My tummy troubles were not the center of my life anymore. I felt like I had “grown up” and put the past behind me, moving forward feeling the healthiest I had ever been.

I went away to college, got a job, fell in love, and got married. We became the happy parents of a beautiful baby girl.  

When my maternity leave ended, it was time to decide if I was going to go back to work. That’s when the pooping started again.  My pooping that is, my daughter was a healthy baby destroying the back of onesies on a daily basis.  

My pooping was the painful, sick kind. The same kind I had every day when I was seven years old. The kind that doubles you over and grips your guts with the strength of a tick.  Ticks are really freaking strong; they grab onto you and never let go.

I didn’t realize it, but I was emotionally thrown back into the story of my own childhood.  I felt healthy and secure when my mom was at home with me and a total free-falling anxiety when she divorced my dad and went back to work.  I realize now that there were a whole host of reasons why my stress level was so high back then, but the wounded child inside of me processed it very simply:

Mom at home = happiness

Mom at work = total distress & sickness

There was no scenario in which leaving this baby was going to work out well in my mind or my bowels.  The IBS kicked up something fierce and my husband and I decided that I wasn’t in any shape to go to work and be a new mom at the same time.  Thank goodness he connected the dots, even when I wasn’t always able to do so. 

Looking back, I see that I basically recreated my own childhood but played it out with a different ending. In order to heal myself I had to replay the parts of my childhood that caused me pain, and watch my own little people go through those stages without experiencing that same pain. It isn’t possible to hide from all of the hard things in life, but I sure tried to rewrite my own story so that they would never know what I knew.

I chose to be a stay at home mom when my kids were babies, I never left their father, we moved one time only 2 miles from where we lived before, and I put my children’s needs first. I didn’t go back to work until my youngest child was in school all day. I never put them in daycare or after school care, I worked part-time and they never even realized I had a job.

This was how I was able to sort through the turbulence of my childhood, by not repeating it.

The reparenting of myself didn’t happen overnight.

It took a total of 28 years and three children, but finally my wounds from my own childhood have faded into distant memories.  I know that I was lucky to have been able to make some of the choices that I did, and that my mom had no one to rely on to help her. I also know that the divorce, the moving, and the changing schools were things that I could have processed better had I had consistent loving support from my parents.

Did my kids really need me to do all of the dramatic things I did for them to feel loved and safe? No. What they really needed was deep, loving and trusted connections with their parents. It’s funny how the brain sorts things out isn’t it?

Until now, I thought I was staying at home for them. Really, I was doing it for myself.  

I am 53 years old now, steady on two feet and pretty sure of myself.  I won’t know if I’ve truly arrived until the journey ends, but, for now, I don’t need to parent myself anymore. I need to reconnect with the child in me in a different way, a way that reminds me who I was when I was innocent and fun and hopeful. I’d like to spend the next half of my life living more like a kid than a parent.