My daughter is fifteen.
She wears Golden Retriever slippers, and she spends too long in the shower. She sends me TikToks I don’t understand and gets irrationally angry when the Wi-Fi lags. She’s still figuring out who she is. And she gets to do that safely.
And every time I watch her be fifteen—I mean really be fifteen—I feel a little something inside me break for myself.
Because when I was fifteen, I was already exhausted. And I was already pretending I was okay. I was already in too deep.
Actually—scratch that. By fourteen, I was living with my boyfriend.
By fifteen, I was fluent in emotional labor.
By sixteen, I could’ve taught a masterclass in self-abandonment.
My daughter doesn’t have to do any of that.
Because I won’t let her.
She gets to be angry. Loud. Messy. Soft. Confused. She gets to take up space.
And watching her do it cracks me open. Because I didn’t get to.
There’s this strange grief that comes with parenting when you didn’t get parented properly.
It’s like… no one warned me that loving her this fiercely would expose the places where I went unloved.
That holding her through the hard parts would make me ache for all the times no one held me.
I didn’t know watching her be safe would trigger all the versions of me who weren’t.
I’m not jealous of her. God, no. I’m relieved.
I’m grateful.
But I’m grieving, too.
Because every time I say, “You’re allowed to feel that,” some ghost version of me whispers, Am I?
Every time I say, “You don’t have to fix this,” she asks, Could I have stopped fixing everything, too?
People love to say kids are resilient.
But you know what else they are?
Absorbent.
They take on the temperature of the room.
They learn to read faces before they learn to read books.
They shape-shift to survive.
And I did that.
For a long time.
Until I had to unlearn every damn thing I thought love meant.
So now, I break the pattern. Every day.
Sometimes with grace.
Sometimes with a voice I wish I didn’t recognize.
Sometimes by just saying:
“I’m sorry. I’m trying.”
Raising her is healing me.
Not in the Instagram-therapy, sparkly-hearts-and-boundaries way.
But in the ugly, gut-deep, old-wound way.
And I don’t have a neat ending for this.
I’m still in it.
But I know this much:
She’s not carrying what I carried.
And that, to me, is everything.
Leave a Reply