I was always a deeply emotional child. If I had a dollar for every time I was told I was being too sensitive, or that I was overreacting, or that I needed to stop crying (or whining), I would be a bajillionaire.
As an adult, this part of me that felt all things big and small has been simultaneously a badge of honor and a curse. The beauty of being highly sensitive, emotive, or an empath is that I can deeply feel my friends’ feelings, my spouse’s, my kids’, the lady checking out ahead of me in the grocery store. I’m deeply tuned in to the nuances of human behavior.
It’s why I love people watching so much. It’s why I want to be a therapist.
The curse of being highly sensitive/emotional/empathic is that as a child, I wasn’t taught how to regulate emotionally.
No one was validating or sitting with my feelings on a regular basis. I would get hugs and affection and love. But, no one with any concrete skills for emotional regulation was raising me. So there I was as an adult that had all these big, big feelings she never learned how to deal with, and the result is that I had to reparent myself while also trying to raise my own children with no tools or skills to speak of.
For years, I thought I was sharing my story to help other moms.
That was genuine desire of my heart. But, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing as a parent anymore than the next person. So I have been writing into the void about my experience. I’ve been making memes joking about the craziness of motherhood and found solidarity when I voiced how hard it was.
Yet, I realized today what my real motive was. I can’t believe it took me this long.
I wanted to know if I was real.
I was listening to Episode 130 of We Can Do Hard Things (Glennon Doyle’s podcast) this morning and I had an aha moment that hit me out of nowhere. They were interviewing the famous Dr. Becky and the episode was talking about raising kids and learning to parent ourselves. I am kind of obsessed with attachment, and trauma, and parenting (so highly recommend this episode). But, what hit me was something I had never heard before and I can’t stop thinking about it.
Dr. Becky was speaking to how when you don’t validate a child’s emotions, it causes an existential crisis of sorts. Kids wonder if they are real if they have big emotions and no one is validating those or seeing them.
Validating a child’s emotions (and I’d argue an adult’s too) is a way that we can help them know that they are real.
They matter.
Their emotions are valid.
They are not broken or abnormal or a non-human being.
They are real.
So often as a child, when I had these big emotions, I was seeking the answer to the question, Am I Real?
Of course I was real. I mean, our logical brains know that if we are living and breathing we’re real. But, perhaps our emotional brains need a little more reassurance. Especially when we’re children.
Yet, so often, my big emotions around just existing and being this highly emotional, highly sensitive child were not validated, or seen as real.
Instead, as parents we use gaslighting as a parenting strategy.
I didn’t come up with that – they said it in the podcast, but boy did that hit me hard. And, this is not to dis my own parents for my not validating my emotions or even seeing them. I’m guilty because I’ve done the same things with my kids and their feelings. My instinct when feelings get big is to say:
Stop crying.
It’s not scary! It’s fiiine.
C’mon. It’s no big deal.
So this kid who had all these big feelings and altruistic motives grew up into an adult who had kids and didn’t know what the hell she was doing.
The result?
I became a mom blogger.
Makes total sense doesn’t it? Because who wouldn’t want to listen to me, the emotionally dysregulated new parent talk about new motherhood?
Well, it turns out that people did want to hear what I had to say. And now I know why. Because they wanted to know if they were real too.
Motherhood threw me into an experience where my emotions were all over the place and I was conditioned to believe I was supposed to love and cherish, and enjoy every second of it.
But, the honest truth was – I didn’t. I mean, yes I loved some of it. Parts of it. A lot of it, really. But, I also had negative feelings and thoughts and experiences around it, too. Not very many people were talking about those. I rarely heard people say that it felt impossible some days, or that they questioned if they were ever supposed to be a mother.
So, I started writing about it.
I’ve always said writing has helped me just as must as it’s helped other people, and now I know why.
I wanted to know that I was real.
I needed my audience of struggling mothers to tell me that it was OK that I was struggling because they were struggling too. I craved knowing that my feelings of anxiety and depression and worry and fear and sadness and angst around being a mother were normal.
I needed someone to validate that I wasn’t alone.
I needed to know that my motherhood experience was real. I needed to know that I was real.
I needed to reach out into the internet void and have a proverbial hand reach back and grab mine and say, “Don’t worry. Motherhood IS hard. This IS real. You ARE enough even with these big, big feelings.”
I suspect many women that read mommy blogs back in the day, and many women that follow me now want to know the same thing about their experience with parenting:
Am I real? Which really means – Am I OK? Am I doing this right? Is this what it’s supposed to be?
For all these years of writing about parenting online and being a “mom blogger” I thought I just wanted to support other moms. I did. I do. I absolutely do.
But, I realized today that my existential crisis was the motivating factor in all of it.
I needed to know that my messy, unpredictable, anxiety inducing experience as a mom was like someone else’s.
That little child still within me that wondered all the time if she was real, or enough with all those big emotions, still needed to know if she is real now.
Am I the mom? Am I the one that’s supposed to know how to do this? Are these feelings normal?
Perhaps a lot of your favorite mom bloggers are really just willing to put their existential crisis out into the universe in the hopes that the universe gives something back to them.
The answer we’re all searching for in this parenting journey.
Am I the mom? Am I the one that’s supposed to know how to do this? Are these feelings normal?
Am I real?
I realized today that was perhaps the motive all those years ago behind why I became a “mommy blogger.” I was really just having an existential crisis.
And I finally have the answer for all of us.
You are good. You are enough. This is hard. It’s going to be OK. You are normal. You might be screwing some things up, but they’ll forgive you. You are a good mom.
Yes, you are real.
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