Today’s entry has been difficult to get to the point where I was comfortable writing about it. I’ve been very hesitant but I know that it’s just the fear talking. I’m hesitant because initially when I thought about writing on this topic I felt awful at the thought of my youngest son reading it one day. What would he think? I never want him to feel any kind of blame and I didn’t know how to properly write about it so I’ve avoided it. As I’ve previously posted I have two sons. My oldest is almost 3.5 years and my youngest not born from me is 2 and 3/4. He was born my nephew and at 9 months old came to live with us, he now calls us Momma and Daddy and loves his older brother.

I have an incredibly rocky past to say the least with my brother which led to trauma I was unaware of for about 25 years of my life. Having children brought it all out to the surface, my mind and body have been and are screaming at me to help myself. My oldest son coming along was what initially alerted me to something being ‘off’ inside of me. I thought it was just hormones, then going back to work then just being a mom which is hard on a good day but this was something else entirely I just had no clue what. My youngest coming along made it so I couldn’t possibly ignore it any longer and had to do the deep dive inward and start doing some damn work! I’m still on my way but my latest thoughts and feelings have eased something that has been plaguing me for months now and I was starting to feel hopeless about it.

I put an incredible amount of pressure on myself to love my youngest the exact same way as my oldest, in my head anything different was not acceptable it was not ‘real’ love just mirrored love. My thought process at the time was if I couldn’t love him the same as my first then it didn’t feel like enough love and as he grew he would feel that and what does that look like for his future? From that head space my brain took off planning a future that involved a lack of love for him because I was incapable of it, or at least that was the narrative I had in my head. As you can imagine the stress, anxiety, guilt and shame that came from those thoughts was debilitating to say the least. I had periods of numbness where no emotion got through just an empty feeling not good or bad just blah and blank. I would also have random days of feeling despair where I just had to leave the kids in the house with my husband and go outside and just cry. I couldn’t reason why I was crying but I knew enough to know it was a release from my body that was coming out uncontrollably. I wouldn’t let feelings in because I was hiding from them and not allowing myself to ask questions and get to the true root of what was happening. I was genuinely afraid of what I would find there within myself, I didn’t want to find out that I was broken. I understand now that I had a belief that even though I completed EMDR and had done a lot of work on myself up to this point that this was the end of the road for me, this was as far as I would get. I was associating all of these negative beliefs to the arrival of my youngest and because my love was different for each boy that automatically meant bad and I was broken.

I was too ashamed to let myself feel the feelings of differentiation because to me that meant less in regards to my youngest. Once I let myself open up to it and really started asking myself some questions I started to become comfortable with opening up that topic and exploring. A big turning point for me was I had a really good conversation with my sister. She has a son and younger daughter, I won’t go into detail on her story just to say that it took her the first 6 years of her daughters life to realize that love doesn’t need to be the same for each child. The only thing that made sense to me at the time that I could compare it to was in regards to parenting. You can have 5 kids and you may need to parent each one quite differently, so I sat with that thought for a while.

I went over my parenting and noticed that I absolutely parent each boy very differently, they had different starts to this world that I’ve always remained sensitive to. In the beginning I started parenting them the same and figured out pretty quickly that was not going to fly so I had to gain some knowledge and apply it. I already knew my parenting styles were different and that was very much okay but this thought kept sticking with me, if I can parent different why can’t I love different? You see, I didn’t have two children born from me to understand that love is different for each child. It doesn’t mean less, it’s unique individually. Maybe if I had two children born from me before my youngest came it would have made it easier, although I am a believer in things happening the way they are supposed to so I know I had to learn it this way.

Even though my sister gave me the thought and intellectually I knew it made sense, I still didn’t believe it in my heart there was a disconnect. Then I used my fail safe method, what would I suggest to a friend in this situation. I would tell a good friend to take your time, settle in, adjust and for shit sakes breathe! I would never judge them or ridicule them for telling me they love their children differently, it made so much sense it started to click. I yet again wasn’t taking the advice for myself that I would give the people closest to me, I was doing myself a huge disservice. It’s so damn hard when you care so much and don’t want to mess these sweet little humans up with your baggage. That’s why I will always owe my progress to those boys and my dedication to seeing it through. I required outside motivation to start but it also had to be for me, I had to want to heal otherwise, well frankly I don’t care to even think about where that ship would have sailed.

I can see now I have done a lot of mirroring emotions, knowing what the proper reaction should be and giving it to people whether I actually felt it or not so as not to piss anybody off or upset them by my lack of fucks to give. Turns out I wasn’t broken just switched off somewhere along the way. I still struggle with letting in positive emotions, these days I focus on letting the trauma release from my body. I’m still today becoming familiar with this new thought and constantly reminding myself to integrate it by reassuring myself it’s okay and I’ve got this. They are both happy and healthy and I love the shit out of them both, maybe now I can breathe for a while and settle into this notion that it’s going to be okay. I don’t have to prep for every disaster my brain can conjure up, I can just…be…and that’s enough for me.

If anyone reading this can relate to anything I’ve said, my advice would be to make sure you search for proof of your negative thoughts before you go believing them. Trust me.

To be continued…