History repeats itself until it doesn’t. I was living my 20s and early-mid 30s as if I was still 5-8 years old. I always knew that I was repeating patterns based on what I experienced and learned as a kid, but it hit different today. It’s like I zoomed out and looked at my life from a bird’s-eye view. It made me feel really sad for that version of myself that knew I was making choices based on past experiences. I couldn’t help myself from continuing those patterns. They were so ingrained in my subconscious mind and body that no matter how hard I tried to make different choices I couldn’t. I used to feel a lot of shame about that.
Years ago I found an old VHS tape with my full name written on it in cursive handwriting. I kept that tape for years without ever watching it. Then last year, an old boyfriend in LA randomly had a VCR and I finally got to see what was on it.
For some reason I always thought the footage would be a couple hours of holidays in the 80s and 90s and other nostalgic, inconsequential moments. The footage was nostalgic, but it wasn’t inconsequential. It was 15 minutes of my mom recording me, and only me, at around 4 years old. I don’t have a relationship with my mom and haven’t for 17 years. So watching those moments made me feel emotional for a lot of different reasons, but mainly because it’s one of the only times I got to see my mom totally focused on and interested in me.
She asked pretty standard questions like what I wanted to be when I grow up and what’s my favorite color. I told her I wanted to be a singer and dancer on stage and that my favorite color was pink. We changed my outfit 3 times in those 15 minutes. She recorded me dancing to Kokomo by the Beach Boys. That little girl version of me looked contemplative, creative, and happy to be with her mom. It seemed like I was taking things in, but I also felt safe and important. That VHS tape got stuck in the VCR so it was the only time I got to watch it. Strangely, it felt timely.
My parents split when I was about 5 years old, and of course that changed things. But it was what happened after the split that changed everything. My mom married a guy pretty fast after separating from my dad. My grandparents used to call him a con artist. I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew that things weren’t good.
It started with us moving into an apartment or condo, staying for a couple months, entering a school system, and then leaving to move into another apartment/town/school system. This pattern happened 4 times in one school year while they were married. My older brother (from my mom’s first marriage) and I weren’t sure what was going on, but again we knew it wasn’t good. As an adult, I realized they were skipping out on rent (and maybe other things) and had to move to different towns to find new places for us to live. I can remember slowly noticing that my mom was changing which was also changing something in me.
The biggest change happened when my mom’s husband made a move that he should not have made. Again, my 5 year old self knew that it was not good. So my 5 year old self immediately told my mom. I’m not sure if she didn’t know what to believe or if she was afraid to believe it—she went to him for what was what. He denied it, and I was told to never repeat that truth again because his denial turned my truth into a lie. In that moment my 5 year old self learned that my truth, my experience, my safety, and my needs come second. I learned that it wasn’t safe to speak up and ask for help. I learned that maybe I shouldn’t trust myself, my decisions, my intuition. I learned that maybe I wasn’t worthy or deserving of love.
My mom and that guy were married for less than a year. About a year or so later she married a new guy. I was around 7 years old the first time I saw him beating her. It was nighttime and I heard yelling. I opened my bedroom door and saw him standing above her, pulling her up by her long, thick hair. I was scared so I shut the door and pulled the covers over my head. She came into my room, locked the door, and got into bed with me. She was crying and asking me to help her. In that moment my 7 year old self learned that I needed to grow up fast and figure things out even faster. My mom and her husband couldn’t take care of themselves so they couldn’t take care of me and my siblings. We’d put water in our cereal. In other words, we didn’t have our basic needs met for 6-7 years. It was legally decided that my brother would move out and live with his paternal grandma. I didn’t really understand how the conditions were unlivable for him, but livable for me.
I experienced normalcy, safety, and had my needs met at my dad’s house. I’m grateful that I grew up with a big extended family—I had a lot of safety in that sense. I also had so many examples of healthy, loving, secure families around me. I stayed with different aunts, uncles, and cousins all the time. So I got to see and experience what consistent homes felt like. Which also had it’s affect on me. On one hand, I felt super lucky. I always maintained the perspective that a lot of people have it worse. On the other hand, I felt like I wasn’t worthy or deserving of consistent love and safety because there was a bunch of chaos going on and nobody stepped in. But now I believe that everyone was just doing their best, including my mom.
She divorced her 4th husband and we had a few years of calm. She had a boyfriend that my siblings and I loved. He was so kind, attentive, safe. He wanted to marry her, but I think safety felt unsafe to her so she broke it off. She flew solo for a while and then married another man who brought new, even more difficult habits into the mix. I eventually needed to make the choice to choose myself before I moved to New York at 21.
These experiences shifted my intuition from a state of creativity and exploration into a state of constant hypervigilance. I did 10 years of therapy across several different modalities. That was all helpful for understanding why I did what I was doing, but wasn’t helping me break the patterns. It’s the inner work I’ve done over the past 18 months that helped me undo a lot of what was done. Once I committed to the difficult work, things started to change.
The biggest change happened a few months ago when I decided to forgive my mom. Just like the old VHS tape, I found an old photo album that I hadn’t seen in about 17 years. It had pictures of us together when I was a baby. She had me in her early 20s, and I realized that she was just beautiful and lost through all of it—dealing with her own internal struggles. That realization made it possible to also forgive myself, and I’m certain that choice changed everything.
