Deserving

By eight weeks old, I knew that my mother hated me. Many of us have been taught that we couldn’t possibly remember what happened when we were infants, but in my experience that’s false. We remember if there’s something worth remembering. We remember if something leaves an imprint.

In Internal Family Systems therapy, which is guiding my healing process, we believe that every person has a Self. The Self is the endlessly loving and compassionate soul or light inside of you. For the past year and a half, I have felt that Self light up my body, growing stronger and stronger. This light, my essence and my being, has been there when I struggle or falter - to listen, to love, to comfort.  That light has helped my parts to heal and helped me to take actions that once seemed impossible, that express my true essence, my heart, my soul. But lately, I have been struggling. It feels like the light has been extinguished.

I’m struggling because I’m beginning to step into bigger shoes. I’m doing work as a leader that shows that I matter and my work matters and the people who I represent matter, but every setback shifts me back to feeling small.  There’s this part of me that believes that I deserve to stay small and hidden, that only those who were born into greatness can truly lead. There’s also this sense that I won’t be able to do the things that would really get my work off the ground because I don’t deserve to get my work fully off the ground. There’s a strong sense that I’m basically worthless.

I stop what I’m doing to sit with the part who feels worthless. I ask her to tell me about herself. What does she see from where she is in trauma time? What does she want me to know? 

When I sit with her, my inner light is present. 

When I write, my light is here.

I am a baby, she says. My mother brought me into this world for hate. She wanted a baby who could also be a mother. She wanted a baby who would embody the pure, unbridled love she never got. But I couldn’t do that. No baby could do that.

My mother wanted love and joy wrapped into a cute baby’s body. Aren’t babies called “bundles of joy,” after all? But I needed to nurse a lot. At six to eight weeks, she surmised that I had been the opposite of what she wanted.  “Having a baby ruined my life,” she would declare on repeat over the decades. “In a good way,” she would add, perhaps tasting a bit of the devastation her words caused. “What I mean is that you destroyed the life I had before, and I made a new life with you.” The addendums were not particularly comforting.

Sitting with this baby part of me, I learn that when I nursed as a baby, I didn’t get enough to eat. As I got older, my mom would talk a lot about how I had needed to eat every two hours, nursing and then falling asleep part way through. My baby part remembers what that was like, how my mom would angrily poke and prod me to wake up to finish eating, shaking me at times. For my baby part, what was going on was clear. I was here in this world to suffer. I needed to eat, and I wasn’t getting enough food, and that was why I nursed for so long and then fell asleep when I couldn’t take the lack of food any longer. Crying for food wouldn’t help either. She got angry when I cried. Perhaps she said the words I remember when I cried when I was older. “Oh stop it,” she’d say. “You’re fine.” 

Motherhood and feeding babies can be exhausting and draining. But when the baby isn’t getting what they need and the mother isn’t okay, it’s time to ask for support and to consider using formula. Instead, my mom blamed me for being a baby, and saw me as causing her suffering and harm.

So I’m sitting with that baby who never got what she needed from that mother. Who was then yelled at and teased and humiliated by both parents. Who later was raped and molested by her father.

Worthless.

Born into this world for suffering and pain.

Filled with light, I look at the baby. She looks at me with sweet, bright eyes. All that she is asking for is to be fed, not raped, and treated with basic kindness. But her parents couldn’t manage even that. 

The baby has a question. She asks, “My parents treated me terribly because I am worthless, right? Because there is something wrong with me and I am less than, and not deserving of the same as others, right?”

The light shines about her. I answer with light. “Your parents treated you that way because they were wrong. They are people filled with intergenerational pain and suffering, and that still doesn’t make what they did okay. You deserved to be treated with kindness and care, the way that every human deserves to be treated. Your parents treated you as though you were worthless. But they were wrong.” 

You are worthy and deserving.

It is safe to shine.

You are love and light.

It is safe to shine.