Where I Still Go

In the passenger seat, I felt myself slip. Not emotionally — physically. That tiny, familiar float that happens when someone snaps at me before I even finish my sentence. And the worst part wasn’t the reaction itself. I get it. We left late. We’re arriving late. We don’t just leave our kids with anyone. Even when we stay with people we trust, we’d never ask them to watch the kids so we could go out — even if the bar is only a few blocks from the Airbnb. That’s just not how we do things.

So when I joked about something I’d like to do — something that would only even be possible if we had found a sitter — it wasn’t a request. It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t pressure. It was just a passing thought. A light comment. And before I even finished the sentence, he shut it down. Fast. Sharp. Final. My adult brain understood the logistics. But my body didn’t react to the situation. It reacted to the tone. The speed. The shutdown. One second I was joking, and the next I was halfway out of myself — dissociating so quickly I almost didn’t catch it. And when I realized what was happening, I had to swallow tears for the little version of me who learned to disappear the moment someone’s voice got sharp.

There’s something destabilizing about catching yourself dissociating while you’re still mid‑conversation. Like your mind slips sideways without warning, and suddenly you’re both in the moment and hovering a few feet outside of it. And once you notice it — once you recognize the pattern — you can’t pretend it’s anything else. It’s not being dramatic. It’s not being sensitive. It’s your nervous system hitting an old alarm because something in the tone, the speed, the shutdown felt too familiar. Too close to a wound you thought you’d outgrown. And the awareness doesn’t soften the impact. It just makes it sharper, clearer, impossible to ignore — especially when you’re expected to pull yourself together and act like you didn’t just get knocked loose inside your own skin.

And maybe that’s what makes all of this hit so hard — the awareness that these aren’t just my trauma responses. They’re the ones I’m terrified I’ll inevitably pass down, no matter how minuscule. The ones I watch for in my daughters’ faces, in their hesitations, in the way they read the room before they speak. The ones I’m trying to unlearn in real time so they never have to learn them at all. It’s one thing to recognize your own wounds. It’s another to realize you’re fighting to keep even the smallest fragments of them from becoming inherited. And moments like tonight make that mission feel both urgent and impossibly tender.

And all of this sits on top of the daily choices I’m already making — the ones I have to remake every morning. Because I’m human. I slip. I yell more than I should. I hand over the tablet more often than I want to admit, especially with my oldest. Screens buy me breathing room on the days when my patience is thin and my nervous system is already stretched. And every time I fall short of the mother I want to be, there’s this fear that creeps in — the fear that I’m still passing something down. That even the smallest cracks in me will become the places they learn to bend themselves. That no matter how hard I try, some part of my old wounds will still echo in them.

But the thing I’m learning — slowly, painfully, honestly — is that the work isn’t in never slipping. It’s in noticing. It’s in choosing again. It’s in catching myself dissociating and coming back. It’s in apologizing when I yell. It’s in repairing instead of pretending. It’s in letting my daughters see a mother who is trying, not a mother who is perfect. Because maybe breaking the cycle isn’t about erasing every trace of the past. Maybe it’s about showing them what it looks like to face it, name it, and choose differently anyway.

I can’t rewrite where I came from, but I can stay present enough to notice the moments I still start to leave myself — and make sure my girls never feel like they have to follow me through that door.