Learning to Thrive in Survival

A Reflection on Parenting, Healing, and the Cycles We Choose to Break

It is often said that there is no rule book that comes with parenting. Truthfully, I think that’s just something parents say to comfort themselves when they feel lost and helpless. There could be guidance, if the hard stuff was ever actually talked about. But it isn’t. So, we’re all just guessing, armed with whatever we survived ourselves.

I was eleven when I got my first real taste of motherhood. My little brother was born, followed promptly by my mother grappling with post-partum depression, and my dad returning to prison. My life felt like it had shifted into a reality I didn’t recognize. I was suddenly responsible for caring for a baby, while I ached for a childhood I felt was slipping through my fingers in real time.

In the 90’s, mental health was slowly beginning to become something people talked about more openly. Diagnoses were being thrown around like suggestive definitions for pain and behaviors people couldn’t understand. Pills were shoved down people’s throats to mitigate the symptoms of struggle and trauma. No one was chasing a diagnosis; they were after an explanation for why existing felt so overwhelming.

By the 00’s, labels became a trend. Everyone wanted to have a way to tell the world who they were. The desire to be understood was more important than defining one’s own identity. I blame the internet and the creation of social media for a lot of it. There was this driving need to be included, to be seen and heard by others who understood. To those of us who felt alone in crowded rooms or invisible to the people who claimed to love us; the internet gave us a place to be someone who was visible.

When my brother was born, I didn’t have an understanding of post-partum depression or trauma. There was no support system designed to help a pre-teen navigate raising a baby and herself. My mother was there, in our life, but stuck in survival mode, which was something no one really understood back then. Fight or flight was a term only used for those who had severe and obvious trauma. There was no help for people whose trauma whispered.

So, while my mother fought with her demons, I ignored mine. My thought was, “Someone has to take care of the baby beyond feeding and making sure he stays alive. Someone has to love him and teach him how to love others.”. That became my mission. As much as I’d love to say I did a great job at ignoring my demons and raising my brother, I can’t. He has grown into an amazing and wonderful man. Not because of me, or in spite of our childhood, but because of who he is. We both did our best with what we had, to raise ourselves, even as the demons persisted.

I gave birth to my first child in 2011. It felt like a surprise at the time, to find out I was pregnant, but considering the things I was doing to run away from myself, it really wasn’t.

A lot happened right after I found out I was going to “officially” be a mother. The details aren’t the relevant information for this essay, but they led to me being without a home and single while carrying a baby. I made a decision when I was about three months pregnant; my child would never carry the weight of my pain. It was important to me that I be a better parent than the ones who raised me. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what trauma was or that I had any, which means I had no clue that I was living in survival mode. By the time I got diagnosed with PTSD, I was pregnant with child number four, and about to get a crash course in post-partum psychosis.

I have five children now. My oldest was diagnosed with Autism at age three. My second kiddo was diagnosed with Autism at age seven, after also being diagnosed with DMDD, ODD, ADHD, Anxiety, Depression, and sensory processing disorder. We were told, more than once, that their gender was the reason that they were so “emotional”. Fighting for a diagnosis became something that I felt I had to do so that I, and others, could fully understand what they were going through. My fourth kiddo was diagnosed with an intellectual disability and complex ADHD at age seven, and recently OCD has been added to that list.

My other two children don’t have official diagnoses, but I find myself watching for it. When my ten-year-old struggles to sit still or focus their attention or sit through ten minutes of a tv show without launching into a ted talk, I wonder if they have ADHD. When my four-year-old lines up her gummy snacks by color or is overwhelmed by textures and loud noises or walks only on her toes, I wonder if there is a touch of the tism there.

It wasn’t until I started mothering myself that I realized that a diagnosis is just a label, not a definition. And that is a wonderful thing to understand! But it doesn’t lift the weight that label still carries.

Most people hear “Autism” or “ADHD” or “DMDD” and think they understand. They assume that a diagnosis is one size fits all. They don’t see that when my son spends two hours screaming that he hopes we die, that we’re stupid and fat and ugly, he’s not a bad kid and we’re not bad parents. He’s screaming at himself. We only hear it because he feels safe enough with us to let it out. He’s the second of my children to live with this intensity, and if I hadn’t started parenting myself first, I wouldn’t be able to parent him at all.

How do you explain to people that you don’t leave the house because your full-time job is keeping your child safe from himself? How do you watch the light fade from your kid’s eyes, day after day, as they get tired of surviving their own mind? How do you give your child hope while they sit on waitlists for help that may or may not come? How do you tell them the medicine that’s supposed to help is making things worse? How do you teach a child to thrive in survival mode, when it’s the only mode you know how to teach, because it’s the only one you were ever taught?

How do you explain any of this to the people who decide it’s easier to just disappear?

It would be easy to blame my parents for all of it. But healing meant taking accountability for my own choices and learning that the cycle doesn’t break itself. Someone has to choose, every day, to be different. That someone is me.

Choosing myself may have looked selfish to the observer. I stopped reaching out, stopped attempting to explain, I stopped offering a window into my life to people who only wanted to gawk. But that time I invested in myself, gave my children safety and security that I didn’t know I was capable of providing.

I’m teaching my children to create their own identities and show me who they are. I’m showing them how to set boundaries and how to reinforce them. I am giving them examples of how to care for themselves without shame or guilt. And I am proving to them that even in the midst of their own storms, they have a mom that knows how to float as they learn how to swim.

Our days may be fraught with meltdowns and exhaustion, but we still create art together, play together, and find ways to thrive within our survival. As my children get older, I find myself feeling gratitude for the forging I have endured. Because without it, I wouldn’t have found the strength to confront my own pain, or help them carry theirs.

So, I suppose, this is more than just a journal entry. It’s also a reminder to stop looking at labels as definitions. There is a person underneath that neon sign. The DSM-5 may define a diagnosis, but it doesn’t tell you a thing about the person living within it. We are more than the labels we wear, and not everyone feels the desire to explain. Compassion should be universal, and kindness should be the foundation of human interaction. You cannot understand something you know nothing about, and you can’t learn anything if you constantly stand in a place of judgment and insecurity. Maybe, if we all spent a bit more time parenting ourselves the way we wish our parents would have, the children we raise wouldn’t have to carry the weight of our pain.