You Belong To You
Recently, I was putting my daughter A to bed and she was upset. This wasn’t problematic, as an almost 5-year old who is a quadruple Scorpio (half her chart is water) and as an emotional Projector, this is fairly normal. But the conversation we were having was brand new territory for me as her mother, and I hope, affirming for her as my daughter.
Me: You seem upset, want to tell me what’s going on?
A: I don’t want to tell you
Me: OK. Is it a worry?*
A: No.
Me: Does it have to do with me?
A: No.
Me: Ok. Because if it does, you can tell me and I can try to fix it. You can tell me anything and I will still love you. But, also, you don’t need to tell me anything. You can have your own private thoughts.
You can have your own private thoughts.
As someone who experienced medical trauma at a very young age, who is a Pisces with moon in Scorpio, who is highly sensitive, who learned to navigate family life by anticipating needs and perfectionism, and experienced forms of enmeshment, having the permission to have my own private thoughts and feelings is radical. No, I don’t need to share everything I am feeling/thinking with other people. Yes, I can tell myself the truth. No, I do not need to act on that truth immediately or ever. I get to choose my pace. I get to process things with whomever I want (and do not owe others an explanation). I get to choose myself first.
And in the same vein, others do not owe me an explanation, do not have to tell me what’s going on, do not need to choose me over their relationship with themselves.
But it took me a long time to get here.
I’m an internal world kind of person (in case you somehow missed that 😂). I’m constantly taking things in, thinking about them, feeling them out, making connections, creating stories, noting patterns. I am happiest here and feel this is where my gifts thrive. Something like writing has always been a way to bridge the gap between my rich internal experience and how I exist in the external world.
I thrive on that deeper connection between myself and others when I do share or they share with me.
So it tracks that my daughter sharing with me is one of the highlights of my life (one of the ways mothering gets easier and easier for me is because she can share her wants/needs/questions/internal world with me verbally). And it is also so, so important to me that she knows, securely and deeply, that her relationship with herself is more important than her relationship with me. That she is absolutely allowed to have her own thoughts/feelings with no obligation to share them with me. And that she knows I love her regardless of how I feel about her thoughts and feelings.
Like a lot of things in parenting, I didn’t expect these topics of autonomy, privacy and respect to come up in this way so early in her life, but here we are. I am not perfect, but I felt proud that my instinct wasn’t to pry or to make my feelings about her emotional state about me. Was I disappointed she didn’t want to share with me? Sure. To be honest, I almost felt hurt, but what a great example of needing to turn towards myself for care when someone I love doesn’t want my help or to share their internal world with me. Another step away from codependency on my part. Another step towards my own embodied experience and giving others the space and trust to have their own.
*We have a shared language about worrisome thoughts from this children’s book Ruby Finds A Worry by Tom Percival.
This writing mentions: Astrology, Human Design, enmeshment, codependency, mothering, introversion and being highly sensitive.
If you find yourself interested in exploring your own experiences of privacy, mental/emotional processing, introversion, sensitivity or how your astrological or Human Design chart influences your experience (or that of your child’s), book a free call with me.