Protective Parents

Imagine living your life entirely for the safety of three other human beings who rely on you for their survival. Literally, every decision, every breath shaped around keeping them safe. That is what motherhood looks like when you are raising children in an abusive environment. You almost become attuned to a lioness primal instinct.

My daughters are my love, my life, my purpose as with many parents and caregivers. However, when you live through abuse together, the bond between mother and child becomes something deeper than many would understand. You learn everything about them and almost train them not to trigger the beast if you like. It becomes a bond forged in survival that is again extremely primal.

I have three daughters. My oldest is twenty-six with a degree in Fine Art and manages the front of house in a wine bar and coffee house. My second twenty-five, graduated with a first‑class degree in Law and now manages a large retail store. My youngest is twenty and about to begin her third year studying Politics and Sociology. They are brilliant, capable, compassionate, and extremely fierce feminists.

But they are also young women who once barricaded their mum into a room to keep her safe. They have witnessed things no child should ever see. They have heard words no child should ever hear. I am so grateful to see them thrive. I know much of their resilience is because of their childhood. But I also know, there must have been times they were terrified.

Being a protective parent, a mother, living with abuse, you become hypervigilant. You become shield, negotiator, planner, peacekeeper. Calculating risk constantly. Anticipating every shift in mood testing temperatures constantly and finding the noise in silence.

You cook, clean, organise, plan, fix, soothe, and distract. Obviously acts of service are a way I show love, but they also filled my silence, that space between where my trauma crept in. the constant sound of a tuning fork reminds me of my unworthiness causing people to treat me this way, Busy was best! Still is really.

I encouraged every outside activity I could- Brownies, Guides, dance, gymnastics, trampolining, drama school. I wanted them to have healthy spaces, to know that the world was bigger than the walls we lived within

The Guilt Children Carry

Now, as adults, my daughters talk to me a bit more openly about the abuse they witnessed and its apparent that children are victims of this too. They tell me what they saw, what they felt, what they feared. And much like the young survivors I supported in my youth work, they carry guilt. They feel sad for me. They feel responsible for things that was never their doing. Thats what is so hard to sit with, children who grow up in abusive homes don't just survive the abuse. They survive the guilt of watching someone they love, do it to someone they love. They want to protect both, they feel guilty for loving a parent that caused harm and they feel bad that they were unable to protect the parent being harmed.

And as mothers, we carry our own guilt too. The guilt of not being able to protect them from everything. The guilt of being distracted, stressed, emotionally stretched. The guilt of wondering whether we gave them enough of ourselves. Of course I probably overindulged them materialistically when I was able, we do what we do, right?

COVID was a gift!

For us, COVID was a strange kind of blessing, we were together, just the four of us. I loved it, and for the first time in years we had space to simply exist. We cooked, painted, watched films, took courses. During the birthday week that my youngest and I share, we built a den in the living room to watch Harry potter and didn’t take it down for a month!!!! We got to know each other outside of crisis.

When guilt creeps in the guilt of wondering whether I gave them enough, I remind myself of that time and while I know many people suffered so much, I am grateful for that space to show my children me, all of me, as me.

Learning to Sit with Myself

Last year I lost everything, like a complete shedding of relationship, kids moving out, losing my dog, my home, my job, leaving the city that held me during my recovery and where I had built a network and career. I found myself alone for the first time in my life, not one night had I spent alone in my entire life and I was forty-four!! What I realised slowly was that my biggest struggle is silence, in fact that silence and being alone with my thoughts was actually very loud.

As a child I learned hypervigilance. I feel my whole life waiting for the next explosion. As an adult, I unconsciously recreated those patterns because they felt familiar. I stayed busy, always moving. I stayed in relationships that consumed me because the alternative sitting with myself felt unbearable. Even after therapy, even after EMDR silence still feels like something I must survive.

For the Mothers Who are feeling this emptiness right now

If there is one message, I want women especially mothers to take from this part of my story, it is this, whatever you did, you did to survive, whatever choices you made, you made to protect yourself and your children.

The judgment of people who have never lived your life should never reach your heart space.

When you have had to navigate systems that did not help. When the court systems hand a child to the abuser, without trying to understand, the impact abuse has on the protective parent and the children. I was lucky not to have had this scenario, but I have worked with so many women who have. I did have to work through social services telling me if I let my child see my abuser I was not taking care of her and I had police once tell me I was being spiteful not letting a dad see his children, which was a bit confusing. Services have too often deemed the abused parent as chaotic or the abusive parent better equipped financially.

But..... 

You did what you had to do, kept going, kept striving to keep your children safe, emotionally, physically, spiritually.

And when your children are grown, when the house becomes quiet, when there is no one left to cook for, or walk to clubs, or deal with bedtime drama or school time drama, it feels strange and empty. It can feel like abandonment, like a lack of purpose.

But the silence is not really a punishment. Its more like a space to hold you, while waiting for you to come back to you.

We are taught to live day by day, hour by hour as we recover. But it can be tough learning what to do when abuse ends and mothering role physically ends, when you have to watch from afar. But they are where they are because of you, you have held the fort well and now you get to see them flourish. Learn to use the silence as a doorway to the next part of your journey. To let it hold you while you find your own wants, your own likes, your own needs. To discover who you are from a place of safety and freedom maybe for the first time in your life.

You protected everyone else for so long. Now the task is to protect yourself. To reclaim your inner sanctuary. To rebuild your identity not around survival, but around sovereignty.