starting a family brings up everything you’ve ever buried

I never really understood what people meant when they said that starting a family brings up everything you’ve ever buried… until I fell in love with Karl. Until we built a life together. Until I became a mum.

Loving him felt different from anything I’d ever known. For the first time, I felt safe. Truly, deeply safe. Loved in a way that didn’t come with conditions or expectations. Wanted simply because I existed. And for a while, I think I let myself believe that love like that could heal it all. That it could somehow quiet the little girl inside me who had spent her whole life wondering if she was too much or not enough.

But love doesn’t erase what was never given. And it was in building our family that I realised just how loud my inner child still was.

When we welcomed our boys into the world, something shifted. Holding them, loving them, watching Karl become the kind of father I never had… it cracked something open inside me that I didn’t even know was still closed. It was beautiful, but it was also the most triggering thing I’ve ever experienced.

Because as I poured love into them, as I held them through their tears and soothed them in ways I never knew as a child, I felt her. The little girl inside me. The one who had learned long ago that love could be taken away. That softness was dangerous. That needing someone meant risking being left.

And suddenly, she was everywhere. In the moments my boys clung to me, needing me. In the sound of their cries. In the weight of the responsibility I carried to be the safe place I never had. She rose to the surface, begging me to see her. To love her. To choose her, too.

There were days I didn’t know who I was crying for, me or them. Days where their innocent need for me felt so overwhelming because it mirrored everything I had longed for as a child. The comfort. The safety. The knowing that no matter what, someone would stay.

I found myself triggered in ways I couldn’t explain. Snapping when I didn’t want to. Shutting down when the emotions felt too big. And underneath it all was that same little girl, still carrying the belief that love had to be earned, that she was too much, that needing too deeply would only ever end in abandonment.

But here’s what love and motherhood taught me… she’s still here. And she still needs me.

So, piece by piece, I’ve learned to love her. To hold her. To let her cry and rage and feel all the things she never got to feel safely. To tell her she is wanted, she is safe, she is loved, not because of what she does, but because of who she is.

Loving Karl and raising our boys didn’t just give me the family I always dreamed of… it gave me the chance to finally come home to myself. To meet the little girl inside me and give her everything she spent her whole life waiting for.

And I’ll be honest… it’s been the hardest, most beautiful thing I’ve ever done. But slowly, I’m learning that I can love them and love me. I can be their safe place and still choose to become mine. And every single day, that feels like healing.

With love & support,

Shorina | Mindful Soul Collective

Holistic Counsellor, Wellbeing Coach & Business Mentor

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