Cracked Open
Parenting, Healing, and the Parts of Us We Can’t Ignore
Becoming a Parent Changes Everything
Having kids exposes you in ways nothing else does.
It guts you.
Rips you open.
Shifts something fundamental inside of you.
Suddenly, your heart is no longer safely inside your chest — it’s walking around outside your body, moving through the world on its own schedule, in its own little form.
Parenting rewires your mind in ways you don’t fully understand until you’re in it. Thoughts change. Priorities shift. The way you see yourself, other people, and the world is completely rearranged.
It is terrifying, beautiful, and messy all at once.
Parenting and the Reality of Healing
I’ve come to believe that healing is not just something that happens alongside parenting — it’s part of it.
It’s one of the ingredients.
The irony is that most people don’t realize they’ll need to heal in order to parent well, or at least more consciously. And even when we do realize it, the harder question becomes: heal from what, exactly?
That’s where things get complicated.
Because often, we don’t fully know what needs healing until we’re already deep into parenting, and something small our child does suddenly triggers something much bigger in us.
It’s almost like children have a way of gently (and sometimes not so gently) revealing the parts of us we’ve managed to avoid.
Awareness Is Not the Same as Action
Being in therapy, or even just being self-aware, can make you more conscious of the need to heal. You start to notice patterns. You start to recognize your triggers. You start to understand your history a little more clearly.
But awareness alone isn’t enough.
Self-awareness and action exist on different sides of the same coin, and one doesn’t really matter without the other. Knowing something about yourself is one thing. Actually working with it, sitting with it, and changing how you respond is something else entirely.
Learning to sit with yourself is a skill. And like any skill, it takes practice. It doesn’t come naturally to everyone, especially when your nervous system is already stretched thin by the demands of parenting.
But it becomes necessary.
Because children have a way of bringing every unprocessed part of you to the surface.
When Your Children Become Your Mirror
Becoming a parent forces you to look at your own life in a very different way.
You start to examine how you were raised, how you currently respond to stress, and what patterns you might unintentionally pass down without even realizing it. You begin to unpack things you may have avoided for years, simply because there was never an urgent reason to face them.
And then you become a parent.
And suddenly, there is urgency.
You start asking yourself hard questions. You start wondering what parts of your own story might unintentionally impact your children later in life. And sometimes, there are no clear answers — just awareness and responsibility sitting side by side.
It also gives you a new perspective on your own parents.
You begin to see them as human beings. People who were also carrying their own unresolved experiences, their own trauma, their own limitations, while trying to raise you the best way they knew how at the time.
That realization can be heavy. But it can also be grounding, because it makes the complexity of parenting more real and less idealized.
The Hard and Honest Truth About Parenting
There is nothing easy about raising children. Every part of it is hard in its own way.
I used to think I could avoid my blind spots or work around them. But children have a way of bringing them directly to the surface, where they can’t be ignored anymore.
It’s uncomfortable. It’s humbling. Sometimes it feels overwhelming.
And still, there’s something undeniably powerful about it.
Because in the middle of all that discomfort, there is also growth. There is also awareness. There is also the slow process of becoming someone more honest with themselves.
Parenting is brutal and beautiful at the same time. And both things can be true in the same breath.
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