Becoming the Steady One

There are some roles we do not choose.

In my own childhood, unpredictability meant my mother would sometimes leave without notice — days, sometimes longer — and I learned early how to hold things together.

When unpredictability lives in the home, someone often quietly becomes the steady one. Meals still need to be made. Homework still needs to be done. The world outside still expects normalcy, even when the inside feels uncertain. Sometimes the child becomes the one who watches the clock, the one who anticipates absence, the one who grows up faster than she should.

There is a particular kind of strength that forms in those years. It is not loud nor is it celebrated. It is simply necessary.

Yesterday, I found women who understood that kind of beginning. We carried different stories, and I don't know all of theirs yet, but there was a shared knowing — the experience of having complicated mothers, of loving and losing in ways that do not fit neatly into conversation.

There are some things that there is no clean recovery from and no returning to what should have been. Childhood does not rewind. Absence does not undo itself. There is comfort in being understood at that depth, and acknowledgement changes something.

But healing asks us to grow beyond origin stories. When we stop trying to erase what formed us, we can begin to choose how it lives inside us.

I cannot undo the years of becoming the steady one, but I can decide what that steadiness serves now. Strength that formed too early does not have to harden us.
It can deepen us. What once protected can become wisdom, and what once felt like survival can become compassion.

We do not always recover from the past.

Sometimes we have to choose to integrate it — and use it for good.