Hi,
I met up with my Auntie recently.
My mum's sister.
And I don't think I expected it to affect me quite as much as it did.
There is something strange about sitting across from somebody who comes from the same family as a person who hurt you.
Someone who grew up beside them.
Who shares pieces of their history.
Their childhood.
Their parents.
Maybe certain expressions or mannerisms you recognise without even meaning to.
Family resemblance isn't always just a face.
Sometimes it's a laugh.
A word.
The way somebody moves their hands when they talk.
Tiny things that can make your brain go,
I know that.
And I think some part of me had prepared for that.
What I hadn't prepared for was how different she felt.
Not physically.
Not in some enormous, dramatic way.
Just in the ways that mattered.
She was kind.
She cared.
And I don't mean the polite kind of caring where somebody asks how you are because that's what people say when they haven't seen each other for a while.
I mean I could feel it.
That's difficult to explain without making it sound bigger than it was.
Because from the outside, it probably wasn't big at all.
Two people meeting.
Talking.
Catching up.
A hug.
Nothing particularly remarkable.
Except sometimes the smallest things find the exact part of you that needed them.
And apparently there is still a little girl somewhere inside me who notices when a woman looks at her with care.
I felt something maternal from my aunt.
That's the only way I can describe it.
Not that she was trying to become my mother.
She wasn't.
I wasn't looking for her to.
There was no replacement happening.
No strange rewriting of family roles.
It was simply warmth.
The instinct to care whether I was okay.
The feeling that somebody was listening because they actually wanted to know.
Kindness without having to earn it first.
And then she hugged me.
God.
The hug.
It's ridiculous sometimes, the things that undo you.
I've survived things that should have broken me and somehow carried on functioning.
I've built a life.
I've become a wife.
I've become a mother.
I've learned how to make a home feel safe.
I've written entire books about people surviving things.
I can talk about childhood and trauma and healing and boundaries and all the complicated things I've spent years trying to understand.
And then somebody hugs me kindly and suddenly there's a little girl inside me going,
Oh.
I think she needed that.
I think I needed that.
There are certain kinds of affection that feel different when you've spent years grieving the person you should have received them from.
Mothering my own children has taught me that over and over again.
I'll stroke Isla's hair when she's upset and sometimes wonder how anybody could look at their little girl hurting and not immediately want to make it better.
Arthur will reach for me and I'll pick him up without thinking.
One of them will cry and something in my body responds before my brain has even worked out what happened.
Come here.
I've got you.
You're safe.
It's instinctive.
And becoming a mother has made me realise how many of those tiny things matter.
Not just feeding children and clothing them and keeping them alive.
The softness.
The checking.
The noticing.
The way your face changes when your child walks into the room upset.
The hug that doesn't require an explanation first.
The feeling of being someone's safe place.
I've spent years making peace with the fact that I didn't always have that in the way I needed it.
Or perhaps making peace is too neat.
I don't think you make peace with everything.
Some things you simply stop fighting with every day.
There are parts of childhood I can understand intellectually now.
I can look at adults as adults rather than as the enormous figures they were when I was small.
I can recognise their choices.
Their failures.
Their limitations.
I can understand that sharing DNA with somebody doesn't automatically make them safe.
And I've learned that protecting myself doesn't require me to hate everybody connected to them.
That one has been important.
Because families are strange like that.
We talk about them as units.
Her family.
His family.
That side.
As though everybody born from the same branches must somehow carry the same fruit.
But they don't.
My aunt is my mother's sister.
And she is not my mother.
That sounds obvious written down.
Of course she isn't.
But emotionally, I think there was something surprisingly healing in experiencing the difference.
The same family can produce very different people.
The same history can be carried differently.
People get to choose what they do with what happened to them.
They get to choose how they love.
How they speak.
How they treat people.
Whether they repeat things or end them.
And sitting with my aunt, I wasn't sitting with an extension of my mum.
I was sitting with her.
A woman who showed me kindness.
A woman whose care I could feel.
A woman who hugged me and somehow touched a bruise she probably couldn't see.
I think healing is often described far too beautifully.
Like one day you understand everything and release the past and walk into the sunset as a completely emotionally regulated human being who drinks enough water and never gets triggered again.
Unfortunately, nobody appears to have informed my nervous system of this arrangement.
My healing has been much messier.
Sometimes it's enormous.
Walking away.
Setting boundaries.
Building a family of my own.
Choosing a completely different kind of home for my children.
Writing things I've spent years being afraid to say.
But sometimes healing is almost embarrassingly small.
It's realising you didn't panic somewhere you normally would.
It's hearing something that once would have destroyed your entire day and noticing it only hurts for an hour.
It's accepting love without immediately searching it for danger.
It's being hugged by your mother's sister and letting yourself be held.
Not stiffening.
Not analysing.
Not wondering what it costs.
Just...
being hugged.
I don't think that little girl inside me disappeared when I became an adult.
I used to think growing up meant leaving her behind.
That eventually I would become so far removed from childhood that none of it could reach me anymore.
Instead, I think I've carried her with me.
She comes out in strange places.
On buses.
In certain voices.
In the way I scan rooms.
In the way I mother.
In the things I write.
In the enormous importance I place on my children knowing they can always come home to me.
She's still there.
But she's not alone anymore.
She has me.
She has the family I've created.
She has a husband who shows me what safe love looks like in a thousand boring, beautiful ways.
She has two little people who have unknowingly taught me more about love than I knew there was to learn.
And now, perhaps, she has another memory too.
A maternal hug from a woman who shares some of the same history but none of the same hurt.
I don't want to make that hug responsible for healing something enormous.
That's too much weight to put on one moment.
It didn't fix everything.
I didn't walk away suddenly untouched by my childhood.
But something softened.
Just a little.
And I think healing might actually happen like that more often than we realise.
Not one enormous moment where the wound disappears.
Tiny experiences that teach your body something different.
A safe person.
A kind voice.
A hand held out without wanting anything back.
A hug.
Another piece of evidence that the world contains something other than what you first learned from it.
My mother's sister hugged me.
And for a moment, I wasn't thinking about everything I didn't have.
I was just feeling what I had right then.
Care.
Kindness.
Warmth.
Something maternal.
And somewhere inside the woman I've become, the little girl I used to be got held too.
I think she healed a tiny bit that day.
So did I.
— Lia x
0 comments