She Called It Abuse. I Called It Parenting.

My adult son confided in me that my adult daughter had told him I was abusive to her growing up.

As he shared, I was perplexed. We stood at my kitchen counter. I wiped crumbs from the granite onto the floor, ready to sweep them up before mopping. Dinner was over. A pile of dishes waited.

"How?" I asked.

He relayed her story—how I had once locked her in her room for hours, only allowing her to leave for the bathroom.

He waited for me to deny it.

I thought for a moment and said, "Yeah. I did that."

He was aghast.

"Did she tell you why she was in her room?" I asked, unbothered.

"No," he admitted.

"She was ten and didn’t want to go to school. You were five, and Tate was a newborn. She refused to leave the house. I had to get you to kindergarten and take the baby to the doctor. I realized I couldn’t drag a ten-year-old into the car, so I grounded her.

'If you think you can skip school and play video games or watch TV, you're wrong. If you won’t go to school, you’ll sit in your chair in your room with books to read. I’ll bring you lunch. You can only leave for the bathroom. When school hours are over, you can come out,' I told her."

My son's eyes widened with amusement and understanding. By now, I was loading the dishwasher.

"The person most traumatized was probably me," I continued. "When I got home, I went to check on her. I cracked open the door and saw she was covered in blood. I screamed.

"Turns out, she obeyed me but got a bloody nose while I was gone. Not daring to leave the chair, she used her shirt to stop the bleeding. I thought she had been murdered."

My son started laughing.

"I let her out of her punishment and never did it again. She never refused to go to school again."

I rolled my eyes, still cleaning. Abusive.

I thought about how my own mother made me sit in a chair for an hour when I refused to practice piano. I can’t count how many times I chose that over plinking at the ivory keys. I was stubborn. My daughter was the same.

Now, after 25 years of motherhood, would I handle that situation differently? Maybe. Maybe not.

I never imagined she would interpret it as abusive. But now, I wonder if it was.

Now, I might look deeper into why she didn’t want to go to school. Back then, I had a newborn, a kindergartener, and was likely battling postpartum depression. My patience was thin. I didn’t consider that she was struggling to adjust to a new family dynamic as much as I was.

What I did was alienate her. I ruled instead of communicating. It didn’t work. It became a childhood trauma for her.

I validate that.

And—I did what I thought was best.

That’s motherhood. Doing our best, getting it wrong, and reflecting.

As old as time.

I partnered with other women to share the stories of motherhood that don’t come with badges and ribbons. Unspoken Motherhood—stories of postpartum, miscarriage, child loss, adoption, and more.

See it here:

Unspoken Motherhood