I'm writing this from my parent-in-law’s home.
We've been traveling for a few days now and it has been a lot. Flights getting canceled, sleep all off, extended family dynamics doing what extended family dynamics do, and me just trying to parent through all of it in the middle of the chaos.
Then something happened that made me stop.
Someone close to us shared something with me about one of my kids. Something about how she'd been feeling on the inside that I hadn't fully seen. When I heard it I immediately understood.
The shame came fast. I should have seen this sooner. I should have created enough space for her to bring this to me instead of someone else. I should have done something to prevent us from getting here.
Then, slowly, a more honest thought started to surface. My daughter didn't keep this inside. She didn't bury it or pretend everything was fine. She found someone she trusted and she told them the truth about how she was feeling. That's actually exactly what we want our kids to do. The version of this story I should be more worried about is the one where she tells nobody at all.
Even knowing that, the question I couldn't shake was: How did we get here?
I knew this. I had all the pieces. Why didn't I put this together sooner?
The inner critic was loud that night. You already knew this. You should have moved faster. You're a psychologist. You eat, breathe, and sleep this stuff day in and day out. What happened girl?
I let her talk for a little while, because some of it I needed to hear. The awareness hurt, but it was also clarifying. Okay. I see it now. I really see it. Now what am I going to do about it?
I'm sharing this because sitting with that guilt, really sitting with it, I started asking myself how we got here. Not in a self-punishing way, but genuinely. How does this happen in a family where everyone loves each other? Where you're trying? Where you're paying attention, at least you think you are?
The answer I kept coming back to is that it didn't happen all at once. There was no moment where I consciously decided to give less to this child or pull back from our relationship. It happened slowly, invisibly, in the space between my intentions and my actual capacity. A new baby arrived. Life got fuller and more complicated. I was just trying to survive the season I was in. Without anyone deciding it should happen, our family quietly reorganized itself around all of it. Around whoever was loudest, whatever felt most urgent, and ultimately what the system needed to stay stable.
When I sat with that honestly, I realized my daughter had quietly slipped into what family systems theory calls the Lost Child role. Our family system had reorganized itself around everyone else's noise, and she had learned to make herself small inside of it. That realization is what I want to talk to you about today.
