How could a parent treat a child the way you did?

It’s a question that has lived quietly in my chest for years.

Sometimes loud. Sometimes just a whisper.

How could you?

How could the person who was supposed to protect me be the one I needed protection from?

How could love and pain come from the same place, the same hands, the same voice?

As a child, I didn’t have the language for it.

I just knew something felt wrong.

I learned to shrink.

To stay quiet.

To read moods like survival depended on it—because it did.

And still, I loved you.

That’s the part people don’t always understand.

Children don’t stop loving their parents when they’re hurt.

They just start blaming themselves.

I told myself stories to make it make sense:

Maybe I’m too sensitive.

Maybe I’m the problem.

Maybe if I try harder, I’ll finally be enough.

But the truth I’ve had to face as an adult is this:

I was always enough.

What happened wasn’t because I was unlovable.

It wasn’t because I failed as a child.

It was because you couldn’t show up in the ways I needed.

And that realization is both freeing… and heartbreaking.

Because it means I have to grieve something that never really existed—

the parent I deserved but didn’t have.

I’ve spent a long time asking why.

Trying to understand how a parent could act in ways that leave such deep marks.

Was it your own pain?

Your own unhealed wounds?

The things no one ever taught you?

Maybe.

But understanding the reasons doesn’t erase the impact.

It doesn’t undo the fear.

The confusion.

The years spent trying to feel worthy of love that should have been given freely.

And so now, my question has changed.

It’s no longer just “How could you?”

It’s“What do I need to heal?”

Because I can’t rewrite the past.

But I can choose what I carry forward.

I can choose to unlearn the belief that love must hurt.

I can choose to speak to myself with kindness instead of criticism.

I can choose to create the safety I never had.

And maybe the hardest choice of all.

I can choose to set boundaries, even with you.

Not out of hate.

But out of love for myself.

I may never fully understand how a parent could treat a child the way you did.

But I am learning something just as important:

It wasn’t my fault.

And it’s my responsibility now to heal.