I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. All the feelings I had in fourth grade came flooding back during a parent-teacher conference for my Kindergartner. My son’s teacher described that when he feels overwhelmed, he curls up in a ball and shuts down. She showed us his paper with only a few letters written on it from a dictation exercise when the students were expected to write the words the teacher said.
As the teacher described my son’s reaction, I couldn’t just empathize; I could feel it. My eyes started to well up with tears. It took me right back to a vocabulary test. I had been expecting fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice. When my teacher told the class to take out a blank piece of paper and to write the vocabulary words and their definitions, I panicked. I had studied, but I hadn’t memorized the definitions word for word.
As a perfectionist, I had never felt unprepared for a test. This was my hell. I remember feeling nauseous and asking the teacher to go to the nurse, and she wouldn’t let me. I don’t remember much after that or how I wound up doing on the test, but that is a defining moment in my life when I remember first feeling anxiety, only made worse by the way adults handled it. That experience and subsequent ones during my fourth and fifth grade years had a huge impact on me and my feelings about school. It was one of the reasons I was homeschooled for my middle school years.
Imagining my son experiencing the same feeling during the dictation exercise and projecting that he may have many difficult moments in school as I did was heartbreaking. Luckily, my son’s Kindergarten teacher is amazing and very experienced. I know that I’m not the first parent who has cried in a parent-teacher conference. But still, I was not expecting my son’s schooling to “trigger” feelings from 30 years before.
I put “trauma” and “triggered” in quotation marks because I don’t consider this moment in my life a true trauma. I find that these words have become overused. However, as my sons get older, this experience made me realize how much raising children will likely continue to make me face periods of my childhood that I would rather never think about again. I can imagine how more serious traumas from parents’ childhoods could resurface and add another layer of unexpected complexity to the current situation. The analogy of putting on your own oxygen mask first before helping others comes to mind. I hope that talking about and reprocessing “traumas” from my childhood as they resurface through my children’s lives will help me to support them better than I was supported. We all want what’s best for our children, and sometimes dealing with our own issues first is the best way to help them.
