When It's Hard to Hug Your Daughter

By the time my daughter Evangelyn was five, she had already begun spelling her name incorrectly at school. “I’m not sure how to tell you this,” her teacher told me one day, “but she thinks her name starts with an ‘a.’”

Of course when I probed her about this, Evangelyn had a perfectly rational explanation: “My name is pronounced ‘uh-van-gel-in,” she said. “That’s an ‘a’ sound, not an ‘e’ sound. I thought maybe you got it wrong.”

It’s a funny story in retrospect, but it’s also a pretty poignant snapshot of my experience raising this beautiful, brilliant, majestically fragile creature. In many ways, parenting this child is one of my most terrifying life experiences to date. And I’ve lived a lot of life.

Evie was basically born a mini adult. I remember telling a therapist that I felt like I was parenting a 40-year-old trapped inside a child’s body. She noticed everything, analyzing the interpersonal dynamics of the adults around her with dizzying clarity.

Once, when she spiked a fever at school, she had to wait for about 30 minutes in the school office for me to come and pick her up. When I got there, she proceeded to tell me how the various staff members felt about each other, who was being passive aggressive, which one called all the shots, and which one was flirting too heavily with one of her classmates’ fathers.

She used to complain about the outfits I selected for her if they didn’t meet her exceedingly high standards. One such outfit was rejected because the pink in the sweater was darker than the pink it the corresponding shirt. You can’t get away with anything when you’ve got a kid like this. They notice everything.

My own mother thinks it’s hilarious because I was a kid like this, and in her eyes, I’m getting my just deserts.

If you look at my toddler pictures, you can quickly see just how serious I was. I remember having existential debates with myself as young as 5, as I helped wheel a cart through the grocery store. I wrote melodramatic poetry and journaled furiously in a diary about the meaning of life. I was prone to episodes of intense despair. I would cry in my room for no apparent reason. I just felt everything so deeply and had no clue what to do with those feelings. I learned to comfort myself as best I could and soldier on.

As an adult, I always just attributed by childhood intensity to my childhood trauma. I assumed I was a mini grown-up because I was sexualized so early. My parents are amazing people who did the best they could, and it would be a mistake to judge them for this, but they were not particularly affectionate. It’s not how either of them were raised. Teasing was a regular substitute for affection. We knew we were loved by the good natured ribbing we regularly received and by the steady, faithful provision of our needs.

Still, the only man who said “I love you” to me growing up was the man who sexually abused me. My experience of physical affection was pretty limited to the grooming techniques of a pedophile. Most of my childhood memories of kisses or hugs or cuddling in any capacity are directly linked to betrayal and what I’ve come to understand as (pardon the crude term—it’s the only one I’ve heard that matches the intensity appropriately) mind f*ckery.

Eventually I learned to wage war against the desire to be loved. It was too dangerous, too costly. Self-reliance became my survival strategy. Vulnerability was not really an option. Vulnerability would get you killed.

I’ve spent at least 20 years in therapy and church working to undo some of this, but it’s been SLOW progress. I still struggle to express affection. Early into my marriage to Daniel, he cuddled up to me in bed one night, and I rolled over and just blurted out without thinking, “What do you NEED?” I remember spending an entire therapy session complaining to my psychiatrist about Daniel’s incessant need to hold my hand.

“It’s excessive,” I remember complaining. “Who needs to hold hands that much? It feels needy. Can’t it just be enough to be in the same room together? Like I’m here. I’m choosing to spend time with you. Why do you need more than that?”

My therapist helped me see that I interpreted invitations to affection as parasitic attacks. My body had determined on my behalf that someone was trying to steal something from me, and that danger lay behind that door. These issues are fraught enough in the context of a marriage, but when you add kids to the equation, it can feel like being in a pressure cooker.

When I had a daughter, I fought like hell to protect her. I figured if I just shielded her from enough of the crap I had to endure, she would have a carefree childhood full of My Little Ponies and princess dresses and frog catching, and she wouldn’t have to wrestle down demons the way I had to. She wouldn’t have to be intense. She could be free to be happy and innocent and as naive as her little heart desired to be.

But I couldn’t protect her. Her young eyes saw too much. Her father left me for the first time when she was just over a month old, and she yo-yoed back and forth as collateral in our war against each other for the next seven years. I’m complicit in some of this, and that’s a really painful thing to admit. When people scratch their heads and wonder how I could, in good conscience, send this kid to a public school, they have no idea it’s because I’ve had to raise her with both eyes fully open for a really long time, and nothing she encounters at school is going to hold a candle to the chaos she’s already observed. Domestic violence, deviant sexual activity, rage, addiction, porn: the poor kid has already seen it all. So we’ve had to talk about it all. I grieve that I’ll never know how much of her persona is just hardwiring vs. how much of it is a response to the world caving in on her.

In many ways, she’s like my mini-me: perceptive and intuitive as the day is long, argumentative to an exhausting fault, and prone to maladaptive behaviors to escape her own intensity.

But unlike me, she has not yet killed her softness. She hasn’t waged war against her need for affection. God bless her; she has not dissociated from her sensitivity. But it sometimes means that she needs things from me that I don’t know how to give. One of the most shameful moments in my entire life was the realization that I physically recoiled from her attempt to hug me. I love this little person more than life itself, so why was it hard to hug her? I decided I must be the worst mother on planet earth for even thinking such a thing, let alone naming it.

But the truth is that it wasn’t just my own trauma surfacing; it was my terror at the prospect of allowing her to need affection. I could not stomach the possibility of her feeling as betrayed as I did. I wanted to neutralize that “weakness” in her. I was trying to protect her in my own severely messed up way.

Parenting my daughter is a unique struggle for me because when I take inventory of the myriad issues I need to address with her, it’s as though someone is holding a massive magnifying mirror up to my face to expose all my own personal issues of unresolved shame and brokenness. Contending with her issues requires me to stop kicking the can down the road on my own problems. I can’t possibly lead her down paths of healing I’ve spent a lifetime skillfully avoiding myself.

It’s work I’m actively, intentionally pursuing. I teach my daughter to be tough and resilient, but in the process, I’m learning to bless the courage of her vulnerability as a strength to foster, not a giant to slay. We’ve come a long way. She gets regular mom hugs, and she hears “I love you” every day, even when she thinks I’m an idiot who spelled her name wrong. And some day, when she rocks her own daughter to sleep, she can look at her and say, “My mom may not have gotten this right, but I’m gonna make sure to get it right with you,” and I’ll be so, so proud of the progress she’s made and the woman she’s been brave enough to become.