Raising the Child You Were

Arash came to me crying about a nightmare, and I found myself saying exactly what I needed to hear at eleven.

“The scary things in dreams can’t hurt you in real life,” I told him, rubbing his back the way no one rubbed mine when fear kept me awake. “And even if they could, I would never let anything happen to you.”

The words emerged from some deeper place than memory—from the part of me that remained eleven years old and terrified, finally receiving the comfort I’d yearned for then.

This is the strange grace of becoming the adult you needed as a child: healing the past by creating what should have existed, offering the younger self still living inside you the safety that was missing.

The Architecture of Absence

I am firm where my father was absent, patient where he was quick to anger, present where he was distracted by work and worry. Not because I’m naturally better at these things—I’m not. My instincts often echo his. The impatience rises in my throat. The dismissive response forms before I catch it. But I catch it, because I remember precisely what their absence felt like.

When Arash asks questions, I answer them fully instead of dismissing them as foolish. When he’s afraid, I validate the fear before offering solutions. When he makes mistakes, I help him understand rather than punish him for not knowing better. Each of these choices requires conscious effort, deliberate override of learned patterns, active construction of the parent I wish I’d had.

Every moment of conscious parenting is simultaneously about him and about the child I was—giving both versions the adult they deserved.

The Doubling of Care

There’s a strange doubling that happens when you parent intentionally against your own childhood. When I comfort Arash, I’m comforting two children—the one in front of me and the one still existing in my memory, still waiting for someone to say his fears matter. When I answer his questions with respect, I’m answering both his curiosity and the curiosity I learned to suppress because questions annoyed my father.

This isn’t projection—I’m not confusing Arash with my younger self. He’s entirely his own person with different fears, different questions, different needs. But my responses are informed by intimate knowledge of what happens when those needs go unmet. I know exactly what absence creates because I’m built from its architecture.

The healing isn’t perfect or complete. I still carry the specific loneliness of the boy who learned to comfort himself, who developed independence too early because no one taught him he could depend on others. That boy exists in me still—self-sufficient, suspicious of vulnerability, uncomfortable asking for help. Therapy helps. Self-awareness helps. But some formations are permanent.

Time Travel Through Presence

Yet watching Arash sleep peacefully after our conversation, knowing he’ll wake up secure in the knowledge that his fears matter and his questions deserve thoughtful answers—this feels like time travel, like reaching backward through decades to offer my younger self the gift of safety.

He won’t carry what I carry. He won’t develop the particular defenses I needed. He won’t learn that vulnerability is dangerous or that needing comfort is weakness. Not because he’s stronger, but because he won’t need to be. The safety I’m creating for him rewrites what was written in me.

What if becoming the adult you needed is how childhood wounds transform into parental wisdom? What if the absence that shaped you becomes the blueprint for what you refuse to replicate? What if the comfort you never received becomes the comfort you’re uniquely qualified to provide, because you know with absolute precision what its absence costs?

The Weight of Consciousness

This approach to parenting is exhausting. It requires constant vigilance, continuous self-examination, perpetual override of instinctive responses. It would be easier to parent automatically, replicating what was done to you without analysis. Many do. The patterns repeat themselves across generations because unconscious parenting simply transfers trauma forward.

But I can’t unknow what I know. I can’t forget what absence felt like. And knowing, remembering, I can’t inflict it on purpose. So I choose differently, moment by moment, response by response, building the parent I needed from the materials of who I actually am.

Sometimes I fail. Impatience escapes. Dismissiveness slips through. I catch myself sounding like my father and have to course-correct, apologize, try again. Arash will have his own complaints about me eventually, his own therapist sessions devoted to my particular failures. Perfect parenting doesn’t exist. I’m not healing everything—just addressing the specific absences I experienced.

The Gift That Gives Twice

But in those moments when I get it right—when Arash comes to me afraid and I offer exactly what fear needs, when his questions receive the respect they deserve, when his mistakes become learning rather than shame—something shifts. Not just in him, but in me.

The eleven-year-old boy still living inside me, still afraid in the dark, still wondering if his questions matter, still uncertain whether he deserves comfort—he hears those words too. He feels that back rub. He receives the safety I’m creating for Arash and experiences, decades late, what he needed then.

This is the strange mathematics of conscious parenting: you can’t change the past, but you can create what should have existed and experience it from both sides—as the giver and as the internal child who still needs receiving. The healing happens in the offering.

Arash will never fully understand what he’s given me by accepting the parent I’ve chosen to become. He’ll take for granted the safety I’m constructing, which is exactly the point. Children should take safety for granted. They should assume their fears matter and their questions deserve answers. They should expect the adults in their lives to be present, patient, reliable.

He gets to be the child I wasn’t. And in making that possible for him, I get to become the adult I needed. We’re both better for it—him because he receives what I’m creating, me because creating it reaches backward to heal what was missing.

What if this is how trauma stops replicating—not through forgetting, but through conscious remembering translated into different action? What if the deepest healing isn’t erasing what happened but ensuring it doesn’t happen again, transforming absence into presence, neglect into attention, dismissal into validation?

Arash sleeps peacefully, unaware of the gift he’s given me by letting me be his father, by accepting the comfort I offer, by trusting that his fears matter and I’ll be there to meet them. And somewhere inside me, an eleven-year-old boy finally rests too, having received, decades late and through the strangest route, exactly what he needed all along.