The Quiet Story You’ve Been Telling About Your Child

Every mom carries a quiet, unspoken story about each of her kids. We almost never hear ourselves telling it — until a moment in the cereal aisle, or the back of the car, or in front of grandma at Sunday dinner. Here’s what happens when you finally do. Get the new e-book to help you discover what you’re quietly carrying that’s shaping how you see your kids & the world around you in The Story She’s Forming. 

 

Marisol in the Cereal Aisle

My friend Lauren told me about a moment in the grocery store last fall that changed how she saw her seven-year-old.

She was checking out. Her son was standing next to her, doing nothing wrong — just standing there. The cashier, who knew them, asked how the kids were. Lauren said, automatically, without thinking about it, “They’re good. Olivia’s amazing as always. Mateo is being Mateo, you know how he is.”

The cashier laughed. Lauren laughed. They moved on.

In the parking lot, loading groceries into the car, Lauren realized her son had been standing right next to her when she said it. He hadn’t reacted. He hadn’t looked at her. But he had heard her describe him to a stranger as “Mateo being Mateo, you know how he is.”

She sat in the driver’s seat for ten minutes before turning the car on. She told me, “I realized I have been describing him that way to people for years. To strangers. To family. To my own mother. ‘Mateo is Mateo, you know how he is.’ I have never once described his sister that way. I have a sentence about him that I have been saying out loud for years, and I had never heard myself saying it until that moment.”

That sentence she had been saying was not neutral. It was a story. A short, casual, weary story about who her son was. And he had been listening to it — in cars and at family parties and in grocery stores — since before he could understand the words.

You Have a Story About Each of Your Kids

I want to say something gently, because it’s the central idea of the book I just finished writing, and it’s the kind of thing that’s easier to hear if you know up front that nothing about it is meant to make you feel like a bad parent.

You have a story about each of your kids.

You may not have ever said it out loud. You may not even know you have it. But it’s there, running underneath everything you do with them. And they are absorbing it whether either of you knows it or not.

Some of the stories are gentle. She’s my easy one. He’s the funny one. She’s so smart.

Some of them are weary. He’s always been difficult. She’s the dramatic one. He’s the one I have to watch.

Some of them are deeply loving and still loaded. She’s so sensitive. He needs more from me. She’s complicated.

None of these stories are neutral. They’re forecasts. They tell you what to expect when she walks into the room. They tell you which kid you’re going to enjoy this afternoon and which kid you’re going to have to manage. They shape what you see, what you miss, what you praise, what you correct. They shape your face when each child walks in.

The kid feels the face. The kid doesn’t analyze it. The kid simply learns who she is by watching how the most important person in her life looks at her when she walks into a room.

How the Stories Form (Often Before She Can Speak)

The stories form fast. Often before the kid is two.

They form from a thousand small inputs — the temperament she showed in infancy, the way she fit or didn’t fit your expectations, the role she got assigned in your family by accident, the way your mother or your partner or your pediatrician described her, the way she reminded you of someone, the way she pressed on something in you.

My friend Anna had two daughters. The first one was a calm baby. Slept well, ate well, smiled early. By the time she was three months old, Anna had a story about her: she is my easy one.

The second daughter was colicky. Up every two hours for the first eight months. Anna was exhausted, her marriage was strained, and the baby cried for no reason that the pediatrician could find. By the time the second one was eight months old, Anna had a story about her too: she is the hard one.

Both girls are now teenagers. The colicky one has been called the hard one, in some form, for fifteen years. She is, as a fifteen-year-old, a sensitive and creative person. She’s not particularly difficult. She has never been particularly difficult, except for the colic — which was about her newborn nervous system, not about her personhood. But the story landed in the first year and never really updated. Anna still describes her, sometimes, as my difficult one. The daughter has now described herself, to her therapist, the same way.

The story formed in the first year and ran for fifteen.

This is how it usually goes. Some early data point becomes the story. The story becomes the lens. The lens shapes what you see. What you see confirms the story. The loop closes by the time the kid can read.

The kid then inherits the story. She isn’t told it directly. She absorbs it — from your face when she walks in, from offhand comments you make to other adults, from the way you brace before she enters the room, from the way you describe her to her own grandmother. By age eight, she has the story herself. By age fifteen, she will tell you, if you ask her, exactly which one she is in the family.

She’ll be right about how she’s been treated. She won’t necessarily be right about who she actually is.

What This Isn’t About

I want to pause here, because if you’re still with me, you may also be feeling a little tightness in your chest. That’s normal. That’s what this kind of looking-at-ourselves does at first.

So let me say what this isn’t.

This isn’t about you being a bad mother. The stories we carry about our kids are not the result of a moral failing. They formed mostly without our consent, from inputs we didn’t choose, in years when we were running on three hours of sleep and someone else’s expectations. They have been running underneath our parenting in the same way our own mother’s stories ran underneath hers, and her mother’s before her.

This isn’t about blaming yourself for what’s been transmitted. The work of seeing the story isn’t the work of feeling worse. It’s the work of finally being able to look at it on the page, instead of having it run silently underneath everything you do.

This isn’t about fixing your kids. Your kids will not change because you read an article or even a whole book. You will. And what your kids respond to will change because what they’re responding to is different. That’s how this actually works. It’s slower and quieter than a parenting fix. It’s also the only thing that goes all the way down.

The Mirror You Almost Never Look At

Here’s the part of the work I’ve been sitting with hardest myself, this past year. It’s also the part that’s hardest to say out loud, so I’m going to say it carefully.

The kid you find harder right now is showing you something specific about yourself.

Not because she’s malicious. Not because she’s trying to push your buttons. Because she’s small, and developing, and her nervous system is responding to the environment she’s in — and she has, completely by accident, pressed on something in you that hasn’t been fully looked at yet.

The friction you feel with her isn’t really about her. It’s about what she’s reflecting back.

I have a friend named Priya with three sons. The middle one drove her to the edge of her patience for years. He was loud. He interrupted. He fidgeted. He pushed back on everything. He didn’t, as she put it, have an off switch.

When she finally sat with what specifically she couldn’t stand about him, she said, “He has to be doing something. He cannot just be.”

Then she went quiet.

What came up for her in that silence was the realization that she had not, in her own life, been allowed to just be. That she had been raised in a household where you justified your existence by what you produced. That she had spent forty-one years measuring her worth by what she accomplished that day.

Her son was simply, by being a fidgety, alive, present nine-year-old, pressing on the exact place in Priya where she couldn’t bear to just be.

She said to me, “My son is not the problem. I am unable to be with him because I am unable to be with myself.”

That was the beginning of her real work.

And the Kid You Find Easier Is Also a Mirror

If the harder kid gets all our attention because she’s pressing on us, the easier kid gets — on the surface — the better treatment. The warmer face. The longer bedtime story. The more patience.

But she’s doing something for us that we almost never see.

She has often, on some level, agreed to be the easier one. Not consciously. But somewhere very early — sometimes in her first year, sometimes the moment a sibling showed up — she figured out that being the easy one was how she stayed close to you. She organized herself around it. She got rewarded for it. She kept doing it.

By the time she’s ten, being the easy one is who she thinks she is. By the time she’s twenty, she’s the kind of adult who doesn’t ask for what she needs, because asking would inconvenience someone.

My friend Renata learned this last winter, on a quiet walk with her eleven-year-old daughter — who had been having unexplained stomach aches for three months. Halfway through the walk, her daughter said, very quietly, “Mom, I don’t think you know what I want for my birthday.”

Renata, surprised, said, “What do you want for your birthday?”

Her daughter said, “I don’t know. That’s the problem. I never know what I want. I just always say I want what’s easier for you.”

Renata had to sit down on a bench. Her daughter had been organizing her wants around her mother’s stress, automatically, since she was small. The stomach aches were her body finally pushing back against the cost of all that organizing.

Being the easy one had become a job. The kid who took that job was still working it, at eleven, with her stomach.

The Cycle Continues Until Someone Looks

I want to come back to something I said up at the top.

The story you carry about your kid is downstream of the story you carry about yourself. The sentence about who you are, what you’re worth, what you have to do to be loved — that sentence is shaping how you see each of your kids. The way you see them is shaping the story they’re forming about themselves. That story will then shape how they see their own kids someday.

This is how it gets passed down. Not through choice. Not through cruelty. Not through any failure of love. Through the simple fact that an unexamined parent transmits her unexamined patterns to the next generation, who absorb them as the truth about how the world works.

The cycle continues until someone, somewhere in the line, stops and looks.

Most of the parents in our family lines never got to do this work. They couldn’t. They didn’t have the language for it, or the support for it, or the bandwidth for it. They passed down what was passed to them. By the time it got to us, nobody could remember the original source.

You get to be different. Not because you’re better than your mother or your grandmother. Because the work is available to you, in a way it wasn’t available to them. The conversation has caught up with the question.

The willingness to look is the entire thing. Everything else follows from it.

One Small Thing You Can Do Tonight

You don’t have to buy anything to start this work. You don’t even have to finish reading this article.

Tonight, before bed, do this. Write down one sentence for each of your kids. The honest, internal narrative you’ve been carrying about them. Not the one you’d tell a friend at the school gate. The one that runs in your head when nobody’s watching.

Don’t try to soften it. Don’t add caveats. Just see what comes out when you stop being polite about it.

Nobody is going to see this but you. That is the entire point.

The seeing is the work. The naming is the beginning. Everything else, you can come to slowly, in your own time.

— Corinne

Common Questions About the Stories We Tell Our Kids

Isn’t it normal to have different relationships with each of my kids?

Completely normal. Different kids have different temperaments, and we will always feel a more natural rhythm with some than with others. The work isn’t to feel exactly the same about each child — that’s not possible. The work is to notice when the different rhythm has hardened into a story, and to ask whether the story is actually about your kid or about something older.

Does this mean I’m playing favorites?

Almost certainly not in the way you’re worried about. Most parents who think about this question love all their kids deeply and equally. What’s usually happening isn’t favoritism — it’s that one child is easier for your specific nervous system to be with, often for reasons that have nothing to do with how much you love either of them. Seeing that is the work. It doesn’t make you a worse mother. It makes you a more honest one.

Is it too late if my kids are already teenagers?

It’s not too late. Stories can be revised at any age, and the revision doesn’t require you to confess anything to your kids — they’ll mostly absorb the new story the same way they absorbed the old one, through your face, your tone, your offhand comments. Many of the moms I know doing this work are doing it with teenagers, and the changes show up within six to twelve months.

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