The Gift
Dec 25, 2025
Dear Parents,
I always think we parents get the child we need.
I don’t have any true understanding of the rhyme or reason that brings our children to us, but I know the child we get pulls forward in us the very things we need to heal the most.
My children’s trauma brought forward my sadness, pain, fear, and anger from being parented the way I was. It wasn’t just the behavior in front of me creating all the turmoil inside me.
When they came home and didn’t seem to want me or love me, I felt the pain of my own childhood with parents who, I’m sure, loved me, but were ill-equipped to love having a child in their older years.
When they came home and rejected my help, I felt the shame of the child I was who felt incapable of pleasing my parents.
When they came home with so much anger, I felt helpless, hopeless and alone like I did as a child.
When they came home and didn’t do what I asked, I was red-hot with rage I didn’t understand until I was reminded of how I felt when my parents “couldn’t, maybe wouldn’t” do what I asked, even when my ask was small.
When my children brought their trauma home, I had to face my own trauma, my own unmet needs. I had to learn to accept myself with compassion and love.
Dear Parents, as we move again into this season of lights, candles, stories, and rituals…
Whether you celebrate Yule, Solstice, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas or something else… Whether you simply honor the turning of the year… I want to offer you something real, not the glossy holiday fantasy, but the truth any therapeutic parent knows in their bones:
You are doing hard and very sacred work.
Not “holiday-card” sacred.
Not “holiday fantasy” sacred.
Sacred in the way that healing always is--messy, humbling, inconvenient, heart-wrenching, and somehow still full of glimmers of joy.
Every night you keep showing up…
Every boundary you set with a shaking voice…
Every meltdown you walk toward instead of away from…
Every time you soften when you feel like hardening…
Every moment you choose connection over control…
Every tiny repair after a rupture you didn’t mean…
That’s the work that rewires a child’s nervous system.
That’s the work that rewires your own.
And yes, sometimes holidays stretch us thin enough to see the cracks in our own hearts. Family gatherings, disrupted routines, sensory overload, expectations stacked like Jenga blocks. It’s a lot. When this season feels heavy instead of magical, just remember:
There’s nothing wrong with you.
There’s nothing wrong with your child.
This is what trauma healing looks like in real time.
And while other families may be posting matching-pajama photos, you might be holding space for a child whose body remembers fear more easily than joy. Or you might be comforting your own inner child who still flinches around disappointment.
That is still holiday magic. It’s just the underground kind--the roots-growing-in-winter kind.
Here’s my wish for you, from my heart to yours:
May the lights of Hanukkah remind you that resilience requires compassion—just enough to keep going one more night.
May the principles of Kwanzaa anchor you in community, purpose, creativity, and the knowledge that you are not meant to raise a healing child in isolation.
May the spirit of Yule and Christmas whisper that love, real, attuned, unconditional love, is not about perfection, performance, or picture-ready behavior. It’s about being present.
And may the turn of the Winter Solstice or the calendar flipping into the new year remind you of something most parents forget:
You are allowed to grow, too.
You are allowed to receive care, too.
Your healing is not separate from your child’s healing. It is part of the same story.
This holiday season, may you feel seen.
May you feel supported.
May you feel strengthened.
May you feel softened.
May you feel loved.
And above all, may you feel, deep in your bones, that you and your child are a gift to one another, even on the days when everything feels hard, sideways, or downright impossible.
From my heart and home to yours:
Hope for the journey.
Awareness of the hardships.
Compassion for the past.
And love, always love, for what’s still unfolding.
Your Love Matters,
Ce
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