Sugarplum came home from the vet looking rough.

She'd been having eye trouble for a couple of months. She kept scratching at it, making it red and irritated, and we'd been through the medicine cycle three times. At this last vet visit, she also got her annual shots. She was just done. She came home, curled up, and looked so small and uncomfortable, and I just fell apart.

I sat there crying, feeling completely helpless. There was nothing I could do to explain to her why this was happening or make her understand it was going to get better. She was hurting and scared, and I couldn't fix it. I had that hollow helplessness of watching someone you love suffer and not being able to do anything about it. It just wrecked me.

Then I had a realization.

I looked at her and thought: she's my cat, not even my child, and I feel this way about her.

How do you not feel this way about your own child?

I didn't have a mother who showed up for my pain the way I show up for Sugarplum's.

There were moments in my childhood where I was in real crisis. There were moments where I said that I wanted to die, moments where I was clearly not okay, and the people who were supposed to show up just didn't. My dad could be deliberately cruel. My mom was so deep in her own survival that she often just froze. I don't think she was a bad person. I think she was carrying wounds of her own. But having wounds of your own doesn't let you off the hook, and "I didn't know what to do" doesn't explain standing there and doing nothing when your child is in pain.

I spent years thinking there was something wrong with me. That I was too much, too sensitive, too needy. That nobody showed up because I wasn't worth showing up for.

Looking at Sugarplum, I finally understood on a deeper level that none of that was ever true.

I thought about my grandmother after my grandfather's funeral. She was in a wheelchair, scared about going back to her facility, and she started crying out that she wanted to die. Everyone around her kept watching TV, talking, doing whatever they were doing. I don't know if it's because I've been through something similar, or if it's just because I have a heart, but I couldn't sit there. I went to her and tried to comfort her. I don't know if it helped much, but I tried.

Nobody should have to cry out like that and be ignored. Not a scared old woman after a funeral. Not a child in her bedroom in the dark. Not anyone.

Sometimes we’re so uncomfortable with other people's pain that we start treating it like an inconvenience. Like if we just don't engage with it, it'll go away. But pain doesn't go away because you ignore it. It just gets louder, or it goes underground, and neither of those is good.

When someone tells you they're hurting, that is not the moment to look away. That is the moment to move toward them.

I tell Sugarplum I love her every single day. I go out of my way to make her life comfortable, happy, and safe. When she's scared at the vet, I talk to her the whole time. When she's not feeling well, I sit with her. When she wants to play fetch at an inconvenient hour — and she always wants to play fetch at an inconvenient hour — I throw the ball.

She has never once had to wonder if she matters to me.

I didn't get that. I'm not bitter about it anymore because here's what I've figured out: the capacity for that kind of love was always mine. It didn't come from being loved that way first. It was just in me. The people who didn't show up for me weren't reflecting my worth back at me. They were just showing me their limitations.

There was never anything wrong with me.

There was something wrong with the situation. Something wrong with the people who were supposed to protect me and didn't know how, and with the people who abused me. Not with me.

If you grew up feeling like your pain was too much, like you were too sensitive, like you needed too much, I want to say the same thing to you.

There wasn’t anything wrong with you either.

You deserved someone who showed up, and you still do.

If the writing here resonates with you, the newsletter is free, but there’s also a support link below for anyone who wishes to help support the work.