On my ”orange cutie”
I breastfed my daughter for the first year of her life. Not on a schedule, not really with a strategy, just following her cues. Just after her first birthday, she simply decided she was done. No ceremony. No transition plan.
For the first year of her life, she also could not be held by anyone but me.
Not grandparents. Not trusted family. Not even for short stretches. The moment she was handed to someone, she cried in a way that didn’t sound like ordinary crying. It was primal. Full-body. Devastating to hear. The kind of cry that makes every adult in the room feel like something is wrong at a cellular level.
People tried. We all tried. She is my second child and this was far different than my experience with my first.
Her nervous system did not care about logic, preparation, or reassurance. She wanted one thing: me.
The intensity of how much she needed me reflected back something I didn’t want to face: how much I had needed my own mother.
Not in the abstract way adults talk about childhood. Not as a memory. As a bodily truth. As a need that never got metabolized because there was no safe place for it to land.
Watching her search for me with her whole body — the panic, the reaching, the refusal to be soothed by substitutes — cracked open something I had carefully sealed for years.
It wasn’t just empathy.
It was recognition.
I understood her distress because my body remembered that kind of distress. The kind that doesn’t come from preference or habit, but from the terror of disconnection when connection is your only anchor in the world.
And yet, unlike my own story, she was not left to cry alone.
I came back. Every time.
I held her through it. I let her bury her face in my neck, clutch my shirt, press herself into me as if she were trying to disappear back inside the safety she came from.
Her need was not a burden. It was a mirror.
And it was also a repair.
Because as I soothed her, something in me was being soothed too — something younger than language, older than memory. A part of me that had never been comforted in real time, only managed afterward.
Attachment is not one-directional. It reshapes both people.
She needed me to regulate her fear.
I needed her to show me what it looks like when someone is allowed to need without shame.
Over time, she grew. She learned that separation did not mean abandonment. That I would leave and return. That the world contained other safe people.
But I don’t think that year was a mistake or a weakness or something to apologize for.
It was the year she built her baseline for trust.
And in the process, she helped me build mine.
And even now, years later, something still happens when she comes to me.
Sometimes she doesn’t say anything. She just leans in — or collapses, almost — and melts into my chest. Her muscles soften. Her breathing slows. My own breathing changes to match hers without me trying.
I can feel it. Physically.
It’s like a warmth spreading through my body. A loosening. A settling. As if my nervous system had been holding its breath all day and finally exhaled.
People say oxytocin is the “love hormone.” That makes it sound cute and optional. It isn’t. It feels structural. Foundational. Like something ancient clicking into place.
We regulate each other.
I didn’t grow up in safety. I grew up learning to regulate myself in chaos — scanning rooms, anticipating danger, managing emotions alone because there was no one steady enough to hold them with me.
Self-regulation becomes a survival skill when co-regulation isn’t available.
So when my daughter comes to me and dissolves into my arms with complete trust — no hesitation, no calculation — it is sacred. Like being given access to a world I was never allowed to live in.
She doesn’t brace. She doesn’t hover. She doesn’t ask permission to need comfort.
She just belongs.
And somehow, she makes space for me to belong too.
This is what safety feels like when it is not theoretical.
It is warm skin against skin.
It is weight resting fully without fear of being dropped.
It is breathing slowing because someone else is steady.
It is the absence of vigilance.
It is home, inside another person.
I made an art piece about this because words kept failing me. How do you capture a sensation that lives in muscle memory more than language? How do you paint the feeling of being needed in a way that heals you at the same time?
Motherhood did not just give me a child. It gave me access to co-regulation — something I had spent my entire life building alone.
When she melts into me, I understand something fundamental:
Safety is not just protection from harm.
Safety is being able to soften.
See my orange cutie here:
