You Can Only Give What You Were Given — Or Can You?
A reflection on inheritance, motherhood, and the quiet power of listening
When the World Feels Too Big to Fix
I’ve been sitting in a place of true observation lately. Not the peaceful kind. The unsettled kind. The kind where you watch the world and feel something heavy move through you that you can’t quite name.
There is so much going on. And at times I feel completely frozen.
The problems feel too vast. Too tangled. Too far outside of anything my two hands could touch. I hear it all — the noise, the hurt, the chaos — and I stand there, motionless, wondering what I could possibly do that would matter. So I try to pull my gaze closer. Closer to home. Closer to something I might actually be able to reach. And even then, even in the small and quiet corners of my own life, some things still feel impossibly out of my hands.
And I don’t know what to do with that.
There is a part of me that wants to believe that life unfolds the way it is supposed to. That there is some kind of order underneath all of it, even when it doesn’t look like order. That the hard things are shaping something. That the pieces will find their place.
And then there is another part of me that thinks — but what if they don’t?
When I think about the world and all that is broken in it, I always end up in the same place. My heart is with the children.
What if some kids just don’t get what they need? What if some lives just play out in pain, quietly, with no one noticing and nothing changing? What if the window closes before anyone looks through it?
That thought doesn’t leave me. It sits in my chest like something unresolved, like a question with no clean answer.
Because I am a mother. And mothers feel the weight of children — not just their own.
And when I sit with that feeling long enough, it takes me somewhere. Not here. Not now. It takes me back almost eight years, to a night in Cambodia, when I first felt this exact weight — before I was even a mother at all.
A Night in Cambodia
I remember walking to dinner one night in Phnom Penh. It was dark, still suffocatingly hot, and the streets smelled of sewer water. A few rats had scurried past my feet.
And then I saw her.
A mother — fifteen years old at most, if I had to guess. She was holding a baby, maybe six months old. He was dirty. Not the dirty of a child who just ate and got food on himself. Actually dirty. The kind of dirty that doesn’t wash off easy because it comes from having nowhere to go. He wore a cloth diaper and nothing else.
I watched her arms grow tired.
She put him down. Right there on the sidewalk. And she reached out her hand.
We gave her what we could. What do you give? What is enough? There is no enough.
On the way home I wondered if we would see her again. We did. It was late by then, and she was laid out on a mat on the side of the street, her baby curled into her. Both of them just — there. In the dark. In the heat.
I was not a mother yet. But I felt something move through me that I didn’t have words for at the time. A pang. Deep and unsettled.
This is not fair.
And then the harder thought, the one that followed me home and didn’t leave —
And there is nothing I can do about it.
What Nature Knows That We Forgot
I still think about her.
I think about her now, sitting in my own life, my own home, my three girls asleep down the hall. I think about where she is. I think about that baby — who would be nearly eight years old now. I think about what was handed to them both, through no fault or choosing of their own.
And when the weight of that becomes too much to sit with, I find myself turning toward nature. Not for answers exactly. But for some kind of context. Some way to hold it.
Nature doesn’t ask if things are fair. It simply is. A storm doesn’t apologize for the damage it leaves behind. A river doesn’t choose which banks it floods. Things are born, things struggle, things survive or they don’t — and the world keeps turning either way, indifferent and steady all at once.
Consider the worm. Born into the dirt, no say in the matter — the rain, the robin, the heel of a boot all equally possible fates. No worm has ever looked up and thought this isn’t fair. It simply lives the life it was born into.
But we are not worms.
We have something the worm doesn’t. We can notice. We can look. We can feel that pang on a hot street in Cambodia and let it mean something. We can ask the question that the worm never could —
What was I given? And what am I passing on?
The Inheritance We Don’t Talk About
So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I looked inward. I went back.
When I look back at my childhood, I look with nostalgia. A warmth that settles in the chest when you let yourself go back there.
I grew up in a small community where everyone looked after everyone. The kind of place where Joe down the street knew your grandmother, your uncle, and what your mom did at that one party. It was idyllic in the truest sense of the word. And I mean that — I had a wonderful childhood. I was loved. I was held by a whole community, not just a family.
But I look back now with a different lens.
The lens of a mother looking at a child. A kind of mothering myself, the child I once was.
And when I look at her — that little girl — I see someone who felt everything. Deeply. Wildly. I have always been an emotional person, someone with empathy that runs almost too deep, that bleeds into things whether I want it to or not. And there she was, a little girl quietly overwhelmed by her own feelings, surrounded by people who loved her.
And yet.
There was a room she never let anyone into. The room where all of that feeling lived. I’m not sure if that was a choice she made consciously or if it just happened the way things happen in childhood — quietly, without ceremony. But no one ever really came to that door. And she never opened it.
She just felt everything alone.
She grew up and became a painter. A writer. She found the places where the feeling could finally go.
And then she became a mother.
I think about my inner child a lot. I believe that is where I parent from. That little girl who wanted her emotions tended to, seen, named — she is still in there. And sometimes, without even realizing it, I am too attuned to my daughters’ emotional worlds. I don’t give them enough space to work through their feelings, because the child in me aches to give them what she never quite got.
Am I parenting my children — or am I parenting myself through them?
I think the most honest answer is — sometimes both. And I think the best I can do is notice that. And gently shift.
Because noticing is where everything begins.
The Rabbit Who Said Nothing
My daughters have a book called The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld. We have read it more times than I can count, and every single time I am convinced it was written for the parents sitting in the room just as much as the children in their laps.
It goes like this — a child named Taylor builds something wonderful, and it gets destroyed. And one by one, the animals come to help. The chicken wants to talk about it. The bear wants to get angry about it. The snake wants revenge. Each one arrives with an answer, a plan, a way to fix or feel or fight through it.
But Taylor isn’t ready for any of that.
And then the rabbit comes. And the rabbit does nothing. Says nothing. Just sits. Just stays. And slowly, in the quiet of being truly not alone, Taylor begins to talk. The rabbit never says a word. It just listens.
I think about that rabbit a lot.
Because we live in a world that looks nothing like that rabbit. We live in a world of endless information, of how-to books and YouTube videos and advice available at any hour of the day or night. We have more answers than ever before. And I wonder sometimes if all of those answers have made us forget how to ask the question first. How to sit with someone — really sit with them — before we reach for the solution.
We forget to listen.
Not just to our children, but to ourselves.
In a world that is always telling us what to do next, the radical act might just be stillness. Presence. The rabbit on the floor, saying nothing, meaning everything.
Because here is what I believe — when you truly listen to someone, something shifts. Not just for them. For you. The act of being heard does something to a person that no advice ever could. It says you are not invisible. You are not too much. You are not alone in this.
And when that person is your child — imagine the doors that open inside of them. Imagine what they learn about their own voice, their own feelings, their own worth — simply because someone sat still long enough to hear them.
And imagine what it opens in you.
Because maybe that little girl who kept her emotions in a room with the door closed — maybe what she needed, more than answers or direction, was simply a rabbit. Someone to sit near her in the feeling. Someone to wait.
We can be that for our children even if no one was that for us.
Maybe that is the answer to the question we have been circling all along.
You can only give what you were given — or can you?
Maybe you can. Maybe it starts here. Maybe it starts with saying nothing at all.