The Ghosts Who Raised Me

Before we talk about sex, politics, or public health — we have to talk about childhood.

Because the first place we learn love isn’t in a classroom. It’s in kitchens, in slammed doors, in the phone that never rang. We inherit our intimacy from silence as much as from tenderness. We grow up carrying absence like a family recipe, passing it down without meaning to.

This is the beginning of that story for me.

A long poem in eleven chapters — about estrangement, survival, self-parenting, and the ghosts we become when the people who were supposed to raise us never learned how.

It’s personal, yes. But it’s also political.
Because the way we were loved shapes the way we let others touch us.
Because shame has origins.
Because public health is emotional health first.
Because we build adulthood out of childhood materials — even when half the boards are missing.

If you see yourself in these pages, keep reading.

Chapter 1: Static in the Blood

I smell you through memory.
Aftershave on a shirt you haven’t worn in years.
I hear your voice in the hum of refrigerators,
in the hush before I fall asleep.
You walk my brain like a ghost in daylight—
no sheet, no chain, just absence wearing your shape.

I tried to make a childhood out of your silence.
A cradle out of cold rooms.
A home out of every “maybe later.”

You taught me how to hold my breath
long enough to love you.

But breath has an ending.
Even lungs give up.

Where do you go when you go quiet?
Do you ever knock when you visit my dreams?
Or do you slip through back doors
the way grief does?

What luck to love someone still living.
What a fucking curse to mourn them anyway.

Chapter 2: Rituals of Pretending

I scrub the walls with my childhood.
I pilgrimage through family photos
like scripture with half the pages torn out.

I swallow old voicemails whole.
I wear your itchy sweaters like a thorny hug.
I stretch forgiveness like elastic until it snaps.

I text you first.
I text you second.
I text you year after year.

I practice conversations in the shower,
whole speeches
washed down the drain.

I rehearse your apologies
until they sound like lullabies.

Still the question coils inside me:

Why don’t you see me?

Chapter 3: Daughter on Fire

If this is what you want—
I could carry your wounds like family heirlooms.
Drag them room to room.
Wear your neglect like perfume so sharp
it bites the air.

I could become the daughter you wish existed—
quiet, grateful, forgetting.
Fold myself smaller until I fit inside your expectations.
Disappear to please you.
But I have already tried that.
It made me a shadow of myself.

You taught me to be strong.
Then punished me for not bending.
You taught me to speak.
Then punished me for every word.

Why wasn’t I enough to make you stay?

Chapter 4: Numb is a Love Language

So what will you say at my funeral
when I am only dead to you?

Here lies the child you forgot to raise.
The one who learned love through drought.
The one who mothered herself.
May she rest in peace
or at least in distance.

I delete drafts I never send.
Unfollow memories.
Turn off the heart’s notifications.

This is detachment as self-defense.
This is “I’m fine” as a battle cry.
This is loving you less
because loving you fully
was killing me.

Chapter 5: The House with No Spoons

Some nights I dream you soft again—
before life cracked you open
and the bitterness poured through.

You hold me like I’m small.
Like you remember my weight on your hip.
Like the world hasn’t eroded you.

I wake up with salt on my pillow
and no one in the next room
to witness the aftermath.

Grief sits heavy in the mouth.
Unsayable.
Unchewed.

I eat silence for breakfast
and call it love.

Chapter 6: Breaking the Mirror

I wore your temper like lipstick.
Inherited the way you love by withholding.
I learned devotion in hunger,
in waiting at windows.

You couldn’t be who I needed.
But I kept trying to become
a someone who might make you try.

I practice saying:
It isn’t my fault.
It was never my job to raise you back.

But my voice shakes like a newborn truth.

Chapter 7: Learning to Parent Myself

I parent myself in ways you never learned to.
Buy flowers for my own birthday.
Tuck myself in.
Call myself home.

I unlearn survival.
Relearn tenderness.
Practice being loved
without bleeding for it.

I want softness that doesn’t cost me.
Warmth without wounds.
I want a mother, I want a father—
but I will settle for peace.

Chapter 8: Letting You Go Without Burying You

Forgiveness is not an invitation.
It is a release.

I set you down
the way sunrise lets go of night.
Not cruel.
Just necessary.

I stop waiting for your apology.
Stop waiting for your aging hands
to dial my number.
Stop wishing the past a different shape.

Forgiving you is like pruning—
Cutting off dead tissue so I can grow.

Chapter 9: Afterlife of the Estranged

One day I laugh without remembering you.
A miracle so small it could be missed—
but it is holy.

I live.
I live louder.
I live without your witness.

I build a future
where love does not arrive empty-handed.
Where “family” does not mean sacrifice.
Where I am chosen.

I rise from the version of me
who waited by the window.

Chapter 10: Tiny Futures, Still Mine

A child in me still wants you—
but the woman opens the curtains anyway,
and lets the morning in.

I hold myself the way I wished you did.
Gentle.
Certain.
Home.

I cut lemons, add sugar, cold water.
I drink what life gave me.
It is sour.
It is sweet.
It is all mine.

Chapter 11: Before the Flowers Arrive

Grandma said blood is not the only thread.
We weave kin from softness.
From those who stay.
From those who show up.

I am the lineage I choose.
The cycle ends with me.

Nothing real can be starved.

I take the ache
and make art.
Take the absence
and make a life.

I turn loss into honey.
Into poem.
Into freedom.

Why this belongs here

I write about sex, shame, and public health — but none of those begin in adulthood.
They begin in childhood kitchens. In the hush before sleep.
In what we were allowed to need. In what we learned to swallow.

Estrangement is public health.
Self-parenting is sexual autonomy.
Grief is curriculum.
Pleasure is rebellion after deprivation.

This poem is the bone beneath the essays.
The origin. The scar. The reason I write.

If this poem sat in your chest…

Leave a comment. Tell me you felt it.
Share if you know someone who carries ghosts too.

If this felt like your story too — if you grew yourself from scraps, mothered your own heart, or learned love the hard way — I’m glad you’re here.

Next, I’ll share how sex work, shame, and self-parenting tangled together in my adult life, and what it took to unlearn survival.

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