When Love Hurts the Little Ones: the Cost of Dating When You Have kids

In this emotional episode of Cocoon After Dark, host Quincy discusses the deep and often hidden impacts of dating the wrong people when you have children. She shares personal stories of her two past relationships with unhealed individuals and how these relationships affected her youngest daughter. The episode delves into the long-term emotional effects on children who experience instability and unpredictability in their home environments. Quincy introduces the 'Five Rs'—Reflect, Recognize, Reassess, Repair, and Rebuild—as strategies to protect children and ensure a nurturing, stable environment. Ending on a note of hope and healing, she emphasizes the importance of choosing peace and safety over companionship for the well-being of both parent and child.

Transcript

QUINCY: 0:01

Hi guys. Welcome to Cocoon After Dark. Tonight I am discussing a topic that is a bit triggering for some people, so. Be prepared to be a little bit off balance tonight. So I'm talking about something that still makes my throat tighten when I say it out loud and it's fresh because this isn't about romantic heartbreak. It's about the heartbreak that happens when love wounds our kids Ouch. Just saying that sentence literally makes me nauseous. The episode tonight is called When Love Hurts, the Little ones, the cost of Dating the wrong People. When you have kids, we all will get here at some point if we have left the partner we chose to have kids with and are dating again. I am talking directly to the moms, the nurturers, the vagina owners who are raising kids, whether you gave birth, adopted co-parent, or building a chosen family.'cause dating when you have a child isn't just dating, it's auditioning someone for a role in your child's nervous system. And I learned that lesson the hardest, absolute hardest way possible. I gave birth to my daughter in 2013, my forever child, the last one, the one who changed everything. After becoming a mother for the third time, I got into two different relationships, both women, for wrong for us, unhealed, unready, and emotionally unsafe, and it's not their fault. They didn't know that they were as unhealed as they were because they'd never been in a relationship with a woman who had a child the age of my child. One of them yelled a lot, and I mean a lot, and it did not matter who it was in front of. She could turn any argument into your fault twist reality until you questioned yourself. Her friends would quietly admit she had issues with control, but they never admitted it to her. And so I stayed believing that if I just loved her harder, she'd soften. Then one New year's day, she kicked me, my daughter out of the house. We lived in hotels waiting for permission to return to a place that was never really even that safe. And when I think back why I was waiting for her to let us back in after the torture that she had put me through on vacation over the most insane things. One of them, my daughter was graduating from graduate school and we had been dating less than a year, and we were taking photos. Family, extended family. My daughter's not quite fiance, and at the end of the day there weren't that many photos with my girlfriend in them, and it's not because we didn't think about having her in them. She had no part in my daughter's education up to that point. I mean by this time she was in her twenties and she didn't really know her that well. So for her to be in photos actually felt disingenuous to my daughter because she was still getting to know this person. By the time we got to Hawaii, I took the brunt of that for hours on the plane. When we got there, when we got to our first restaurant, just hammering me with how I could be so insensitive to not include her in every possible photo. Looking back, I realized I wasn't just choosing a partner, I was choosing energy for both of my daughters to be around and my youngest to grow up around, and I found out last night that cost her her peace. I had no idea the depth that that relationship had scarred her. And now she's 12. Brilliant, beautiful, sensitive. And when her therapist asks her about her earliest memories of fear, she doesn't say me, she says them. She remembers the yelling, the drinking, the unpredictability. She doesn't like sleepovers because she doesn't know if a parent will get too loud, too drunk, or not know how to take care of her. She need them in the middle of the night, and when she says those things, I sit there literally gutted, like, a rabbit or a, deer after a hunt. Where they just slice open their guts and everything just comes rolling out, and I realize my child is still healing from those relationships, I chose not knowing that those people had unhealed trauma that would then turn around and affect my child so deeply that six years after we left. That horrible relationship that she's still suffering from. That's the part no one tells you about motherhood. Your healing becomes your child's foundation. The things you ignore in love, your child ends up caring into therapy. I used to think if I'm with her, she's safe, but safety isn't about presence, it's about peace, and I didn't always protect that peace. And I feel so incredibly guilty for that. I know it's in the past, and all I can do is make the right choices from here on out, but damn do I wish I had a magic eight ball or a time machine that I could have seen in advance what our life would look like six years later. We grow up being told that kids need two parents, but really sometimes they just need one emotionally regulated adult. And I don't care what those two parents look like. Those two parents can be anything, but if one of them is not healed enough to parent someone else, meaning children in their lives, I'm gonna be serious and honest here. They cannot be in your child's life. I used to think companionship was the goal that love would make our family whole. But love without safety is just noise. And when your child learns that love is unpredictable, they start bracing for heartbreak before they even hit puberty. Staying in the wrong relationship teaches them the wrong kind of loyalty, and that's the cruelest part. They learned to stay where it hurts because they saw you do it first. Oh my gosh. They saw you do it first. They saw you allow someone to hurt you, and oh my God, that is heart wrenching. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do as a parent is to leave a love that looks good in photos, but feels like tension in not just your body, but in your child's body. There's something called the Five Rs about protecting your child while you learn to love again, right? You might be actively dating, you might be casually dating people might be setting you up on blind dates. But nonetheless, there's a possibility that you're going to enter into another relationship while your daughter son them. They still live in your home. So the next part isn't about blame, it's about awareness, and they're what I call the five Rs. They're the lessons I've carried from therapy. Heartbreak and the quiet hours after bedtime. They're how I will eventually learn to love someone again without letting danger through that same door. So the first one is before you invite someone in, ask yourself, why are you opening the door? Are you lonely or are you ready? Because dating from emptiness only attracts people who feed on it. I had to ask myself, what parts of me still needs to be chosen? What pain am I trying to patch with A partnership? Reflection is the pause before the pattern and your child. Has years of unlearning from that first pattern that they saw. Next. We're going to recognize that when someone shows you who they are, believe them. And how many fucking times have we heard that? Believe them if they are on the fence about kids or if they are in their fifties and never have had a kid. Maybe they had the opportunity before, maybe they didn't. But this is not a choice to take lightly. This is a live time commitment people. I have an older daughter who has her own children now. I am parenting her while she parents, her children, while I parent my middle schooler. While I am still the daughter of other humans who are still parenting me at my ripe old age of a Gen X person, this is a lifelong commitment. Do not go into a partnership with somebody that has children. If you are not 100% fully on board with first. Parenting. And two, what parenting apart will look like if you break up. So you're gonna watch this person's tone, their patience, the way they speak to your children when no one's watching. If they belittle you, if they raise their voice at you, if they twist the truth about things that are going on, don't justify it. Passion doesn't sound like fear. Recognition isn't cynicism. It's self-trust. It's saying I don't need to collect more evidence to know that this doesn't feel safe for me. I don't need one more argument. I don't need one more nasty text. I don't need one more days of silent treatment for you to try to prove to yourself that you're right. Because I am protecting my child from you at this point. Reassess. This is the third R. so, so far we've got reflect, recognize, and now we're looking at reassess. We're gonna check the temperature of your child's spirit. Kids don't always tell you something's wrong, right? You ask'em how their day was good. You ask'em how lunch was good. You ask'em how much homework they have. Not much. Did you like the movie? Yes. Do you wanna sleep in or stay up late tonight? I don't know. You know, they don't have sometimes a lot of sentences. So they show you you're looking for clues that something isn't right. Are they telling you their neck hurts, their back hurts, their body aches? Are they curled up in a ball? Do they do their hands sweat? Do their feet sweat? Do they look uneasy? Do they have stomach aches? Do they. Play sick when they know the other person isn't gonna be around, do they say they're sick before you have a plan to meet up with that person. When my daughter started getting quieter, more anxious, and more unsure, that wasn't random. That was data. I just didn't know how to read it. Reassessing means watching for the subtle signs that peace is slipping out the door. And having the courage to go after it. Because what you're also doing while you're parenting apart or assessing somebody, if they're the right partner, is what other relationships have they had? What is their relationship look like When your child is with your ex, do they come home to you? Disjointed, scattered. Miserable, pale, tired, hyper, um, frustrated. What are your child's body signals trying to tell you? Then we're gonna look at repair. This is our fourth r. Say the words that heal generational trauma. We are going to say, I am sorry that wasn't okay. You didn't deserve that. I am here to protect you, not make your life worse. Those are words I've said to my daughter, not because I failed forever, but because silence would've made the failure permanent. When we do not apologize, when people do not apologize to us, they're forever saying that you do not matter. That your feelings about how you reacted to something I did doesn't matter that they don't have to apologize for hurting you. We need to stand up and apologize more. Repair is sacred work people. It is so sacred. It takes meditation, it takes silent retreats. It takes walking without earbuds, leaving your phone at home. In fact, just get outside, be grounded. It takes talking with friends. It takes writing in journals, making promises, keeping those promises. It tells our kids that you're worthy of apology, you're worthy of care, and you're worthy of better, of better examples, of a better life, of better safety, of better nutrition, of better support, of better sleep. All of those things make us a whole human being and it's not weakness when we say, I'm sorry, it's legacy. It's repair to someone's psyche. The last part is rebuild. We're gonna choose peace as our new love language. Above all else, we are going to choose peace and not silent. Peace where we just sweep it under the rug or we ignore it, or we don't say anything, or we laugh it off, or we make excuses. We choose peace as a radical thing. We choose peace that most, that is the most radical thing I ever did, wasn't leaving. It was staying single long enough to remember what peace feels like. I stopped calling stillness, loneliness, and I started calling it safety. Rebuilding means cooking dinners without tension, laughing freely, reclaiming your home as a sanctuary, not a survival zone. It means teaching your children that quiet can be holy. That family is measured not by numbers, but by peace. There's two people in our family and that is plenty. Often we joke that we are not only each other's punching bags, but we are also each other's pillows. You are always safe to snuggle with me even when we've just had an argument or a disagreement or we're just not feeling like ourselves. I am that pillow for you. Some nights I lie awake, replaying the moments, the yelling. The hotel mishaps, the look in her little eyes, and I whispered to myself, dammit, Quincy, you should have known fucking better. But healing means forgiving the version of myself that didn't my daughter's laughter. Now when we are alone, that deep belly laugh is proof that healing is contagious and God, she's still healing. She seems to take accountability. She sees me take accountability. She sees me go to therapy. She sees me own it and name it and move forward and protect her from people that I know don't deserve space. In our precious little cocoon we have built. This is how I break cycles. This is how we break cycles. Not by being perfect, but by being honest in front of the next generation. So if you're listening right now and you're in something that feels not that bad, please listen closer to those children, to that child. Look deep into their eyes. If your child's light is dimming. If your peace feels small, it is that bad. Staying for the wrong reasons hurts more than leaving for the right ones. Real love doesn't make you or your child anxious. It doesn't require shrinking. Real love feels like rest. It sounds like laughter and it smells like safety. Think of a time when you felt safe. What did it smell like? What did it sound like? You can rebuild and you can heal, and your children will learn how because they will watch you do it. You've been listening to Cocoon After Dark. I'm Quincy. If this episode touched something in you, share it with another mama, another woman, another survivor of almost love. Because the greatest act of love we can offer our children is to make safety. The story they grow up believing in.