SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET

People talk about “skeletons in the closet” like they’re shameful secrets or bad decisions from a messy younger version of ourselves. But that’s not what skeletons really are.

A skeleton is anything we refuse to face.

A wound we never opened.

A truth we never named.

A need we never acknowledged.

A fear we learned to hide.

A belief we accepted as “just how I am” without ever asking where it came from.

Skeletons aren’t reminders of what happened. They are reminders of what we never healed.

The dangerous thing about skeletons is this: they don’t stay where we put them. They seep.

Into our reactions.

Into our relationships.

Into our assumptions.

Into the tone we use.

Into the trust we withhold.

Into the patterns we don’t recognize as patterns.

Most of us think we’re responding to the moment at hand, but really, we’re responding to the past still rattling in the dark.

I know this because I lived it.

I grew up in a home where love simply didn’t live. Two adults, burnt out long before they ever married or became parents, repeating wounds they never healed. It wasn’t a home. It was a pressure system.

As the youngest, I learned early to observe the weather of the household. I learned to read moods before I learned to read books. I could sense tension in the air the way others sense a coming storm. The way a cupboard closed, the weight in someone’s footsteps, the sharpness of sudden silence—these were my forecasts.

I learned to stay small. To move quietly. To never want too much. To never need anything I couldn’t give myself.

That kind of childhood doesn’t just teach fear. It teaches hyper-awareness. It teaches you to scan every room, every tone, every face. It teaches you that disappearing is safer than being seen.

That was my skeleton.

Not the events themselves, but the beliefs formed from them—the belief that love was unpredictable, that safety had conditions, that belonging wasn’t guaranteed, that being unseen was better than being hurt, that silence was strength, that expecting the worst was wisdom.

I didn’t call it trauma. I called it:

“I’m fine.”

“I don’t need anyone.”

“I’m just independent.”

“I don’t trust easily.”

“I overthink because I care.”

“That’s just my personality.”

But the truth was simpler and sadder: my skeleton was leading my life, and I didn’t know it.

It shaped my reactions. How I read people. How I anticipated rejection in places where rejection didn’t exist. How I expected disappointment even in joy. How I stood on emotional tiptoe even in safe rooms.

Hidden wounds don’t heal. They root. And those roots twist themselves around our worldview—how we love, how we trust, how we respond, how we show up.

It took years to realize the skeleton I had stuffed deep in the closet was shaping everything behind the scenes.

Here is the truth that changed everything: we cannot heal from what we refuse to see.

The turning point didn’t come from a dramatic moment. It came from a quiet awareness that my fears didn’t match my reality, that my reactions were too old for the moments that triggered them, that my hyper-vigilance belonged to a childhood that had ended long ago.

I realized I wasn’t guarding my skeleton. My skeleton was guarding me—from healing, from connection, from truth, from the life I was meant to experience.

So I did something that felt unnatural, terrifying, and necessary.

I opened the closet door.

I dragged that skeleton into the light like laundry on a clothesline—visible, exposed, undeniable. I looked at the ache I had been carrying, the fear that shaped me, the hunger I had learned to swallow, the belief that love was something other people got to have but I didn’t.

In naming it, in acknowledging it fully, something inside me began to loosen.

Because vulnerability isn’t about exposing weakness. It’s about reclaiming truth.

The reality was this: I had spent my entire childhood aching for something I never received. And that ache had followed me into every corner of my adult life.

But everything changed when I became a mother.

I didn’t step into motherhood timidly. I didn’t parent with fear or hesitation. I didn’t tiptoe my way into becoming what I needed to become.

When I became a mother, I came in determined, intentional, wide open, and on fire.

I knew exactly what I didn’t want my children to feel. I knew the coldness of being unseen. I knew the ache of belonging nowhere. I knew the fear of being too much or not enough. I knew how silence bruises deeper than words.

That ache became my compass.

I chose for my children what I never had. What I always ached for. What I spent my entire childhood watching other children receive.

I chose softness.

I chose presence.

I chose gentleness.

I chose belonging.

I chose safety.

I chose joy.

I chose love so steady they never had to question it.

Every time I held them, I was holding the little girl inside me too. Every time I spoke life into them, I was rewriting places in myself where silence once lived. Every time I protected them, I was building a future that my past had tried to steal.

If there is one thing I know without doubt: my children never hungered for love. Not once. Not ever.

They grew up knowing they were cherished—a joy, a blessing, a gift to me and to the world.

This is the part that humbles me the most: they carried that love forward.

My children became parents who love with ease, who comfort without hesitation, who speak gently, who nurture naturally, who lead their homes with grace, warmth, and adoration.

I watch them now with their little ones in their arms, loving with a freedom I had to fight for. And every time I see it—every soft moment, every patient correction, every belly laugh—something warm fills my chest and spreads like light.

It isn’t pride. It’s a humble moms-heart kind of glow. The quiet, grateful kind. The kind that whispers, “Thank You, God… we really did break this.”

Because the truth is simple: the skeleton that once held me hostage is the very thing that shaped the freedom my family walks in today.

My grandchildren—and their children, and their children—will grow up surrounded by the very love I once stood outside of, watching from a distance.

Safe love.

Pure love.

Secure love.

Chosen love.

All because one woman—a girl who once learned to tiptoe through silence—dragged her skeleton into the light and refused to pass it down.

What we bury binds us.

What we face frees generations.