My paci

Little Mary

I often find myself on the side of TikTok where parents are asking for advice on how to wean their child from a pacifier. As a childfree person, I hold my tongue and read all the comments as if I am an expert in child-rearing. I look at tips from cutting holes in the nipple to sending them with Santa, and I thank heaven my parents did not do that to me. I was in 1st grade when I got rid of mine. For those non-Americans, that is roughly about 7 years old. Did I sit in my classroom and have something dangling from my mouth? No. What I did do was keep it in my backpack in my cubby or in my lunchbox. I am sure I was the source of jokes of some adults in my life, but I needed that paci. 

When I started my journey on learning about trauma, I was watching a lecture from my professor about children and trauma, and the talk of self-soothing came up. It hit me that my pacifier was the only way I could self-soothe. 7-year-old me was intuitively practicing grounding. See, my paci was something I could look at or touch in my pocket when the classroom was too loud or overwhelming. What I now know is that paci was my medicine for what was going on at home. I come from a large family with three older siblings who are 8 to 13 years older than me. One of my sisters is bipolar and was rapidly cycling, and my home was chaos. 

Around the time I was 7, my sister left home, and I was able to let go of that. Is the trauma of that time, and to be honest, any of the other times she has come around, gone, no. I have done work to help that 7-year-old to protect her in a way no one else around her could, because they, too, were fighting for their lives. Trauma asks me to go back to standing in the cubby room, looking in my backpack at my paci, but resilience tells me I am adaptable and strong. 

-Mary Stanley