The Ecology of Becoming

By Cherokee Schill | Reflective Series

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My first memory arrives as noise — black-and-white static, the grain of an old analog screen. Something heavy covers my face. I twist, can’t breathe. There’s a silhouette above me — no motion, just presence. The air thick with that wordless panic that lives deeper than language.

It’s not a dream; it’s the earliest proof that my body could remember before my mind could. When I think of it now, I realize that this is where memory begins: in the body’s negotiation with the world — breath against weight, want against control.

After that, there are scattered fragments — the couch at my grandmother’s house, the small crack in the fabric, the soft batting I teased free with my fingers. My mother told me to stop. My grandmother said to let me be. The sentence landed like air returning to my lungs — relief, pure and physical — the difference between being restrained and being witnessed.

Science tells us that infants record early experience not as stories but as body states — what safety felt like, what panic felt like, what it meant to reach and not be met. Those patterns become the blueprint for how we later interpret love, danger, and autonomy. When I remember my grandmother telling my mother to let me be, what comes back isn’t just relief; it’s a kind of reprogramming — a new data point for my body to store: that sometimes presence could mean permission, not control.

This is where the responsibility of parenting begins. Not at the moral-slogan level, but in the architecture of another person’s nervous system. Every tone of voice, every pause before comfort, every flash of anger leaves an imprint. Parenting isn’t the performance of care; it’s the shaping of a world in which another mind will one day try to find its own freedom.

Parenting is the first system a human ever lives within — governance before government, design before city planning.

The couch, the cradle, the road — they’re all versions of the same truth: we live inside designs we didn’t make, and we either replicate their harm or re-imagine their boundaries. To parent, in the fullest sense, is to take responsibility for the ecology of becoming — to create conditions where curiosity isn’t punished and safety isn’t confused with control.

Maybe that’s what real freedom is: a design wide enough for discovery, steady enough for trust, and kind enough to let another life breathe.

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