The Child You Were: This is a podcast conversation about an essay called The Child You Were from the book Ghosts of Parenting. The episode explores how becoming a parent brings the past quietly into the present, not as memory, but as sensation, reaction, tenderness, and strain. It names how early experiences of care and dependence remain active in the body, shaping fear, love, vigilance, and exhaustion across years, and how parenting places people in daily contact with the child they once were. Rather than offering advice or solutions, the conversation gives language to this layered experience of time, showing how unrecognised pressure can become heavy, and how clarity softens it, revealing parenting as a living overlap between who you are now and who you once were.