I was seven the first time I counted past two hundred.

Not because anyone taught me to. Not because it was a game. Because my mother had said “I’ll be right back” and walked through the automatic doors of a grocery store, and I was sitting in the backseat of a blue sedan with the windows cracked two inches, and I needed something to do with the terror that was climbing up my ribs.

So I counted.

I counted the people walking out. I counted the shopping carts. I counted the seconds between each person exiting and the next one appearing, trying to calculate some kind of pattern that would tell me when she would come back. I watched every face. None of them were hers. And somewhere around two hundred and thirty, the counting stopped being arithmetic and started being prayer.

She came back, of course. She always came back. Bag of groceries, maybe a coffee, sometimes that apologetic half-smile that meant she’d run into someone she knew. And I would feel the flood of relief so strong it almost made me nauseous, and I would say nothing, because what was there to say? She had only been gone fifteen minutes. I was fine. The car was fine. Everything was fine.

But something in my chest had learned a lesson it would never unlearn.

The parking lot classroom

Most people hear “waited in the car” and picture a minor inconvenience. A child flipping through a comic book. Maybe playing with the radio dial. A small, unremarkable pocket of boredom.

But for some children, the car was not a waiting room. It was a laboratory for abandonment.

The specific experience I’m describing is not dramatic. It’s not abuse. It’s not neglect in any way most people would recognize. It’s a parent running an errand and a child sitting in the backseat, and nothing bad happening.

Except inside that child, everything was happening.

The scanning of the entrance. The mental rehearsals - what if she doesn’t come back, what if I need to get out, who would I ask for help, could I reach the horn. The way a seven-year-old body can produce the same cortisol spike as an adult facing a genuine emergency, simply because the person who represents safety has disappeared behind a set of doors that the child cannot open from this side.

A 2014 study published in the journal Development and Psychopathology found that children who experienced repeated episodes of uncertainty about a caregiver’s availability developed heightened activation in the amygdala - the brain’s threat detection center - even in objectively safe situations. The researchers called it “anticipatory threat processing.” The child’s brain was not responding to danger. It was responding to the possibility of danger, which, to a developing nervous system, feels identical.

The car was where some of us first learned that love could walk away and might not walk back.

The invisible timer

Here is what nobody tells you about those parking lot minutes: they install something in you.

I call it the invisible timer, because that’s exactly what it feels like. Someone says “I’ll be there at seven” and it is 7:04 and already your chest is tightening. Your partner says “running to the store” and you say “okay” and then you are watching the clock on the microwave with a focus that belongs in an air traffic control tower.

You text “are you okay?” after twelve minutes of silence. You check the location app. You stand at the window. And you know - you know with your adult brain - that this is not proportional. That twelve minutes late does not mean catastrophe. That your partner going to Target does not constitute an emergency.

But your body does not know that. Your body is still in the backseat.

1. You cannot sit in waiting rooms without watching the clock

Doctor’s offices. Car repair shops. Anywhere you are asked to simply wait for someone or something to appear, you become the child again. You track time not casually but urgently. You notice the minute hand. You notice when the receptionist looks up. You notice everything because noticing was once the only power you had.

2. You send the “just checking in” text too early

It’s been twenty minutes since someone said they’d call. Most people wouldn’t notice. You’ve already drafted three versions of a casual-sounding text that hides the fact that your heart rate has been climbing since minute eight. The text is not about information. It’s about confirmation that someone is still coming back.

3. Lateness from others feels personal

When someone is late, you don’t just feel annoyed. You feel a specific kind of dread that sits low in your stomach and whispers the old story: they’re not coming. Something happened. You’ve been forgotten. Rationally you know traffic exists. Emotionally you are seven years old and the parking lot is getting darker.

4. You over-prepare for every scenario

You always have a backup plan. You know every exit. You carry a phone charger because a dead phone means you can’t reach anyone, and not being able to reach anyone means being the child in the car who couldn’t call for help. Your preparedness looks like responsibility. It feels like survival.

5. You struggle to believe “I’ll be right back”

It’s the phrase itself. Those four words. Someone says them to you and something in your nervous system flinches, because you have a body that remembers - really remembers, in the muscles and the breath - all the times that “right back” meant ten minutes, twenty minutes, long enough for a child to start planning what to do if nobody ever came.

A 2019 study in Psychological Science found that adults who reported chronic childhood uncertainty about caregiver availability showed elevated physiological stress responses to ambiguous social situations - situations that were not threatening but were uncertain. The researchers noted that these individuals were not anxious about bad outcomes specifically. They were anxious about not knowing.

That’s the parking lot in a sentence. Not knowing.

6. You become the person who is never late

This one is quieter, but it runs deep. Because you know what waiting feels like - what it really feels like, the cellular version - you refuse to inflict it on anyone else. You arrive early. You text when you’re on your way. You give exact ETAs. You are pathologically punctual because somewhere in you, the child decided: I will never be the person who doesn’t come back.

7. You feel a physical flood of relief when someone arrives

Not just happiness. Relief. The kind that loosens something in your shoulders you didn’t know was clenched. The kind that makes you want to cry for a reason you could never explain to the person standing in front of you, who simply walked through the door at 7:15 like it was nothing.

Because for them it was nothing.

For you it was the door of the grocery store opening and your mother’s face finally appearing, and the whole world clicking back into place.

Why the body keeps the score of small things

Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk wrote extensively about how trauma lives in the body, not just the mind. But what’s often missed in that conversation is that the body doesn’t distinguish between large traumas and small, repeated ones. It doesn’t file experiences by how dramatic they look from the outside. It files them by how they felt on the inside.

A child sitting in a car for fifteen minutes while a parent shops does not look like trauma. It doesn’t look like anything. But the child’s nervous system was doing real work during those minutes - scanning for threat, managing uncertainty, suppressing the urge to cry, rehearsing emergency scenarios, performing a kind of emotional labor that most adults would find exhausting.

And the body remembers that work. Not as a story you can tell, but as a pattern you can feel.

Research by developmental psychologist Edward Tronick demonstrated that even brief disruptions in caregiver attunement - moments where the child cannot read the caregiver’s availability - produce measurable stress responses. His famous “still face” experiments showed that infants as young as four months become visibly distressed when a caregiver becomes emotionally unavailable, even momentarily.

The car was a still face experiment that lasted twenty minutes at a time.

The distance between “I’ll be right back” and something going wrong

Here is the thing about those minutes in the parking lot. They taught you something about time that you carry everywhere.

They taught you that the distance between “everything is fine” and “everything has fallen apart” can be measured in minutes. That the difference between safety and abandonment is not some vast, obvious chasm. It’s a slow stretch. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen.

And so now you live in a world where time itself feels dangerous. Where someone being late is not an inconvenience but evidence. Where silence from a person you love is not neutral but loaded. Where the gap between the last text and the next one is a parking lot, and you are still in the backseat, and you are still counting.

This is not weakness. This is a nervous system that learned its lessons in a blue sedan outside a grocery store, and never received the memo that the lesson was over.

What the child in the car deserved to hear

If I could go back to that parking lot - to any of those parking lots, because there were so many of them - I would open the car door and sit in the backseat next to that child and say something very simple.

I would say: you are not overreacting. What you feel right now is real. The fear is real. The counting is real. And it’s not your job to manage this alone.

I would say: the fact that nothing bad happened doesn’t mean nothing hard happened. Waiting in uncertainty is hard. Watching for someone’s face through a crowd of strangers is hard. Being small and still and quiet while your whole body screams is hard.

I would say: you will carry this. I won’t lie to you about that. You will carry this into relationships and friendships and Tuesday afternoons when someone is fifteen minutes late and your hands start to shake. But carrying it doesn’t mean it owns you. It means you survived something that asked too much of you too early, and you found a way through it.

And then I would wait with her. Not because she needed me to. But because no child should have to count past two hundred alone.

If you still feel that timer start in your chest - in the waiting room, in the restaurant, in the quiet minutes after someone says “I’ll be right back” - I want you to know something.

You’re not anxious. You’re not clingy. You’re not too much.

You’re the child who kept watch. And you kept watch because you loved someone so much that the idea of them not returning was the most frightening thing your small world contained.

That’s not a flaw. That’s the deepest kind of loyalty, learned in the hardest kind of classroom.

You can put the stopwatch down now. You’ve counted enough.