Past & Done
My therapist said she specializes in the hole in your heart
that lacks a mom,
& I thought, no s***, Sherlock
that's your job
& I could write a post about mothers
my mom in particular
that would offend
almost everyone
but I won't
and that's growth
that's the hole in my heart
shaped like a machete wound
which are weapons used in combat
to fight our enemies, our
evil counterparts
& that is not the definition
Merriam Webster uses to define parent.
Combat.
& now I sit with the damage, the collateral effects
of it -
but it's our job to overcome
what was done to us
to move on and fill the hole
that sits and festers
until we seek professional help -
the machete hole in my heart
is saying:
it's okay to be broken
but don't pass on
this trauma, this propensity
to sit and ruminate about
what is past, and done.
I redact my forgiveness
*I swear I meant to follow the prompt. Alas, I wrote this...content warning-ish, I guess*
You told me I was ugly.
Worthless. Brainless. Pitiless.
You told me I would never amount to anything more
than the sad shadow of a dream you'd predestined for me.
You told me I was small,
and then when I outgrew you,
you cut my legs from beneath me.
You told me I was talent-less,
unworthy of investment.
You told me not to reach, not to strive, not to build myself up.
You even taught me that it wasn't worth the effort.
Why become at all when the world only seeks to destroy?
I listened.
That scrawny, pathetic, witless child listened.
I drank down your bitterness and convinced myself it was sweet honey.
I forgave every transgression.
I offered myself up onto your altar,
allowed you to mold me into your dream.
I didn't fight back.
I didn't ask for more than the pittance you gave.
I stagnated.
And I reveled in every shred of praise.
I stopped caring about my conscience.
I ignored the inner voice that screamed
to be more than a slave.
Yes, the child I was
forgave.
And then,
I was suddenly awake
and full of hate.
I hate what you made me.
I hate that I let you convince me to be nothing.
My conscience is screaming now, motherfucker--
and it's telling me that you committed a travesty.
You heinous, insidious, shriveled little prick-
you stole that girl's soul.
You saw her.
You saw that she would've rattled the very core of the universe if given half a chance.
And you were terrified.
So you crushed her- crushed me- like the ember at the end of a cigarette butt.
I became ash beneath your feet.
I am no longer a child.
She may have forgiven you,
but I don't.
Most certainly not when I went and fulfilled your dreams for me.
When I pumped out children like some prized brood-mare
because it was the only thing I'd ever been taught to be.
I became that mother.
I became that wife.
I became that live-in maid you always wanted me to be.
But your plan backfired.
Because the moment I looked into my child's eyes,
I felt more powerful than you'd ever allowed me to be.
And I knew
I would burn the world for that little girl.
I would even burn you.
She will never doubt for a moment
her immense worth.
And as she grows, I feed that fire in her.
Intelligence that was quelled in me,
looms iridescent behind her cunning eyes.
She will rattle the very core of this universe.
And I will be there
beside her
a battle cry on my lips,
as she conquers every dream she ever dared to dream.
And you will still be dead
Ash beneath our feet.
Forged Ideals
I learned to hate the idea of being a woman.
Our only purpose seemed to be to serve, to submit, to be silent and suffer.
I watched as my mother cried and begged church after church for forgiveness for a crime she had no choice in commiting.
Knowing her story, her suffering,
intimately by age 9,
I had wept with her and could not fathom the cruelty and audacity of all of those pious, holy hypocrites to find joy in her desperate pleas.
I learned that I was not as good as my brothers, I was weaker, more emotional, better suited for cooking and cleaning and laundry than sports or video games or cars.
I learned that my voice should never be heard when there is a man present, that if a man chooses to give you attention, you should always be polite and sweet and thankful.
I learned that I would never be smart enough to understand the things in a man’s world.
I grew up with the notion that women like my mother and I are not pretty enough, we should be grateful for any man’s attention, because we have brown hair, brown eyes, baby bearing bodies and deep sadness that no one could ever deal with.
I had more body hair than most boys in my 5th grade class, I was too short, my hair was never blonde, my eyes weren’t blue, my stomach never once flat enough despite years of not eating and vomiting constantly- all of this kept as a tally of my exact degree of worth, or lack thereof, in the back of my brain.
I learned that I looked so similar to my mother through any eyes but her own.
She could only look at me and see her past regrets, now I look at me and I see a nauseating blur of two people that broke and abandoned me.
And so I burned the idea that I could ever be a woman to the ground.
I longed to be anything *but* a woman, hoping that would be enough for my father to care, to rewrite my past through a new lens, give me new worth, allow me to enjoy the things that he did even though I was not born with the same body as my brothers, but it turns out I will never be a man either.
There is nothing left that feels like mine except the in between shades of bluish gray.
The absent, gaping void settled betwixt here and there.
I do not belong to either world and I never will.
But I will forge my own place for my younger self to find safety and sanctuary in- even walking through the flames of the hell I’ve been damned to.
I am a phoenix.
Even if it takes lifetimes to rise from the ashes of generational grief.
The Unwanted Inheritance
It started with nightmares. Blood-curdling screams that would jolt me awake in the dead of night, tangled in sweat-soaked sheets as memories and fears that weren't my own clawed at my mind. Images of war, of violence so horrific it seemed beamed in from another plane of existence entirely.
At first, I thought it was just a phase, night terrors brought on by stress at school or the pressures of being a teenager. But the nightmares only grew more vivid and persistent as the years wore on. By college, I was avoiding sleep entirely, living off caffeine and adrenaline as the waking world became a sanctuary from the psychological torture that awaited me each night between the sheets.
It wasn't until my psychology elective that I began to untangle the knot of intergenerational trauma that had been passed down to me like a curse, striking at me from the grave.
My grandfather Ian never spoke of his experiences in World War II. According to family lore, he had been captured and held in a prisoner of war camp for 18 agonizing months, enduring torture and deprivation that marked him permanently, though you'd never know it from his stoic silence.
When he finally returned from the war, his own father was so traumatized that he could barely look at his son, the living reminder of the violence and fear he had endured on the frontlines. And so the psychological scars went unacknowledged and unprocessed, packaged up like a ticking time bomb to be passed on to future generations.
My dad jokes that the reason he had kids so late in life is because he spent his 20s and 30s trying to outrun the ghosts of his father and grandfather. The substance abuse, the self-destructive behavior, the inability to form real emotional bonds - now I recognize these were his ways of coping with the ancestral cloud of trauma and disconnection that haunted him.
And I inherited it all. The night terrors, the emotional numbness, the feeling of always being on guard, waiting for the next mortar shell to drop on me at any moment. This was my bloody genetic legacy, an unwanted inheritance of psychic injuries incurred before my great-grandparents had even said their marriage vows.
I fought it as long as I could, wrapping the pain up tight like my grandfather had done and shoving it deep inside where it couldn't be explored or excavated. But the nightmares always found a way to bubble up, threatening to swallow me alive in the process.
At my lowest point, I found myself drunk on the bathroom floor at 3 AM with a bottle of sleeping pills, seriously contemplating ending the cycle of intergenerational trauma through the most permanent solution. And that was my wake-up call.
There are resources out there to begin the process of generational healing, even for those of us who feel irrevocably damaged by the traumas of our ancestors. I started seeing a trauma counselor and joining group therapy sessions with others who carried their own inherited psychological wounds.
I'll never forget the first time I met Jacob, a young man whose grandfather and great-uncles survived the atrocities of a Nazi concentration camp but never opened up about the soul-scarring brutality they experienced. Jacob and I became accountability buddies, checking in on each other's progress and emotional state while we worked through EMDR therapy and family mapping exercises.
With the group's support and my counselor's expert guidance, I began to unravel the heavy cloak of trauma, allowing the light to pierce the darkness I had been living under for so long. I started practicing mindfulness and meditation to find stillness and separate my own identity from the intergenerational pain.
The nightmares persisted in the beginning, with vivid flashes of images and sounds that made me jolt awake in a cold sweat. But I learned grounding techniques to ease the anxiety spirals and remind myself that I am my own person, not just an avatar for my family's tragedies.
As the weeks and months passed, the nightmares slowly started losing their grip on me. The visions of war and violence faded, replaced with more abstract fears and half-remembered fragments. Some mornings, I would wake up and realize with surprise that I had slept through the night undisturbed, with no memories of dark dreams whatsoever.
With that release of the nightmarish visions, I felt myself becoming lighter somehow, less weighed down by the unseen baggage I had been carrying for so many years without realizing the burden. I laughed more easily, took more emotional risks by opening myself up to others, and discovered newfound reserves of creativity and ambition that had been locked away by the traumatic inheritance.
Jacob and I still keep in close touch, meeting up for a hike and outdoor meditation whenever we're in the same area. We often remark on how our friendship formed from the mutual goal of healing from generational trauma, but now our bond transcends that psychic scar tissue. We are who we are because of it, but no longer defined or imprisoned by it.
My story is not unique, unfortunately. According to research, trauma can be encoded into our DNA and passed down over multiple generations through cellular memory. Many of us may be walking around haunted by nightmares and neuroses imprinted on us like scratches on wax from experiences that predated our birth, feeling the pangs of fear and violence that scarred our ancestors.
But just because these unwanted inheritances get passed down to us, that doesn't mean we can't begin the process of healing them. What my grandfather and father and so many others of their wartime generations couldn't do - open up the traumas and allow themselves to feel them, metabolize them, release them - is still possible for us.
It takes courage, patience, perseverance. It takes being willing to feel the weight of atrocities and psychic injuries we never experienced directly but which became entangled in our cellular code. It takes a village of support, of shared empathy and mutual dedication to doing the shadow work and bringing light to what has remained cloaked in darkness for so long.
These days, I sleep through the night more often than not. And on the occasions when I have a nightmare that summons those ancestral agonies, I don't panic or try to stuff them back down. I allow myself to sit in the discomfort for a while, grounding myself with deep breaths and mantras to remind myself that I am safe, that those horrors are in the past. And then I release them back into the ether, more convinced than ever to continue doing my part to cauterize the generational wounds.
We can't keep passing down this heirloom of unprocessed trauma to our descendants like a sick inheritance. We have to be the ones to stop the cycle, to un-inscribe the nightmares from our DNA, to remember the light and the warmth of our shared humanity.
It may take generations more of mindful effort to heal the intergenerational trauma on a mass scale. But we are the ones with the opportunity and the obligation to step into that light, one cautious but determined step at a time.
An (Un)breakable Cycle
Ten years ago, every day, I'd have to fight a dragon. The dragon would snap at the slightest notion, would swipe its claws at me without reason, and would mercilessly attack my very being. My only shield was,
"I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry,"
"I'm sorry!"
And although your hunger was sated for the time, it was never enough.
Ten years ago, I never knew the joys of parenthood.
Ten years ago, I never knew the indescribable, innumerable love I felt for my girl.
So, while ten years ago, I forgive
Now, I fight you with my claws.
Break the pattern
You always said, 'I'm telling you what my father told me, don't wait too long to have kids.'
When I turned thirty, you took me on a long walk - and explained my own dwindling fertility to me - as if you couldn't understand why I hadn't yet produced a child. Another disappointment I suppose. I made many excuses - my low wages, my high rent, my partner's reluctance to become a father, the increasing conflicts within the world, the collapse of ecosystems, pollution. All of these reasons were real - but none of them is what was truly keeping me from motherhood.
The truth is - I didn't feel equipped to become a parent. I was painfully aware of my hair-trigger temper, my disproportionate reactions, the undercurrent of violence that flowed through my veins, always threatening to come to the surface.
My own world felt so unsafe that I could never imagine willingly subjecting an innocent being to it. Because children are supposed to be nurtured and kept safe. They are supposed to be encouraged and loved unconditionally, so they can grow into the beautiful and unique (and yes sometimes frustrating) person they are supposed to be. And I didn't get that from you as a child. The home I grew up in felt like living on the edge of a volcano. Sometimes dormant, usually spewing lava - but occasionally blowing up and destroying everything in it's path.
Now I am healing and learning healthy communication and emotional maturity. Maybe one day - with the right partner, I might feel safe enough to nourish a child. Maybe not. Either way, I am determined to break the pattern here.
I just wish you would take the time to come to terms with your own childhood trauma - I can't imagine what you have suffered to make you as you are.
Father, Father...
Who can love anger?
I destroyed childhood toy castles,
as my father did his own.
He was my best friend,
until his canines were sharp in the side of my neck.
A lone wolf, killing its cub.
I am nothing but broken pieces,
and as I hold my child I could never imagine
shredding the bloom of the seed you sowed.
I still feel it deep in my bones,
hammering like he did the door when drunk.
I wish to pierce holes in you,
as he did switchblades to drywall.
But I know I cannot. I can never be so angry to kill a child's soul.
But I hug him with loose arms, and I absorb his warmth and tears to the crown of my head he used to kiss.
I forgive him as a child,
but I will never forgive being a fear-soaked child, shaking and stripped of a father.
working hands.
I once admired
your working hands.
Hands rough and strong,
so streaked with dirt.
Hands that feed, that
fight, that teach.
Hands that prayed,
and they pray still.
Hands that
risk their life to
abandon a homeland,
to cross a border,
hands that left your
home a world away
to make this strange land
mine
Aching hands that,
of sun and sweat, and
prayers and dirt,
built my life
on American soil
Loud hands at work,
at family reunions, church,
at quinceañeras, barbecues.
Loud hands outside,
Silent at home.
Sunburnt
hands that rip
The bitter taste of
fatherhood from your
unwilling tongue.
I've always watched your
Working hands come
home to rest,
No strength for love,
no time for me,
only to eat,
and work,
and sleep.
I pray my soft
delicate hands
Be as strong and tough
as you,
My gentle American hands,
such tender hands, so
unlike yours.
My privileged hands,
they want for nothing.
Such sheltered hands
Uncalloused, young,
untraveled.
I pray that
my American hands
have room to hold
the love you never did,
Love meant for me, my
brother, sister, mother,
or kids.
My hands provide
for not a child unseen.
They work to care, to
mend their hearts,
To wipe the sweat upon
my brow only after I dry
their tears.
My hands
won't work to kiss the
sun, my hands will work
to make a home.
My working hands
will work
To love.