Generational Trauma Memes

I am begging you to put the glasses away.

No, you’re not the first woman in your lineage to break generational curses. No, you’re not some savior coming to break your daughter out of chains. No, those chains were not forged by her foremothers AND HOW FUCKING DARE YOU. This idea is all over the internet and it’s gotta stop. 

The meme is three or four glasses, one filled with dark liquid and the others are empty. The dark liquid is poured from one to another until it gets to the penultimate glass. That glass gets the dark liquid AND fresh, clear water. And the water just keeps coming until all of the dark liquid is washed away and then that clear water is passed down to the final glass. 

Sometimes this happens in a sink with a full glass. 

I saw one in a snowy field. It was beautiful. 

IT’S BULLSHIT. 

Those women, the ones who made it possible for you to be alive and go online and dismiss them? They were whole, actual, human beings. They were not receptacles for pain. They were not filters. 

They were whole human beings with childhoods and first loves and heartbreak. They had orgasms and diarrhea and night terrors and day dreams. And they dreamed of you — the same way that you love and worry about your children and wonder and wish for your possible grands and greats. You lived for them long before you lived. 

You will never, ever convince me that they didn’t heal shit before it got to you. That they didn’t fight for you. That they didn’t try FOR YOU before you were even a glimmer of hope in their hearts. 

I come from a long line of badass women on both sides of my family. Women who were enslaved, women who were forced into marriage, women who were disowned by their families and thrown into jail for following their hearts, women who taught themselves how to read, women who taught others how to save and invest, women who broke the curses laid upon them as much as they could. 

They were human — and so the fires they passed along to me have sometimes burned. The traumas have come through the ages along with the will to heal. I see women now, mothers proclaiming loudly that they are breaking curses for their daughters and want to ask them WHERE DO YOU THINK THE SPELL COMES FROM?

We would not be where we are without those women behind us. 

My mother fucked me up. Deeply. I do not forgive her for many things. And our relationship now is shallow and consists mostly of me doing things for her which she can no longer do for herself at 80 years old. 

I do not have to forgive or embrace in order to respect all that she tried to do for me. I can see just how different my childhood was from hers, and hers from her own mothers, and back and back. It’s the same on my father’s side. Each generation trying to do better, each one failing in different ways for different reasons. 

I wonder sometimes if we as mothers are so fucking terrified because we know how we treat our own mothers and how we view our foremothers. I know that I have failed my own children and that I will continue to do so. There will be ways that I hurt them that I won’t know about for years. 

I also know that I am breaking generational curses. I am healing myself and that healing runs backwards through time and forwards. I know that I am supported in that healing by the sacrifices my mother made, by the dreams my grandmother had, by the prayers my great grandmother chanted, and by all the foremothers whose names I don’t know. 

They are the clear liquid and they are the dark. Life is murky like that, no matter what social media wants you to believe. 

And women HAVE ALWAYS BEEN FULL AND WHOLE HUMAN BEINGS no matter what this world wants you to believe. 

You aren’t special because you’re different from the women who made you. You are special because of the women who made you different.