Breaking What Broke Me

Heal from the things that hurt you, so I don’t have to spend the rest of my life healing from you.

I say that with more softness than it probably sounds. Because I know you didn’t mean to become something I’d have to recover from. I know your own pain started long before I ever entered the picture. I’ve bent myself backwards trying to hold space for that, trying to offer grace, to see the child in you who never got what they needed either. And I have. Over and over again. I’ve whispered compassion into the silence where your love should’ve been.

But understanding doesn’t undo impact. Compassion doesn’t patch bullet holes. And I’m tired of stitching myself back together in the dark, just to protect the parts of you that never learned how to stop hurting people.

Because even the parts that understand and feel compassion need someone, too. That’s what I wish I could say to you without choking on the guilt of needing anything at all. I needed someone steady. Someone who made it feel safe to need, to be small, to not always have it together. I needed someone who looked into me, not through me. Someone who noticed when I went quiet, not because I was fine, but because I was disappearing inside myself. I needed someone who could see the exhaustion in my smile, the fear buried in my silence, the way I was carrying more than any child ever should. I didn’t need to be rescued. I just needed to be held. Not because I was falling apart, but because I was holding everything else together. And I did it so well that no one ever stopped to ask if it was too heavy.

I learned early that there wasn’t room for my emotions unless I made myself small enough to fit into the cracks left behind by everyone else’s chaos. So I did. I swallowed my feelings. I softened my voice. I learned to disappear in all the right ways. I became the one who didn’t ask for too much, who didn’t cry too loud, who didn’t take up space. I became the one who stayed calm while everything else collapsed. The one who held it together so no one else had to. The strong child. The reliable child. The good child. The easy one to love because I didn’t make it hard. And everyone praised me for it… for being mature, for being good, for being so “together.” But no one ever asked what it cost me to be that girl. No one ever wondered what I buried to become her.

It cost me my softness. It cost me my childhood. It cost me the understanding that I was allowed to be held, to be cared for, without earning it first. I became fluent in everyone else’s emotions, able to read a room the way some kids read storybooks but completely illiterate when it came to my own. I could sense when someone needed space, needed comfort, needed saving. I just never learned how to recognize when I did. I became whoever the moment required, shape-shifting into safety for everyone else, but I never got to be just me. Because I never really learned who that was, I was too busy surviving everyone else’s storms.

I know you had your own storms to survive. I know the world wasn’t gentle with you either, and that you didn’t have someone who showed up in all the ways you needed. I don’t fault you for your scars. I don’t blame you for the ways you learned to protect yourself, to keep going. But I do wish you had stopped long enough to see how those wounds were spilling onto us. I wish you had looked at your pain instead of handing it down. I wish you had chosen to break the cycle instead of letting it break me. Because I was just a child, desperate for safety, for softness, and instead, I inherited battles that were never mine to fight. And I’ve spent so much of my life trying to heal from what you refused to face.

I know you were hurting. I know life handed you burdens too heavy for you to bear, things you never learned how to carry. But so did I. And I carried mine alone, invisibly, while you disappeared deeper inside yourself. I was just a child. A child. I know that word probably makes your skin crawl because you trained me out of it before I even knew what it meant. You trained me to be calm when everything was chaotic, to be mature when things fell apart, to be useful when no one else could hold it together. You needed me steady, so I became steady. You needed me silent, so I swallowed down every scream and every tear. You needed help, so I became it. I became the one who held your cracks while my own broke in silence.

I carried the weight of a household on shoulders still soft with baby fat. I tucked my sister in at night while no one noticed I was still terrified of the dark. I did the things no one asked me to do because somehow I knew they had to be done, and if I didn’t do them, no one would. You never protected me from that kind of knowing. I’ve tried to understand. To give grace. To tell myself that you did the best you could with what you had. But why wasn’t your best ever something that included me? Why was I the emotional landfill where everything no one wanted to face was dumped? Why did you only see me when I was useful, or silent, or good? Why did tenderness have to be earned through invisibility? You called me strong. You praised me for being easy. But what you really meant was thank you for not being a burden, thank you for not needing me, thank you for making your life easier. You never truly saw me… not once, not really. And now I’m the one bleeding out in a journal, because no one taught me how to simply exist without apologizing for it. You always say I’m so independent. So resilient. But independence was just a fancy word for abandonment dressed up as a personality trait. Resilience was just the scar tissue I grew over my unmet needs. You weren’t there. And I know it hurts to hear that. But not nearly as much as it hurt to live it.

I’m still unlearning what it meant to grow up unseen. Still trying to believe that being noticed doesn’t require being needed. I still flinch when someone asks how I’m really doing because for so long, no one did. And when they did, they didn’t stay long enough to hear the answer. I still wrestle with the belief that love has to be earned through usefulness, through being the one who fixes, who calms, who holds it all together. I’m still dragging around the weight of a role I never signed up for… daughter turned caretaker, peacemaker, emotional sponge. The one who absorbed everyone else’s pain and never got to name her own. And even now, with all the awareness, all the healing, some days I still don’t know how to just be without trying to prove I deserve to exist.

I know you didn’t mean to hurt me. I know you didn’t do it on purpose. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t affected. It doesn’t mean I didn’t spend years carrying what you couldn’t name, shrinking to fit into the spaces where your pain took up too much room. I’ve tried so hard to love you gently and to meet you where you are, to speak your language, even when I don’t yet know how to speak my own. I’ve offered grace where I needed comfort. I’ve made excuses in the name of understanding. But the truth is, the little girl in me needed someone, too. She still does. She needed to be chosen. To be seen. To be protected, not just from the world, but sometimes from you. And I’m still learning how to give her what you couldn’t.

So if I could ask you for anything now, it would be this… please look at your pain. Really look at it. Not through blame or shame, but through the honest eyes of someone who finally wants to be free. Let yourself heal, not just for you, but for everyone who’s ever loved you while being cut by what you couldn’t face. Because I’m tired. I’m tired of carrying what was never mine. Tired of stitching up wounds that don’t belong to me just so I can function. I want a life that isn’t defined by survival. I want to stop bracing for the next emotional fallout. I want to stop confusing strength with self-abandonment. And underneath all of that, I still love you. I always have. But I needed you. And I don’t think you ever really saw that. Maybe because you were never taught how to see someone else’s need without feeling accused by it. But I was just a child. I didn’t want blame, I just wanted to matter.

So heal. You couldn’t do it for me, but heal for my daughter’s sake because I refuse to pass this weight down one more generation. Heal so she never has to carry even the smallest fraction of this pain, this silence, this fractured love. I will be a different mother. I will love her fiercely, tenderly, in ways I was starved for. I will be present in the spaces where I once felt invisible. I will listen to her with my whole heart, hold her without hesitation or conditions, and protect her from the ghosts that haunted me. I will be everything you never were, not out of spite, but because I owe her that. And even in all this brokenness, you gave me a painful kind of clarity… a blueprint of what love should never be. Your silence, your scars, your absence, they showed me the edges of love’s true shape. So heal. Not just for your own sake, but so that healing can ripple through me, through her, through generations yet to come. So that maybe we can finally break this cycle.


Author’s Note:
Originally written July 15, 2009 - For every child who carried what wasn’t theirs.

I wrote this less than two months after my daughter was born. It was one of those nights where the world felt impossibly still, as if it was holding its breath with us. She was warm and impossibly small in my arms, her lashes brushing her cheeks as she slept. I traced the soft curve of her face with my fingertips, memorizing her, and I couldn’t stop wondering if my own mother had ever done the same for me. Had she looked at me with this same awe? Had she made the same silent promises I was making now… to love fiercely, to break the cycles that had broken her?

And if she had, when did it change? When did love begin to fracture? When did survival take the place of presence? I remember feeling afraid that maybe I was doomed to repeat her patterns, too, that love might somehow slip through my fingers the way it had slipped through hers.

Sixteen years later, I know it didn’t. That tiny baby is a young woman now, and she’s extraordinary. Brilliant, yes, but her brilliance is the least remarkable thing about her. She is kind and outspoken in ways I never knew I could be. She uses her voice without fear, knowing it will always be met with mine… steady, listening, safe. She tells me when she’s hurt, when she’s scared, when she’s spiraling. She trusts me enough to spill over, knowing I will catch every drop. She moves through the world certain of my love, not because she earned it by being easy or quiet, but because it’s the air she breathes.

She knows she can be messy, loud, imperfect. She knows there is no version of herself that will ever make me love her less. She gets to be a kid in all the ways I never could…  laughing at silly things, speaking her mind, moving freely in her own skin. That’s how I know the cycle is broken. Not because I declared it, but because she lives it. I hear it in the way she calls me when she needs someone to vent to, the way she comes to me without hesitation. Every version of her knows she is safe with her mom.

She also had eight beautiful years with my mother before my mom’s death. My mom was an incredible grandmother… present, proud, cheering the loudest in every crowd. And I will admit, there were moments when a part of me felt the ache of envy, watching my daughter receive the version of my mom I always needed. But I am deeply grateful my daughter got to know that side of her. When she remembers her grandmother, she remembers only love and joy, and I wouldn’t change that for anything.

Still, the little girl in me will always grieve what she didn’t get. There will always be a quiet ache for the safety I never knew. But that ache doesn’t define my motherhood. My children’s laughter does. Their trust does. Their unshaken certainty that they are loved in every moment… that is the proof.

I did it. I broke what broke me.