My Wounds Won't Be Heirlooms

I haven’t met you yet, but I carry you every minute, every breath. You’re more than a heartbeat on a monitor now. You’re a constant stretch beneath my skin, a quiet nudge to my ribs, a slow turning in the dark that keeps me awake at night with wonder and fear. You’re still hidden, tucked safe inside me, but I swear you’re already rearranging my soul. Some days, I press my hand to my belly just to feel you move, just to remind myself you’re real, that this love I feel isn’t just a dream. And yet, even as I carry you, there are moments I fall apart under the weight of everything I don’t want to pass on to you. You feel so small inside me, and yet the promise of you feels bigger than anything I have ever known. I don’t know the shape of your face or the sound of your cry, but I know that you are already the most sacred thing I’ve ever touched. And I would set fire to every version of the girl I’ve been if it meant laying the foundation of a gentler world for you to stand on... if it meant you’d never have to live in the wreckage I was born from.

You are the future I never believed I was allowed to hope for and somehow, you're already teaching me how to bleed without breaking. You ground me. You anchor me. I feel the weight of your spirit pressed into my ribs like a vow I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to make. You're not even here, and still, you are the heaviest thing I’ve ever carried…. not in burden, but in meaning. You are my most fragile dream, not made of glass, but of all the broken pieces of me I’m desperately trying to soften so they don’t slice you the way they once gutted me.

Before you ever take your first breath, I need you to know this… I am trying. God, I am trying so hard. Every single day, I wake up and drag myself through the wreckage of the person I used to be, just to build something better for you. I’m trying to stitch together a version of myself that won’t bleed on you the way I was bled on by the people who made these same promises to me. Because I grew up in shadows, the kind that crept into corners and curled up in my bed at night. Some nights those shadows are the only thing that ever held me. I screamed into silences that never screamed back. I was invisible, see-through, fragile, and blamed for things far too heavy for my hands. I learned to stay small, to shatter quietly so no one had to clean up the mess.

But you will not carry those shards. I swear it with everything I am, everything I’ve clawed my way out of. I have bled enough for both of us, and I will not let my wounds become your inheritance, I will not pass down my ghosts like heirlooms. I will break every chain with my bare hands if I have to. I will unlearn every cruel story etched into my bones and torch the blueprints of trauma I was raised on. I will not let you be built inside a house made of echoes, silence, and judgment. I will rip down every wall that caged me, even if it splinters me in the process. You will never have to tiptoe through the broken glass I once called home. You will never have to shrink yourself just to feel safe. I will be the shield between you and the storm, the softness this world so often forgets to offer. I will be the light I never had, the kind that stays, even when the night stretches long and cruel. You will know safety not as a reward, but as a birthright. And love will never be something you have to earn or beg for.

I don’t know the color of your eyes, the sound of your laugh, or how your tiny fingers will wrap around mine, but even still, I know I would set fire to the world just to keep you safe. I would tear down heaven with my bare hands and string the stars like nightlights for you, just so you’d never have to hide in the shadows I once knew. I’ve swallowed the sharp edges of words that were never meant for a child to carry. And I will not - I will not - hand that pain down like some twisted carnival prize. You will not have to earn your worth in pieces.

I want you to grow up knowing that love is not a cage you contort yourself to fit inside… it is a wild, overgrown garden, untamed and full of light, where your soul has room to stretch, to breathe, to be. I want you to run through that garden barefoot, knowing you are safe to be loud, to be soft, to be wrong, to be radiant. I want you to know that your voice is sacred, an untamed wildfire sparked from generations of silenced women who swallowed their truths just to survive. Their stories live in your throat now, waiting to be set free. So don’t you dare whisper. Roar. Roar for them. Roar for you. Speak with the thunder of every chain you were born to break. Let your voice be the wind that topples walls, the song that heals wounds, the storm that writes a new history. I hope you learn how to build your wings from the wreckage of mine, not to carry my pain, but to rise above it. I pray that your flight is free and unburdened, not something you had to earn through survival. I don’t want you to inherit my battles. I want you to inherit the strength it took to end them.

I pray you always know how deeply you are wanted, not for what you do, but for who you are. I pray your heart stays soft, even in a world that will try to harden it. I pray you chase joy with wild abandon and never feel guilty for shining too brightly. I pray your boundaries are strong, your voice steady, your spirit unshakable. I pray you find people who hold your soul gently and places that feel like home without having to earn them. I pray your mistakes teach you, not shame you. I pray you always come back to yourself when the world tries to pull you away. And most of all, I pray that when you forget how loved you are, you always feel safe enough to crawl into my arms so I can whisper it back into your bones. Over and over, until you believe it again.

I am so far from perfect. I am still learning how to hold myself with the softness I want to offer you. I am still stitching myself back together from all the places I broke in silence. But every day, I choose to heal, even when it hurts, even when it scares me, because you are coming. And when you get here, I want to be ready. Ready to catch you when the world feels cruel. Ready to hold you through every storm, to listen when your voice trembles with truth. I want to be your safest place. The home you never have to earn. The mother you deserve.

You are my reckoning, the mirror I didn’t know I needed, the storm that shook everything loose. And you are my redemption, the reason I crawl through the wreckage of who I used to be, bleeding and breathless, but still moving. You are the prayer I whisper through gritted teeth, through sleepless nights and hollow days, long before I believed I was worthy of an answer. You are the hope that refused to die inside me, even when I stopped listening to it. And before you ever take your first breath, before the world ever lays its ugly hands on you, I need you to know that I am already in the fight of my life for you. For the kind of love that doesn’t leave when it gets hard. For the kind of mother I never had but always needed. For the kind of future that breaks every curse and stitches something holy in its place.

You are my promise, carved not in perfection, but in scars I’ve covered in silence. And I swear to you, even when I am afraid, even when I don’t know how… I will keep showing up. Bloodied. I don’t know who you’ll become, what dreams will catch fire in your chest, what truths you’ll whisper to yourself in the dark, what parts of this world will try to dim your light. But I do know that I will spend every breath I have making sure you never flinch at your own reflection. That you never shrink to be loved. That you never silence your voice to feel safe. You will not be punished for your softness or your fire. Not under my roof. Not in my arms. You are free to be loud, tender, wild, messy, whole. Whatever you are… I will love you there. Especially there.

Author’s note:
Originally written May 05, 2009: I would’ve burned it all to keep her safe. But some of the ashes landed on her anyway.

I wrote this piece before I held her, before I heard her cry, before I saw the way her eyes reflect both the wildest parts of me and the ones I swore I’d bury. I wrote it when all I had was hope and trembling hands, when the only thing louder than my fear was my love.

I wrote this full of promises and the sort of fire that I was willing to use to torch every path that dared to cause her pain. Now I read it, 16 years later, with tears stinging the back of my throat, because the truth is… I didn’t protect her from everything I swore I would. And nothing will ever haunt me more than that. I read it knowing she has already carried pieces of my pain, despite every desperate prayer that she wouldn’t. She’s known pain I never wanted her to taste. She’s had to learn too early how to guard her softness, how to question love, how to navigate this world with armor she should’ve never needed. I wanted so much to give her a world free from the ghosts I still wrestle with. I wanted to give her the things I never had the chance to hold…  softness, safety, unconditional love that didn’t ask her to shrink or shatter to earn it.

And yet... I see her building stone walls, the same kind I built to survive. And sometimes, when we sit together at the base of those walls, her pain echoes with a familiarity that crushes me because I recognize the stones. Some of them came from my own wall.

I’ve stayed in places I should’ve left sooner. I’ve trusted people I never should’ve let near her. Every person who hurt her had access because I opened the door. I let them in. There is no sentence more painful to write than that one. Because no matter how good my intentions were, the consequences still touched her. She has felt the ripple of every one of my mistakes and I carry that. I never wanted her to know the kind of pain I’ve known. But I see it in her eyes. I hear it in her silence. I see it in her spirals that remind me so much of my own.

Still… I hold tight to the prayer I wrote in this letter, the one I still whisper at night when the world feels too heavy for both of us. I pray she won’t have to continue to break just to understand what it means to be loved whole. That she’ll grow bigger than this town, braver than her fears, freer than the generations that cursed me. That she’ll thrive, not just survive like I’ve done my entire life. I still believe she can grow taller than the pain, dream wider than the silence, love deeper than I ever imagined was possible. I pray she finds a kind of freedom I never had the blueprint for.

This piece was my vow. And even when I’ve failed, even when I’ve fallen short, I am still choosing to show up. To continue to fight to heal. To forever be willing to grow. To fight for her to have a mother who keeps becoming.

One day, I hope she reads this and doesn’t just see my pain but sees how deeply, how wildly, how impossibly she is loved. I’ve stumbled, I’ve broken, I’ve gotten so much wrong over these 16 years… but loving her is the one thing I’ve never needed to figure out. It’s the only thing that’s ever come easily.

And even still… even with the weight I never meant to hand her, she is perfect. God, she is so perfect.

The ashes may have landed on her skin, but they didn’t stain her soul. She’s bold in the ways I was once punished for. She’s loud, hilarious, and unfiltered in a way that makes silence irrelevant. She demands space, and more than that, she holds it for others like it’s instinct. She cares fiercely. She feels everything. She shines in places I once dimmed myself just to survive. And maybe that’s the most sacred thing I’ve learned in all of this: She didn’t come from my wholeness.
She came from my breaking and still, she’s rising into something beautiful, something unshaken.
She is not the product of my pain. She is the proof that love can grow even in ashes.