I Broke the Chain!

I learned something yesterday that I thought I knew. But I didn’t.

As I was working on my memoir, I was glancing up at my parents wedding picture on the wall, and for the first time I saw them. I saw them as little children, all dressed up in adult costumes. I saw them for who they were; two adults who were children themselves, and who had no business ever having children, because they themselves were never parented.

I remember my father telling us as kids that his father beat him in the streets, called him a sissy and told him he’d never amount to anything. The same thing my father said to us when we were little. And my mother used to say her mother, my grandmother, never told her that she loved her. Maybe this is why she never told me.

My parents inherited generational pain, passed down from their parents, and my grandparents parents, and then from their parents also, and so on. But I broke the chain.

When my older brother, who is a writer said “I can’t write a book because I’m 70,” I turned around and said “well I can,” and I did. And when my other brother said he “feels bad about himself and feels like he doesn’t deserve anything” I turned around and said,” well I do! I deserve everything.”

I broke the chain!!