Now that mental health awareness and education are so prevalent, countless parents today are working to prevent generational trauma from affecting their kids. And sometimes, to truly break the cycle, it’s necessary to sever contact with certain elders.
This woman, in her thirties, recently watched the same situation play out between her older sister and their mother. For some background, her sister, who has children ages 10 to 13, decided to move three states and refuses to let the kids stay at their mom’s home during school breaks.
Why? Well, her sister wants both their mother and their father to go to therapy. Otherwise, they’ll only get to see their grandchildren while being supervised.
Now, she knows that her parents didn’t exactly have a picture-perfect relationship. In fact, they’d always claimed that arguing was their “love language.”
“My parents have never been kind to each other. They defend their frequent explosive arguments and strings of insults by saying that their marriage wouldn’t have lasted 45 years if something was wrong,” she recalled.
However, she doesn’t exactly remember much else from her childhood. She attributes this to her teens and twenties being “absolutely terrible,” so her memories before high school are either fuzzy or entirely nonexistent.
This time period coincides with when her sister still lived at home, meaning she doesn’t really remember growing up alongside her sibling.
That’s why her sister keeping the kids from her parents had been tough to understand. Her mom claimed to be in a deep depression due to her sister holding the children “hostage.”
“I don’t know why your sister resents me so much. I know I wasn’t perfect, but I was a working mom, and she has no idea how hard we had it. I wasn’t mean. I wasn’t cruel. I didn’t scream at you guys. I was stern, but I wasn’t a bad mom,” her mother stated.
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Her sister, on the other hand, doesn’t want the kids exposed to an unhealthy dynamic or love “style.” And recently, she stumbled across a relic from her past that actually corroborates her sister’s point of view.
It turns out that from the time she was 10 to 16, she had a diary. Yes, there were large gaps between her sometimes sparse entries, but after reading it for the first time in more than a decade, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Apparently, once-harmless entries discussing her friends or hobbies morphed into a “catalog” of all the hostility in her childhood.
“Screaming, punishments, occasional hitting, and just outright meanness. For every benign entry about ‘Twilight’ or sixth-grade camp, there were three to four about what my mom or dad was mad at me for that day,” she revealed.
The discovery left her speechless and questioning if her mom really had forgotten all those incidents, like when her sister got kicked out of the house just for purchasing her own toiletries. And now, she’s unsure whether to show her mom the diary.
It could be a good idea since her sister and mom are at a major stalemate.
“My mom says she won’t go to therapy because then my sister wins and gets to hold that over their head. Besides, she says they’re old and stuck in their ways. It’s a monumental waste of her time,” she vented.
The diary, though, could be a wake-up call that forces her parents to confront the reality of her and her sister’s childhood. Nonetheless, she’s worried that her mom might not even believe the entries and just call her 12-year-old self a liar.
Do you think her mom actually forgot, or could she be downplaying the past? Should she show her mom the diary or not? What would you do?
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By Katharina Buczek
Katharina Buczek graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in Journalism and a minor in Digital Arts. Specializing in... More about Katharina Buczek
