One More Perspective

As soon as I wrote Four Generations and No Shortcuts, I knew something was off.  It felt too neatly tied in a bow.  It haunted me.  That’s the gift of writing; it brings perspective to any subject, once no longer in one’s head. 

I have convinced myself that feeling clean, furious grief for what was done to me is an act of hypocrisy because my own fractures bled onto my children.  It is an airtight logical defense my brain created; this is the intellectualization I do as a self-defense mechanism.  It sounds like high-integrity accountability, but functionally, it acts as a gag order and is a product of my own guilt.  I’m sinking under this weight.

I am forcing my twelve-year-old inner child to carry the adult sins of her future self.  The girl hopelessly pacing on that roof in Hungary contemplating suicide did not have children.  She had not yet made desperate, survival-driven parenting mistakes.  She was a child being actively violated, unprotected, and exploited.  Telling her that she is not allowed to scream, hate, or grieve what is happening to her because decades later she would fail to parent with pristine perfection is a retroactive execution of her right to exist.  Her reality does not depend on my future track record.

I realize now that I am conflating predatory abandonment with the collateral damage of survival.  Hurting my children because my nervous system was shattered and I was drowning while trying to keep them afloat is a tragedy.  It warrants sorrow, humility, and repair where repair is possible.  …but it is fundamentally not the same thing as the incest, exploitation, and betrayal inflicted on me by the adults whose explicit job was to protect me. Conflating the two into a flat category I consider we all hurt each other is an intellectual maneuver I do to avoid two terrifying things:  1) the searing fire of pure anger at my abusers, and 2) the gut-wrenching sorrow of where I fell short with my own children.

I can also see how my blanket amnesty actually prevents real accountability.  When I say to myself, “I can’t be angry at my negligent parents because I hurt my kids too,” I create a neat moral standoff where everyone is pardoned in the name of generational trauma, and nobody (including me!) ever has to stand in the raw, messy truth.  Minimizing what was done to me inevitably forces me to minimize the weight of what happened next.  I don’t protect my children by swallowing my own abuse; I only protect the silence that allowed it to travel down the generational line in the first place.

I don’t need a clean balance sheet to have the right to my own pain.  Real integrity is messy:  it means I can be incandescent with rage on behalf of the little girl who was preyed upon and discarded, and I can carry profound, aching remorse for where my survival mechanisms hurt my own children.  Both truths exist.  Neither cancels the other out.

To my children, accountability means I will never use the brutality of my childhood as an excuse for the ways my survival wounded you.  I will not ask you to study four generations of family history.  You do not owe me an understanding of my pain.  Your experience of me belongs to you, and I will stand in the truth of where I failed you without flinching.

To my twelve-year-old self pacing in agony on the roof, integrity means I finally stop demanding that you earn the right to your anger.  You do not have to be a saint, a martyr, or the mother of spotless children for me to take your side.  You were a child who was violated, exploited, and abandoned by the people whose only job was to keep you safe.  You are allowed to scream.  You are allowed to hate what was done to you.  I will not force you to swallow your truth just to pay for my adult mistakes.
There is no bow here. There is no neat generational transcendence. There is only the quiet, messy reality of holding both truths at the exact same time:  debilitating grief and protection for the child I was, and radical, humble responsibility for the mother I became.