2026 is the year of the Fire Horse, I am told. Well, this creature has certainly come to throw me onto its back. After last weekend, I am in full gallop. I have accessed what I believe to be my my most precious fears and hurt, vulnerability and grief. The portal is open and it is much like a champagne bottle at first uncorking. I am not only honoring my tears, I am going to other mediums to broaden the space for what has remained unspoken within me for decades.
Naming what will never be is not an act of defeat; it is the grueling, clarifying work of body-stored grief. For decades, the invisible labor of hoping, over-functioning, and trying to earn acknowledgment kept my wounds active. Committing these hard nevers to this page finally withdraws my emotional investment from an unpayable debt. It allows the reality of what is missing to exist plainly, without requiring me to minimize the cost to me or to my children.
Here are my heartaches I don’t want to eat me up alive anymore:
I will never have parents who genuinely like me, assume my good intentions, and naturally feel protective over me. I will never have a Mother who engages with me about my childhood, who doesn’t feel attacked by my need to be acknowledged, and who doesn’t use my desperate intensity to be seen, as the excuse to shun me. I will never have a Mother with wherewithal to repair, who doesn’t say “I don’t want to talk about that, I put it all behind me!” while I’m desperate to talk about the sexually abuse I endured and with which she then abandoned me. I will never have a family of origin where belonging isn’t conditioned on collective amnesia and my silence. I will never receive a late-in-life epiphany, deathbed apology, or moment of reckoning where my parents finally comprehend the magnitude of what they allowed, what they ignored, what they passed down, and what they demanded I carry.
I will never experience the relief of having my reality confirmed by the people who shared the roof with me; my memory will always have to be enough. I will never have a family I know has my back and can rally around me because I belong with them, and not rally away from me, because, inconvenient to them, I am still fighting for myself and my invisible childhood.
I will never know what it feels like to have been a child who was allowed to be ordinary, messy, helpless, or weak without fearing total emotional and physical abandonment. I will never have a childhood where safety was a given birthright rather than an architecture I had to design, build, and maintain through sheer competence. I will never get back the developmental years spent managing the emotional weather of the adults around me instead of discovering who I was outside their storms.
I will never have a Mother who, despite her feelings about me, shields my children, her grandchildren, from that conflict with me, to preserve the sense of family security for my children. My children will never be able to say their parents are still happily married to one-another. My children will never have a childhood with a relaxed, playful Mother who is always able to hold space for their vital, developmental feelings. My children will never have a Grandmother who deeply desires to see them have a home and belonging, like she and I never had. My children will never have a Grandmother who puts their development ahead of her own need to be liked and validated. My children will never have perfect health and smooth, youthful years away from doctor offices and specialty foods. I will never celebrate an earnest, reciprocal, loving marriage as it reaches its 30-year wedding anniversary milestone. I will never have a spouse who doesn’t ultimately default to how little they can do to nurture the marital connection because I carry the relationship for two, readily absorbing fault and shame as well as concealing it, just like I did with my childhood. I will never have twenties where I am responsible only for me. I will never have friendships where I’m not concerned I will be swallowed by my own tendency to show my capabilities and value vs rest in the authenticity of the connection.
I will never know what it feels like to have been a spouse who, from time to time, was allowed to be ordinary, messy, helpless, or weak without fearing total emotional abandonment. I will never know what it feels like to collapse completely into someone else’s care with the unshakeable certainty that they are strong enough to hold my weight without buckling or resenting me. I will never have a baseline nervous system that didn’t have to spend its most formative, critical decades wired for imminent threat and constant perimeter checks.
I will never be able to rewrite the decades where I mistook being indispensable for being loved.
I will never have ancestral roots that feel like an emotional harbor rather than a minefield I had to navigate and ultimately walk away from. I will never be able to offer my adult children an extended family tree that feels wholly safe, unbroken, and uncomplicated to lean on.
The entire purpose of excavating a fortress is to realize I don’t have to live inside it anymore. Staring at the rubble indefinitely doesn’t help me build anything new. I can simultaneously honor the losses that made the bunker necessary and the damage I caused because I built it. My purpose now is renewal; learning to exist, then thrive.
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