Beginnings · What You Inherited
Date: 2 April 2026
I would not terrorize my child. Harsh words like “You are worthless. Don’t you worry, I’ll get you” would never be hissed. There would be no grinding psychological torment. No talk of mutilation.
My mother could laugh like anyone else. She could hold you tenderly, could sing, could charm a stranger into believing she was the most dazzling woman alive. And then, without warning, the bottom would drop out, and you’d be falling.
I learned to live in that free fall. To smile when I wanted to scream. To read the slightest shift in a face, or the pause in a voice. My son will not have to learn this skill.
I would not have a favorite tool for punishment: a brush, the one with steel teeth. Robust, efficient, cheap. No threats of invoking the “Holy Trinity” of the brush, broom, and hammer. Love and loyalty would not have to endure being smacked.
And yet I said things. “I expect you to move out at sixteen.” “My marriage to your mother is doomed.” “If it were not for you, I would be nursing my mental health on a beach with blazingly white, sun-scorched sand.” The aftertaste of those words still twists my face. He looked down each time, and I knew I was slowly estranging myself from him.
Date: 2 April 2026
Nothing. But other things make me go mad. I might scream; my nature is not gentle. I can moan and pout. It has been hard to nurture a gentle nature in me. Mental illness has tainted every aspect of my life. The terror from my childhood occasionally comes out when I take things personally. When I am hurt. Lied to, disrespected. The constant, terrifying threat of my mother’s unpredictable violence mutilated my childlike gentle nature, and yet I have never struck out at anyone. At least not with my hands.
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