More Rust Than Weight

On motherhood, memory, and the quiet labor of breaking generational patterns.

Me and Annie

I spent two hours the other day writing a piece about walking my dogs and thinking about generational trauma—

how that shit gets passed down until someone finally says, “Fine. I’ll feel it. I’ll talk about it.” I wrote it, read it back, tweaked and reworked, but there was still a disconnect I couldn’t quite name.

Before I could even sit with that disconnect, the front door flew open. The kids were back from their dad’s, loud, happy and home and came stumbling into my room causing me to closed my laptop and get them ready for bed.

As I was lying with Annie in her bed in her the dark room, I remembered a note in my phone—something I’d started a while ago, not realizing it was about the exact same thing I had just spent forever writing. I opened it. The screen lit up my face while she drifted beside me. And I thought, Oh. This. This is what I was trying to say. And I was annoyed.

Annoyed that I’m still having the same feelings I’ve already had a thousand times. Annoyed that this has apparently become my thing. A generational trauma expert. I’d rather be the woman who talks about baking online, the one who shares a good sour dough recipe (although I have never made sour dough in my life) and goes on with her life. But instead, I’m the one who says, “Today we shall go into the depths of your soul, dust off the shelves, and examine why you believe you are unlovable.” Spoiler: it’s because your mom believed it, too. And she birthed you with that same belief buried somewhere in your bones. Bonus: you get to be the one who changes it. Gag. Annoying. Insert all the eye rolls here.

Sometimes, I just want to be nonchalant. To not turn every small moment into a moment. But this always-feeling and always-expressing is just… my default setting. And honestly? It’s exhausting.

The other day, I was sitting next to my mom in her hospital bed. She told me a story—how, when she was 18, she almost moved in with a group of girlfriends. But when her parents found out, they didn’t say much. They just got quiet—the kind of quiet that says “We’re disappointed” without having to say anything at all. She said it made her rethink everything. She wrote them a letter—because they didn’t talk about feelings—and told them she wasn’t moving out after all.

And instead of just hearing that story and letting it be, I carried it home like a puzzle piece. Ready to hold it up against my own story. Because of course I did. I saw how that one moment—where she chose their comfort over her own freedom—rippled down into me. And I wondered: What if she’d chosen herself at that fork in the road? Would she have lived differently? Would she have mothered differently? Would I have had to be the one to break the chain?

But she didn’t. And here I am, holding the ache.

I couldn’t just let her story stay a story. I used it as evidence. Proof of the women in our family who wanted to be bold but stayed small—because the grief of disappointing others was louder than their own desires. And it makes me wonder—what stories my grandmother swallowed. What emotions she tucked under her tongue, what parts of herself she clipped short so she could be the woman she was expected to be.

I never heard her talk about desire. Not once. Not what she wanted from life, not what she dreamed of. She spoke in recipes and weather, in casseroles and cleaned counters. Maybe that’s where the silencing began.

And before her? I don’t know. The lineage gets blurry. But I imagine women who carried babies and burdens at the same time, who kept their rage folded neatly in their aprons, who looked in the mirror and only saw duty staring back.

There’s something about being born into a line of women who chose survival over selfhood. Something about trying to name the ache when it was never given words. And now here I am—a daughter, a mother, a middle point in the pattern—trying to hold all these stories without becoming them.

I look at my daughter, and I wonder what she’ll inherit, not just in her DNA, but in her memory. What she’ll feel but never be able to trace. What I might hand her without meaning to.

Some days, I want to sit her down and say, “You don’t have to repeat any of this. You don’t have to shrink.” But then I catch myself doing the very thing I’ve vowed not to do. And I know—healing isn’t a perfect straight line. It’s a winding, messy walk back through the stories we were never meant to carry and still somehow do.

I want to be the one who breaks the chain, but some days I feel like I’m just rearranging the links. Making them prettier. Less sharp around the edges. Polishing pain into something more palatable.

I read the books. I go to therapy. I write about it, talk about it, feel it until I’m sick of myself—but still, some patterns remain. Still, I hear myself say something in my mother’s tone, watch myself silence a part of me to keep the peace, feel the urge to apologize for simply needing space. Again. Again. Again.

It’s like the chain is clever. It knows how to disguise itself as progress. It says, “Look, you didn’t yell. You’re healing.” But I didn’t speak up either. I just swallowed it quieter.

And I wonder—is breaking the chain one big, loud snap? Or is it this slow, awkward unlearning? The kind where you slip sometimes, where you pass down less, but not nothing.

I hope that counts. I hope the trying matters. Even if the chain isn’t gone, maybe one day my daughter picks it up and realizes it’s lighter. More rust than weight. More story than trap.

No one claps for you when you choose to breathe instead of yell. There’s no parade for catching yourself before you pass down your pain. But maybe this is what it looks like—unnoticed, slow, holy work.

It looks like catching the urge to people-please before it leaves your mouth as a “Sure, I don’t mind,” when you very much do mind. It looks like staying in the discomfort of a boundary, even when everything in you wants to backpedal.

It’s choosing softness, not because you’ve been trained into it—but because you want to lead with something different. It’s feeling the old impulse rise, and whispering, Not this time.

There’s no one watching. No finish line. Just a thousand quiet moments where you choose something new, hoping it echoes forward in ways you’ll never fully see.

I think about her, my daughter, when I make these choices. The ones no one sees. The ones that don’t feel like much in the moment—but cost something anyway.

I don’t know what she’ll remember. If she’ll notice the pauses. The way I tried to respond instead of react. The way I stayed when I wanted to disappear. The way I told the truth, even when my voice shook.

I hope what lands in her body is the sense that she was safe. That love wasn’t something she had to perform for. That she got to take up space without apology.

I won’t undo it all. I know that. But if she moves through the world a little more free, if she trusts herself a little sooner than I did—then maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s the break in the chain that we all needed.

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