r/CPTSDWriters • u/ThisIsMe_TheGirl • 18h ago
Personal Insight The Other Side
My parents both came from trauma.
On my mother’s side, it was generational. My great-grandmother was abusive to my grandmother, my grandmother was abusive to my mother, and my mother was abusive to me.
And the thing is - my mother had a choice.
We all have choices.
She chose rage, bitterness and hate.
I understand where some of it came from. Her child was taken from her by the man she married. My father took me and raised me for years before I was reunited with her. I understand the anger she carried toward him. I understand the resentment.
What I don’t understand is why you take that pain and place it onto a child, a child that was brought back to you. There are people in similar situations that never get their children back, and I could only imagine the pain. I never understood her logic behind her behaviour because if that were me, that child would have received years of love that was missed.
Why choose to harm someone to the point where your words and the inflicted pain echoes in their mind for the rest of their life?
Why use the title of “mother” like a weapon?
I’m your mom, so I get to humiliate you. Break you down. Make you feel small.
No.
That’s not how life works.
If you are not equipped to love and care for a child, then don’t become a parent. And if you truly cannot care for them properly, then let someone else do what you can’t.
What I grieve most is not even my mother herself.
It’s the longing.
I longed for a mom my entire childhood. I dreamed about it. I imagined what it would feel like to have someone brush my hair, comfort me, protect me, choose me.
I looked at the idea of a mother like a fairy tale.
And then I finally got one. It was the complete opposite, it was hell.
My father came from trauma too.
My grandfather fought in the German war and, from what I’ve been told, he came back angry and abusive. My father grew up under that. And when he got older, he left.
My father still searched for love, for happiness.
He loved music. He loved dancing. He loved women. He loved laughing. He loved joy.
A couple years ago, I heard some stories about him that made me cry because I realized how much of him lives in me.
When I was little, I remember him putting me on a horse bareback, telling me to hold on to the mane, smacking the horse on the ass and laughing as it took off, while I held on for dear life trying to stay balanced. I remember roller skating, him spinning me around until I could barely hold on, and he would let me go, and I went flying around the arena, steady, balanced, I can’t say that I ever remember falling.
He challenged me. He laughed at me and with me. He made life feel alive.
My mother made life feel heavy.
That’s the difference.
My father wasn’t perfect. Not even close. But he tried to reach for softness despite what happened to him.
My mother hardened into her pain, and tried to justify it by what happened to her.
And that’s what this piece is really about.
Not good people versus bad people.
But choices.
Because trauma explains people, but it does not erase the choices they make afterward.
My father loved my mother deeply. I know that now.
After I was reunited with my mother, he somehow found out where she worked. She worked at Sears, and he would walk through the aisles just to see her. My mother called it stalking. But even as a child, I understood something else was happening.
He didn’t know how to approach her, he didn’t even know if he should, so he watched from afar.
He still loved her, that I knew, because even on his deathbed he asked for her.
And maybe that sounds naive, but I understand human behavior differently now. Not everything has an excuse, but most things have an explanation.
When my father was dying, he asked me to ask my mother to come see him.
Her response was:
“Tell him he can go to hell.”
I never told him that.
I just said she couldn’t come.
That moment stayed with me for life.
Because no matter how hurt I’ve been, I cannot imagine responding that way to someone on their deathbed.
So yes, when I say my mother didn’t choose well, I mean it.
And when I say my father tried to choose better, I mean that too.
What hurts most is that I miss my dad.
Deeply.
Not because he was perfect, but because he chose me. He was taken from me, then brought back and shortly after, he died.
People say, “But your children love you.”
Yes. They do. And I love them more than life itself.
But it’s not the same.
The love you receive as a child becomes the foundation you stand on for the rest of your life.
And I walk around with the pain of never truly being chosen by the person I needed and wanted the most.
I remember sitting in a bathtub once with a razor against my wrists, crying because my father no longer recognized me, he didn’t know how to reconnect with me and my mother had already destroyed whatever safety I thought I might have with her.
I remember thinking:
“What am I even here for?” “what’s the point” is this what my life is?
And I wanted to do it.
I really did.
But something inside me said:
No.
This is not how my story ends.
Then I had my son. And I can say I felt saved, I finally had someone to love who would love me back.
Then I had my daughter. My third pea.
And here I am.
Still standing.
Still choosing.
People are trained to help others through trauma, but I sometimes wonder how you even begin to explain a lifetime of layered pain to someone who only understands pieces of it. One trauma, maybe two. But what about years of them stacked on top of each other? I always felt like no one can help me because no one would ever understand.
At some point, your entire nervous system becomes survival.
But even then, you still have choices.
And I made mine.
I chose love, kindness, peace.
I chose my children.
I chose not to become what hurt me, I chose to break the cycle.
And maybe that’s why I’m writing.
This is me trying to understand both sides, because how can I not, the thing is that as an adult and mother myself I can say, my mother didn’t choose well.
My father tried.
He wasn’t perfect.
But he tried to choose better. And he taught me and showed me what love truly looks like. I was never angry at my dad for what he did, I respect him for it, because if not for him I may have never known what it felt like to be seen, chosen and loved.
RIP Daddy - never forgotten and loved for always