What is breaking cycles about…
If you are here, I’m pretty sure you are familiar with the idea of breaking cycles.
And you can probably imagine, I believe this to be some of the most important and sacred work we can do with our time on this planet.
I also know that we parents can put a lot of pressure on ourselves as “cycle breakers” (Which is one reason I’m not a huge fan of this term).
We can think our healing means that our children should never experience an ounce of the kind of pain we did when we were little. And when we fail, we might fear that we won’t actually be able to give them a more safe, free and loving childhood experience than we had.
Besides being entirely unrealistic, I really don’t think that this is what breaking cycles is about.
We humans just don’t work that way.
Having learned the stories of my mother’s lineage, I know that my daughter came into this world with a long line of stories of loss and abandonment, experienced time and again by the women who came before us.
Of course I don’t want her to suffer in the same way they did. Nor in the ways that I have struggled with my own stories of fear and abandonment.
But I now understand that our history does not mean that I need to protect my child from any events in her life that will remind her of these very old and tender wounds.
You see, I think breaking cycles and healing our lineages means we have to experience in the present, things that will remind us of the wounds from our past. This is how we have the opportunity to shine a light on the wounds that live on in the shadows of our psyches, remembered by our bodies.
And choosing to shine the light, looks like choosing to recognize these events and the impact they have on us. We interrupt these cycles when we acknowledge, instead of repress, the feelings of loss, abandonment, wounding and scarcity that they bring up in us. And we birth new stories of resilience when we grieve them.
So when our children experience something in their lives that hurt in deep ways, we are there to help them know that they are not alone with that pain. That in fact, we want to be by their side when they are hurting, and can help them move through the scary feelings.
That we are there to witness and hold them through their grief.
This is where the real healing happens. When we interrupt patterns of repression with patterns of healing.
You see, it is inevitable that our children will feel the painful effects of our struggles, of the world they live in, of the stories that came before them.
They will feel disappointment every time they seek closeness in our eyes, and find a look of distance, on our "off" days. They will doubt their worth and belonging when nobody wants to play with them at school one day. They will see a tv commercial that makes them feel inadequate in a number of ways, all at once. They will wonder if they are the reason their parents are angry with each other, or that their other parent no longer lives with them. Their lives will hurt. And a lot of times, they will hurt because of us.
Which can be pretty scary for us as parents.
We think, “I can’t get a divorce, I can’t have an unhappy marriage, I can’t be unhealed. Because then my child will suffer the way I did.”
And sometimes that fear takes the helm of our decisions.
But as we heal, we start to come to terms with the scary fact that we are human. That we will mess up. A lot.
Because hard things are going to happen. We are going to have struggles. We will not know what to do and will sometimes take a long time to figure it out. We won’t be able to fast forward through the time it takes to work through the feelings that are blocking our hearts.
And these things will be hard for our kids to witness.
But it is simply untrue that it was our job to pretend everything is okay, or that we are supposed to prevent them from having homes where humans are messing up.
Of course it is also true that we want to do our best. That our intentions matter and can be purified through thoughtfulness and courage.
Of course we do what we can with what we know. And as Maya Angelou says, when we know better we do better. And I would add, when we know and feel better, we do better. And we repair the ruptures we caused, too.
And throughout all of this, we always have the opportunity to say to them, “Wow, I can see that this hurts for you. And I am right here with you while you are hurting.”
And we stay. We witness. We wait. We contain their grief with our love.
So much of what hurt our ancestors and hurt us in our childhoods, is simply the fact that we were unable to grieve the painful circumstances of our lives. We did not experience our losses in their potential to actually strengthen our sense of togetherness, belonging and resilience.
Which is why the pain broke us into pieces and left us fragmented; pursuing connection and wholeness in painfully ineffective and unsatisfying ways. Ways that only remind us of the times we were left alone with our hurts.
And so, of course it only makes sense that we would want to protect our kids from this by being perfect or creating perfect environments.
But thankfully, this is not what they need.
They just need us to care, to keep trying, and to let them grieve, time and again.
Which is all we really need, as well.