1 Chapter One “All I need is the validation of my self”: Describing the Impacts of Intergenerational Trauma and Identifying Coping Strategies
Every child deserves to grow up feeling safe and secure. Many do not. These powerful stories describe beloved parents who wounded their children in many ways, from being emotionally distant (Barrientos and Lozano-Ortiz) to poverty (Hines and Moss-Novak) to drug-induced violence and chaos (Garcia-Gonzales, Moss-Novak, Rodriguez-Garcia). The student authors, for example, recall not simply realizing that their parents were flawed, but also that those flaws arose from their parents’ childhood experiences of poverty and abuse. The parents’ flaws were often made worse by the parents’ unresolved traumas caused by their immigration journey and experiencing racism in the United States. And with that realization that their childhoods are part of a larger, intergenerational cycle comes a resolution to heal, and to rewrite the stories of their own lives and those of future generations. As student author Rodrigues Garcia puts it, one coping strategy around intergenerational trauma is to “forgive the life you’ve lived.”
Definition of Terms
Intergenerational trauma. Hesse and Main (2000) define intergenerational trauma as the process by which parents with unresolved trauma transmit this to their children via specific interactional patterns, resulting in the effects of trauma being experienced without the original traumatic experience or event.
References
Hesse, E., & Main, M. (2000). Disorganization in infant and adult attachment: Description, correlates, and implications for developmental psychopathology. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48(4), 1097–1127.
Dayanara Garcia Gonzalez
Living with an Alcoholic Father
Throughout my 19 years of living, my dad had always struggled with alcohol. Growing up with an alcoholic father isn’t something easy nor something that anyone should go through. Although my father was constantly in and out of his drunken phases, he was always responsible for taking care of my mom and I. The bills were always paid on time, he never let my mom or I go hungry. Something that I do look up to him for is that he has his own small business in yard maintenance. And I hope to fall into those footsteps in the future of creating my own business. Sadly, I did witness my dad in some really bad drunken phases throughout my entire life, and some of those memories I will never forget.
Since I could remember from a young age, my dad would constantly get drunk. Sadly, my dad would become violent when he was under the influence mainly with my mom, thankfully not physically but it would be verbally. I remember sometimes having to go stay at my aunt’s house along with my mom so I wouldn’t see my dad in that state. Or sometimes my mom would have to call my aunt’s phone to come and pick me up and take me somewhere else. I have a faint memory from third grade and I remember that I would start calculating a certain number of weeks that my dad would last sober, and then I would start realizing that the amount of time that we would last sober was kind of odd. So, then I would start preparing myself that within the next few days he would most likely get drunk again. Now looking back, that was not healthy for me: What third grader has to approximate how long their father lasts sober and having to start preparing for their next drunk phase? Another thing that isn’t correct—now looking back— was that whenever I would find alcohol bottles or cans I would sneakily go get them and hide them from him. By me doing that I would feel relieved in a way because I would think that I would prevent him from getting drunk.
Another memory that I won’t forget was when he was so close to possibly dying. From what I could remember was that he got really drunk and I think my mom ended up taking him to the garage so I wouldn’t see how he was behaving, but since the garage is where he would hide his alcohol he just kept drinking. I think later on two of his sisters and his brother showed up to see how drunk he was. But because he was so intoxicated he ended up falling and his head was just about an inch from hitting his head from a metal part of a table. All of the adults who were there tried to pick him up or at least move him further away from the metal part of the table. But my dad’s body was very heavy and they couldn’t lift him up, so they just left him there until he woke up. At that time no one let me see him in that state, but later on they ended up taking pictures of him and I ended up finding those pictures.
My middle-school experience was difficult. I remember I could not get adjusted to it for some reason, and I felt like I didn’t fit in. I remember I was crying every single day for every little thing—and that’s how I spent most of my sixth grade year. It was getting really bad that I didn’t want to go school, so in seventh grade I ended up having to go to therapy sessions. After some time of attending therapy sessions, I was finally doing and feeling better. But once I started feeling that way, my dad started drinking again. I remember one day coming home from school and my mom wasn’t home but my dad was, and the first door to our house was open and I heard loud music. But, at first, I just thought that he was doing paperwork because he normally puts music on when he does his paperwork. So I didn’t think much of it; once I actually got into the house, I saw a bottle on the table in the living room. I kept walking to the kitchen, and there my dad was with his speaker and another bottle just staring at the wall. I could tell he was already pretty drunk because of his eyes and how he was speaking to me. He just looked at me and he asked me where my mom was and I didn’t know so I just said I didn’t know where she was.
After I said that, I just speeded to my room and locked the door. I immediately started crying and I called my mom and told her that my dad was drunk. She came home and then they just started arguing. And he was on and off being drunk and being sober throughout the rest of my years of middle school. When I was at the end of my eighth grade—and my promotion/middle school graduation was getting closer—he was in his drunk phase again. My mom had, in a way, warned him or anticipated him that he needed to sober up so he could attend my eighth grade promotion. He kind of listened and he did end up showing up, he was hungover and not feeling it, but he still managed to attend.
The summer going into my Freshman year of high school was pretty hectic to say the least. I remember I was already scared and nervous because I was going to start high school. My dad had entered a severe depression phase, and he leaned towards alcohol like always as his solution. But this time it wasn’t like his other drunk phases that would last one or two weeks;this phase nearly lasted the entire summer. He was barely eating, and he was constantly throwing up, and it was getting worse because he started throwing up blood, and when he would use the restroom there would also be blood. I was getting scared, and on top of that he couldn’t sleep. So he started consuming sleeping pills; he would take one or two pills. He would try to go to sleep, and if he couldn’t fall asleep he would go and take more pills. At that point I broke down because I was scared that he wasn’t going to wake up. I even told him to stop taking those pills and to stop drinking because I was scared that something was going to happen to him. But he just started crying but still kept consuming both things for a couple more days. Afterwards my mom had to end up taking him to the emergency room because he wouldn’t stop throwing up blood. He ended up in the emergency room a couple more times that summer.
He was decently better when I was about a month or two into my freshmen year, and this time he lasted sober a little longer. But once again it didn’t last for long, once he started to feel healthier again he went into his drinking phase and consumed the sleeping pills again. This was around Thanksgiving break where he started drinking again, because I remember that on Thanksgiving night my mom ended up calling the police because it was the only way he could be saved again. He spent a couple of days detained, but afterwards he wasn’t allowed to come home. So he had to stay with other family members. I was able to see him once he was out— him and I don’t really have a close relationship. But once I saw him I started crying. I was happy because he was out but sad because he didn’t look well. My dad still didn’t learn his lesson because he continued drinking. I think at this point he was staying with his mom and brother, and they live in Vancouver, Washington. And I guess he was semi drunk and he was headed to their house and he got pulled over. He ended up getting a DUI and ended up in court, and he wasn’t able to drive for a couple of months. Later on, he had a machine installed in his car where he had to blow into the machine so the car would be able to turn on. After that final incident, he finally learned his lesson.
Overall, my dad has come a long way after all the situations and experiences he has gone through. After he finished his required mandatory meeting of AA, surprisingly he still decided to keep attending those meetings even if they were not required anymore. To this day, he still attends those meetings, and he is learning new things from those meetings. I don’t have a really close relationship with my dad. I really have never had a close relationship with him because he was and is always working—when he wasn’t in his drunk phases. Due to him always working, he was constantly absent and was never really involved in my education. My mom would complain to my dad that he would barely spend any time with me, and he would always answer with the same thing: Do you want me to spend time with you and work less which means less money to buy you your things? Or do you still want anything that you ask for? I would never answer him whenever he would say that, because ideally I wanted both things. But, after everything, I am thankful that he has not gotten drunk anymore.
Julia Hines
Food Scarcity Shaped My Life from an Early Age
“Feeding America” states that in 2020, nearly 38 million people in the United States faced food scarcity, 2.1 million households were rural households, and child hunger is most common in rural communities As someone who grew up in rural areas and faced and at times continues to face food scarcity from childhood to adulthood, I believe that it is important that I finally speak up about my experiences.
Food scarcity shaped my life from an early age, when my father was laid off during the recession. At the time, we still lived in Colorado, so my mother could take my infant brother and me to my grandmother’s house so we could at least eat. I was too young to think much about it, and since I did manage to get food, I did not realize my family’s situation.
This lack of awareness changed when we moved to Nebraska, where my father found a new job. When I lived in rural Nebraska from ages eight to thirteen, we often only made between $100 and $500 a month, so we were often hungry even with food stamps and WIC (“WIC” stands for “Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children,” a government program). My father’s boss had promised more money and an entire steer to eat per year; however, we were lied to. So, we primarily lived off of eggs from the chickens we owned and the milk from the cows that my father’s boss owned. There was never enough for everyone, so we often fought over who would get to eat. Sometimes this was just verbal arguing, and sometimes this was physical fighting–pushing and shoving to get to the pan first or stealing food off each other’s plates. My father, probably the most desperate from hunger due to performing manual labor for over twelve hours per day, was the most guilty of this, and as a result, the rule became and still is, if you want something to eat, that is just for you, it is best to not only buy it yourself but also hide it and eat it in secret. It was not better at my rural middle school. It lacked a cafeteria and would not have offered free lunch anyway due to the belief that in this country “if you can’t pay, you don’t eat.” To get our groceries, my mother would often go from ma and pa grocery store to store in each town within a certain mile radius and rack up a credit bill. Once, I was extremely hungry and had to go to the store in the town my school was in and beg for a frozen macaroni and cheese that cost only a dollar in front of several onlookers. No one offered to pay, but after getting tired of my begging, the owner agreed to let me add it to my mother’s bill. After that day, I had to always have the money to pay in full, meaning that I paid for everything in pennies, which became my nickname.
When we moved back to Colorado, the food insecurity we had faced initially decreased; money was still tight, but we could eat more than milk and eggs. However, when we moved to rural Colorado in 2014, food insecurity became a daily part of my life once again. My father had stayed behind since his job there paid more, and we needed the money, however, running two households required more money than initially planned. He joined us again in late 2015, taking a job with significantly less pay that required a long commute. While the school I attended during my junior year of high school offered free and reduced lunch and breakfast, the school I attended my senior year did not. Each morning, my dad would drop me off somewhere that was open at 5:00 in the morning and hand me all the change in his pocket–only amounting to a dollar or two–and this was my lunch money. I could usually go to the Dollar Tree to buy something to eat, but when I had no money at all, I had no choice but to go without lunch; once, after a long week of being hungry, in desperation, I walked a half-mile to Wendy’s and scouted the trash for something, anything to eat. My suffering only increased after graduation.
Thinking and writing about my childhood hunger is very difficult because realizing that this was only a few short years ago sinks in and upsets me–thinking of how long it persisted is devastating. In the few short years before PSU and in the nine months in between my first term and when I could afford to come back, I often could only eat once every three days. At one point, my brother and I had three single-serving microwave pizzas to last us an entire week; as an older sibling, my responsibility was to make sure that my brother could eat since he was still growing, so I often gave him my food, and I went even longer without eating. We often visited food banks and received food boxes. However, many people do not think when donating, and while donations of any kind are appreciated, it is important to remember that one cannot make hamburger helper without hamburger or milk. So, we would often get desperate enough to eat dry ingredients or condiments out of a bottle. Our nearest store for most of my life has been at least a twenty-minute-drive away and often did not have fruit or vegetables due to the food desert we live in, and when they did, they were only good for a few days before rotting, so not only did I never get to eat fresh fruit and vegetables, but when gas was unaffordable, we often could not even get to the store or the food bank at all.
Now I am at PSU and no longer face food scarcity as often, but the anxiety is something that still comes up periodically, sometimes out of nowhere. I still cannot bring myself to buy much of the name brand of food aside from kraft macaroni and cheese and kraft mayo; attempting to buy “rich people food” often fills me with anxiety. I hoard nonperishable food, and I often still hide it. I buy food that sits on the shelf, under the bed, in a box, or in a drawer. I do not eat it. Even when I am hungry, I do not eat it. Knowing it is there, knowing that if everything else falls apart, it will still be there, is a comfort. In most instances, I restrict food, especially if it is something out of a stash or that I have bought. Restriction means that it will last longer, and after years of eating at most once a day, my body does not particularly like eating twice or more anyway. There are a few instances when my food anxiety will cause me to eat more than I need or want, such as when I feel that someone will take my portion unless I eat it immediately and quickly. I notice this instance primarily with a friend who can quickly eat a lot. Rationally, I know that she will not steal it, but the part of me that exists from “the before” remembers when food was stolen from me, stolen from my stash, my plate, my hand, and I get so anxious that I binge eat. This friend is also much more wasteful, and more than once, I have had to fight the instinct to rescue her entire pizza slice from the garbage. As much as I do not like to share food directly from my plate or my portion of shared food, I am often very generous with food. I cook for people if something in my stash needs to be used or if I know someone who is often hungry. I take them out to eat with me under the guise of, “well this coupon gets me two, and I can only eat one, so while you are here. . . .”
It has been challenging to sew these two different fabrics of my life together: The twenty years of hunger and the year free from hunger, especially since I know that I have not entirely escaped food insecurity, that it is still a looming possibility for me. Because of this difficulty in coming to terms with these two aspects, it has been nearly impossible to speak about it. Talking about my experience with food scarcity usually gets pity, which only makes the pain worse since it reminds me that I did not have what everyone else had or has; I feel humiliated all over again. Being pitied also reminds me that I am the only one who escaped it; my family still suffers from hunger at times, although it is getting better, and their suffering, while I feast like a king, wracks me with guilt.
I am not sure where I can go from this point in my life, and I do not believe that I will ever fully recover from the habits surrounding food I’ve gained, in the same way my grandpa, who lived during the Depression as a child, never fully recovered. However, I believe that my situation will get better and that my anxiety will subside a little; this belief is why I chose to write about my past despite the pain it brings me, and I hope that sharing this at least allows someone else to know they are not alone.
Works Cited
Coleman-Jensen, A., et al. (2019). Household Food Security in the United States in 2018. U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. Available online at: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/94849/err-270.pdf?v=963.1
“Rural Hunger Facts | Feeding America.” U.S. Hunger Relief Organization | Feeding America, https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/rural-hunger-facts. Accessed 1 June 2022.
Laihha Moss-Novak
My Childhood Was Full of Poison
I’ve experienced hunger, poverty—broken flip-flops-duct-taped-to-my-feet kind of poverty. I experienced what felt like a never ending cycle of mental, physical and emotional abuse. My childhood was full of poison, the drugs and alcohol kind. The kind of poison that stops your mother’s heart over and over again. Yet she lives, holding on by a thread. Not for her children, and not for herself, but just for more poison. The kind of poison she loved so much that she shared it with my sweet little sisters in the womb, one of them born with a lethal combination of alcohol and meth in her veins. The kind of poison that made me the girl with homeless parents. The kind of poison that took my father’s life.
The kind of poison that I call abandonment. Abandonment that sounds like Mom saying, “I’ll be back for dinner,” and then not seeing her for three years. The kind of abandonment that looks like an empty seat at graduation. The kind of abandonment that looks like missed calls and texts left unread. A lack of power, self-worth, and utter abandonment left me to pick up the pieces of my being, attempting to put myself back together without any glue.
“Why me? Why couldn’t I be like everyone else,” I asked? Until I realized, I don’t ever want to be like anyone else. That path was never meant for me. I stopped sucking it up all the time, trying to be strong for those around me. I found beauty in vulnerability. I found confidence through my story and its ability to empower others. One day, I decided it was time to rewrite my story. It was time to create my life. And that my lack was not who I was.
It is easy to reflect on my experiences and feel confused as to why it was me that lived through them, or wonder what I had done to deserve such a life. But, it is in my moments of strength, when I am loved and supported by those around me that I understand how everything is happening for me, and not to me. My family always told me that addiction was a sickness. It is a sickness that both the addicts and their loved ones need healing from. This gave me hope. It was on the healing side of addiction that I found a home in countless grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, coaches and friends. That is the story I want to remember.
Brenda Rodriguez-Garcia
Beyond Intergenerational Trauma
Our childhood experiences and parents have influenced us to be the person we are today. For some people, this influence gave them many incredible outcomes in their adult/teenage life but for others, this influence could be very damaging, hurtful, and traumatic. I hold the belief that every baby is born innocently, and their parents, society, or community influence the person they’ll grow up to be.
At a young age, I constantly witnessed my parents always fighting verbally and physically and never getting along. My mother, brother, and I were always moving into different homes and ended up in a domestic abuse shelter. We’d always leave my father behind, and I never understood why. Being young and naive, I often made my own conclusions that my parents simply didn’t love each other enough and that’s why they’d always leave one another and get back together all the time. I found myself resenting my mother when my dad would come to look for us, and she’d refuse to be with him and force him to leave.
When I was eight, I remember my parents arguing for the whole car ride back to our house. As we arrived home, my mom stormed out of the car into the fall night, and my brother and I quickly followed behind her and left my dad behind. I don’t think my mom knew where she was intending to go because all she was doing was crying as she walked—which provoked us to cry along with her. After she noticed we were very cold, we headed back home but my dad didn’t open the door for us after the countless times she knocked. We had no choice but to sleep at a park as we shivered in the cold. The next thing I recall was being carried inside back into the house by my mom as she angrily continued to argue with my dad about not opening the door and having us in the cold. After this night, there was no more fighting or arguments, my parent’s relationship was healthier, and everything changed for the better.
By the time I reached middle school, I overheard a heated argument between my parents which I wasn’t necessarily new to, but this time I wasn’t naive and understood what they were arguing about. My mom realized this and took me out of the house to a random parking lot. I don’t know what I was expecting but little did I know this conversation would have a great impact on my life. She revealed why we used to leave my dad so much in my early life which sadly turned out to be for my dad’s struggle with a crystal meth addiction. When my mother would get domestically abused by my father, it was because my dad would be drugged and have hallucinations of my mom cheating on him. To protect my brother and me, my mom would get us away from the violence. For the past five years, he was attending a rehab group and was sober which explained why our lives had changed for the better. Unfortunately, the reason why she was revealing all this was due to my dad relapsing back into his addiction.
From there, my life changed forever and I felt as if I had lost my father by witnessing him lose, destroy, and consume himself by his drug addiction. He’d be sober for a month or two and then relapse again and make endless promises of changing, but his drug addiction always seemed to overpower him. It was truly hard to have to go to school and act as if nothing was going on at home and to come home from school not knowing if my dad would be sober or drugged. When he’d be drugged, he wouldn’t sleep or eat for days, destroy the house, ignore us, and would have constant hallucinations about incidents that weren’t happening. Commonly, those hallucinations would be my mother cheating, someone trying to kidnap me, people breaking in, and awfully more.
I’d feel very devastated and depressed, because I felt as if my father preferred his drugs over me and my family. I witnessed my household turn into a living hell, and I couldn’t do anything about it due to being young and lacking the resources to help my father’s addiction. Many times I felt as if I was the adult at home because my mom would be depressed, even suicidal, and I had to be supporting her in a way I could. She would have mood swings where she’d take her frustration out on me and even though it hurt a lot, I’d still have compassion for her because it was hell at home. My mother had her flaws but she also never abandoned us. SHE made us feel loved and cared for, and provided for us. My dad never abandoned us either, his weakness was his meth addiction, so when he was absent or a horrible person it was when he was on that but when he wasn’t he was the best dad in the world.
The hardest years of my life would have to be my high school years due to the fact that I was sadly living with a drug addict and somehow still pursuing school. My life at home couldn’t be changed from the lack of control I held, but I viewed my education as my only salvation to save my family as it would guide me to more opportunities that would benefit me in my life to pursue my dreams and help my father. By my sophomore year, things were just getting so out of hand, and it just kept making everything more and more difficult to be at home. Sometimes I would either stay after school or go to my friend’s house just to avoid having to go home. It was hard to focus on school with everything at home, but somehow I still managed to do it. My mom was getting emotionally and physically tired, too. Halfway through the year, she decided for us to leave my dad and go live with her sister in Wisconsin. I had to leave everything behind in my life and start a new one in a different place. It was very overwhelming having to start a new life and adjust to a new high school, especially halfway through the year. Although I was far from my dad, somehow he would still affect me and influence how I felt.
After a week of us being gone, my dad drove to go find us. He knew my mom would take us with her sister since that’s the only family she has here in the United States. Somehow he got there ready to take us home, but I wasn’t too convinced. He convinced my mom he would change for good and to leave back with him. I decided to stay because I didn’t want to have to adjust one more time to school, and I was embarrassed to show up there since I wouldn’t know what to tell the school. My dad was offended by me not wanting to leave back with him, but he didn’t consider how I had left everything for him, and deep down inside I knew it was too soon for him to change. About two weeks after my parents left with my baby sister, he had again relapsed into his drugs. So, my mom ended up coming back to Wisconsin embarrassed, but I didn’t judge her for believing in him. At the end of the day, we all held the same hope he’d defeat his drug addiction.
Things only got even worse after that, as now my dad was all alone drugging himself non-stop. I fell into a really bad depression, as I didn’t understand why my dad chose his drugs over his family. My aunt would check up on him occasionally and even pay the rent so he would have a place to stay, but that didn’t help him much. He destroyed our house. He broke the walls, burned our belongings, burned spots in the house, painted the windows black, and so on and so forth. He was only damaging everything around him but most importantly damaging himself.
After three months, he got arrested for driving recklessly and that was the best thing that could’ve happened since my dad would be locked up without being able to drug himself anymore. My mom left back for Oregon to save our house from getting taken away, and facing consequences since it was under her name. I stayed to finish my high school year at Hamilton High School, even though it was a pretty dangerous school. I felt unsafe many times because the staff weren’t very strict, and it felt as if the students were in charge. We had to go through security every single day before entering school. My life was slowly getting back together again, as my dad was now sober and would frequently call me. After a month, his parents paid the bail and he was three months sober getting his life back together. My parents ended up getting back together, and when I arrived home in the summer the house was rebuilt again. Nothing remained of the house I had left behind. I did not see the destruction my dad had done to it. Sadly, this didn’t last long. On my birthday, my dad came home very upset with bad news about the court and having to leave for Mexico. My whole world was falling apart just when everything was getting back to normal.
In Mexico, my dad relapsed back into his drugs and spent time in and out of rehabilitation. I would go visit him when I could during the holidays, and my grandparents would take him out to spend the holidays with us, but after a short time, he would just go back to his drugs. It was like no matter what I did, his family or friends did to support him, he’d always choose his drugs over everything. At this point, he lost all his family, his job, and his life due to his drug addiction.
The hardest moment in my life was my senior year when my dad was lost for the weekend and nobody could locate him. Monday night I received a call from my aunt crying telling me my dad had run over a person while he was drugged. Unfortunately, the person was in a cartel and sent people after my dad to kill him. I felt my world ending as I feared for my dad’s life. I prayed for the people of the cartel to have compassion on the life of my dad because he didn’t intentionally try to hurt anyone since he was struggling with a deep drug addiction. My dad drove to my grandparent’s house with bullets all over his car, and somehow my dad’s brothers managed to negotiate with the people by covering all the hospital’s expenses, buying him a new motorcycle, and giving him money for six months. Even though we found a solution to the problem, and my dad’s life wasn’t lost, my heart sank at the thought of my father almost losing his life. I remember being so emotionally unstable I didn’t go to school for a week, which got me behind in my classes.
Living through all of this was very devastatingly hard for me, and sadly I’m still living through this challenge that hasn’t ended, yet. Many people judge my father and talk bad about him. They often say he is never going to change, but, at the end of the day, he continues to be my father regardless of who he is, and I’m never going to lose hope in him changing. His weakness is his addiction, but he loves us, and I know it.
I’m happy to share that I received a four-year scholarship to pursue my education and complete my desires. After completing my college education and my criminology and criminal justice major, I plan on helping my dad by putting him in a rehabilitation center and counseling program to help him recover from his addiction for good and heal his childhood trauma. As for my mom, I want to give her everything she deserves, as she’s the one who’s suffered the most. She would’ve loved to pursue her education but couldn’t for circumstances in Mexico, and I want to complete that dream for her. I still hold no resentment towards my father or mother.
My parents aren’t bad people and never will be even after all my siblings and I have lived through. I’ve always had in my mind that people are who they are based on the childhood they lived through. My dad had a very ugly childhood full of domestic violence, physical and sexual abuse, and neglect. My dad at six years old witnessed the death of his brother who was six years old due to bricks falling on him while they were working in Mexico. My mom’s life faced some trauma as well, and I acknowledge that they’ve both reflected on what they got as children, their trauma, problems, and more that hasn’t yet been healed so this is why I don’t hold any grudges or judgments against them. As you could imagine this was very traumatic in my life but it also made me desire a better future and mature very young. I honestly don’t know where I would be today without my parents or the life I’ve lived as it has shaped me into the woman I am today. Although not everyone is strong enough to forgive and look beyond the trauma, I encourage you to forgive your parents, forgive the life you’ve lived, and move forward to truly heal yourself. Break those inter-generational curses that separate and restrict us from living and pursuing a healthy life.
Annakaren Barrientos
Childhood Collage
Within families, each generation has different ways they connect emotionally. In the case of many Latiné families, emotional connections do not come easily. Although the value of family is significant in the culture, many families struggle with the emotional aspect of their relationships due to generational trauma created through years of financial hardships and immigration. When I look at my family, I can see the difference between my grandparents’ and parents’ relationship and how they interact emotionally vs. my siblings and I with our parents. I noticed from a young age that being vulnerable with family was not something that is common in Latiné households as it was for most of my white friends’ families. Showing our struggles and pain when we faced challenges became a sign of weakness in my family. Even to the point that when I did want to reach out for advice or help from my family I was uncomfortable doing so. This is not because I believed that my parents would turn me away or get mad at me, but because I knew they would not know how to deal with a situation like this. My father grew up with parents who worked a lot and could not be there for him as much as they should have. My mother lived with her mom for only a few years before being sent to another city to study and live independently. This meant that my parents grew up not having any emotional support from their guardians. This made vulnerability uncomfortable for them. But when they had my older sister and became parents themselves, they started to slowly change their ways. By the time that I was born my parents were more open to speaking about mental health and talking about our emotions.
Barrientos Reyes, 2002-2022, Salem, Oregon.
In this collage, there are pictures of my childhood. The pictures show the love and affection that my parents showed me through my childhood after they unlearned all the hyper independence that they were taught as children. In this collage there are also pictures of my grandparents and even great grandmother, showing the different relationship dynamics between generations of my family. Although my mother and father have been trying to be more emotionally available parents for my siblings and I, there is still a disconnect in our relationship when it comes to showing how we feel and being vulnerable. I believe that can be shown in some of the pictures and memories that the college also has. This collage is designed to look like it’s out of a scrapbook from the early 2000s, which is when my childhood took place.
I hope that as generations keep growing in my family, we can unlearn all the toxicity that is rooted in our culture. This can create more healthy and welcoming environments for children to grow up in and improve society as a whole.
Axel Lozano-Ortiz
Hope and Community Project
The mother-daughter relationship is often seen as one of the strongest complex relationships, neither positive nor negative. My mother tells me she only wanted boys because she thought a daughter would be too “emotional” for both to handle. She ended up dealing with an emotional son, a cry baby they had to sneak out of restaurants. I have always seen my relationship with my mom as complex and wonder if it is from a lack of connection. Physically, we are close; we are currently living in the same home and, some days, we simply enjoy our company. Emotionally, we are distant from each other; we are both fragile and approach life with different philosophies. We grow up learning to respect our parents, and expect to return the years of labor they have invested in us. I am grateful for what my mother has endured. and I hope to give back all that she has sacrificed for me, but there is still so much I require from her to move on from the past.
For the majority of my life, my mother has been the person to continue caring for me at my most vulnerable. Without my father, my brother and I had looked up on her to see where she would take us in life. My mom had to be strict and emotionally absent, and emotional only when reminding me of my responsibility to focus on my education. If I ever mentioned a feeling of exhaustion, she would shut it down. She would tell me if I would rather study in school than work early mornings to mid-days. I had no room to voice complaints or show weakness. She was good at invalidating my reasons for feeling exhausted; she would say, “You are young. You shouldn’t feel tired.” Her invalidations only served to prove how strange I am. Her invalidations poked at me and irritated me. It got to the point where I wouldn’t bother to ask to stay home because I already know what her response would be. I still went to school even when I was so ill, I could not handle standing up. However, such moments were when I felt most connected with her. Getting cared for by my mom at my most vulnerable gave me a break from the pressures of my mother’s expectations. It was when I could sleep in her bed, in a fetal position protected by warmth and love.
My mom has a terrible memory when it comes to remembering events in the past. And there are moments I will never forget when I think about my admiration for her. I don’t remember seeing my mother cry when I was younger, and she didn’t begin leaving her guard down until we got older. The same could be said with mentioning her past life in Mexico. The first time I had gone to visit Mexico, I was three years old so I am unable to remember what we had done .There was always a certain memory I dreamt of where my mom and I were on a plane looking out the window, reaching out. My mother has never returned to Mexico since that trip. When I went last summer to Mexico, my brother and I went without our mom’s company. She rarely told us about memories of her childhood in Mexico and how she even ended up in the U.S. She would tell us about all the fruits and foods we had to try and how they would never compare to what we get here. Going to Mexico was exciting to me because I would finally uncover a part of my mother’s identity she would never teach us about. I grew up surrounded by my father’s family and never knowing I had other cousins living in the U.S. from my mother’s side. When I was young I was unaware of who my grandparents were from how little we would see them.
The first day arriving in Mexico I made sure to tell my aunt that I wanted to visit my grandmother and see the house they had grown up in. I had a vague memory of how the house looked because of my mom showing me the house on Google maps. Entering the home that my mom grew up in took a heavy toll on me. The house was full of pictures including my mother and her siblings, gifts we have given to my grandmother, and furniture that creaks its age. My first steps in the living room I saw a wedding picture of my dad and mom similar to the one we have at home. I had to take a seat when I felt a sudden wave of emotion inside me and building pressure in my eyes. I had begun to think about how much longer a wait we would have to continue enduring for my mom to step in her home. All the years that could’ve been spent growing closer with my family, lost because of distance and immigration regulations.
I wonder if the lack of true communication stems from an uncomfortableness of exposing feelings we closed off after my father’s death. I am aware of our differences, but they can always be easily forgotten in moments of a good conversation. Still, despite knowing our differences, there are moments with my mother that left me surprised by noticing our similarities. The time when the responsibilities and expectations of my mother and her children are lifted will surely be a moment where we can simply enjoy our recollections and unapologetically be ourselves.
