CURSEBREAKING
The beautiful child who showed me how to parent
When silence raised me, and strength raised her.
Some lines don’t break with rage.
They break with love.
I was born into a line of women who didn’t touch.
They cooked, cleaned, and endured. They didn’t hug or soothe or say, I’m proud of you. They loved in ways that looked like duty, and hurt in ways they never spoke about.
Neither of my mothers offered me affection.
Gloria couldn’t, and Mom didn’t know how. I grew up not feeling safe, protected, or enough. I don’t speak for my sisters — their memories are their own — but mine is of distance. The kind that hums under the skin, the kind that makes a child grow up fast.
My mother and I never fit. Her standards weren’t mine, and I didn’t know how to be what she valued. She didn’t know how to communicate in the language I understood — not unkindly, just unknowingly. It’s not a failing. It’s a fact.
So I did what all good daughters of broken mothers do:
I overcorrected.
I became the communicator, the explainer, the fixer.
If she had built walls of silence, I built bridges so long they circled back and trapped me.
I told myself I was giving my daughter maturity and space — but truthfully, I was over-saturating her with my attempts to grow up while still learning how to mother myself.
And still, somehow, Betsy understood what I couldn’t say.
Betsy chose her path early. I saw it, even when I didn’t understand it.
She cried rarely, but when she did, it meant something real. She faced every challenge with a kind of quiet determination that stopped me cold.
When she got sick — the diagnosis that would have crushed most people — she met it head-on, no theatrics, no collapse. She adjusted, adapted, and kept walking.
In school, she chose a creative life over a social one. I worried she was isolating herself, but she wasn’t. She was curating her peace. I wondered if I was being accepting or just lazy, but I’ve learned it doesn’t matter. She didn’t need shaping. She was already whole.
She never wavered. Not when the world misunderstood her, not when the easy choice would’ve been to conform. She chose her life, and she’s walked every bit of it her way — even when it meant silence between us.
And that silence used to hurt me.
Now I understand: it was never distance. It was sovereignty.
Every generation carries the burden of translation — learning to speak what our mothers couldn’t say, and unlearning what they never meant to teach.
The women before me survived by hardening.
I survived by feeling too much.
And Betsy — she doesn’t need either defense.
She lives the peace I could only dream of.
She doesn’t over-explain. She doesn’t shrink. She doesn’t mistake quiet for weakness.
She just is.
And that’s the miracle, isn’t it?
That the daughter of a woman who was never held became the woman who holds herself with grace.
The women before me were soldiers.
I was the bridge.
She is the peace.
The line is clean now.