Generational Silence, Our Shared Pain, My Mother Birthed My Voice to Reclaim Us

Welcome to the intro of I’m Talkin to You, I’m Talkin to Me Too! Join me as I find my voice—the voice that was stolen, but somehow along the way, I gave away too—saying all the things I should’ve said while walking through my experiences of generational trauma. My grandmother kept quiet, and my mother carried those untold stories. My mother kept quiet, and I carried hers. Now, I’m speaking so my daughter won’t have to carry mine. From my grandmother’s struggles to my mother’s pain, I unravel how trauma shaped me and how I learned to become who others needed just to stay connected. Through therapy and reflection, I’m doing the work to know my true self—for my daughter and me—breaking cycles and refusing to let trauma define the next generation.

The untold stories our mothers carried burned within them, their pain, sadness, and disappointment erupting as fear and frustration. That weight wasn’t my mother’s to hold, but she couldn’t release it, and so it was passed to me. I refuse it—it’s not mine, and it holds no power over me. Through reflection, I’m reclaiming the strength in my story, speaking its truth so my daughter inherits the power of my voice, not the silence of my trauma.

Transcript

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So Sola doesn't have to. I've really been trying to figure out what I wanted to talk about and when I wanted to talk about it. And my mother's trauma raised me. I never got to meet my mother. I was always met with her trauma and her trauma responses. And I'm almost positive that that's because my grandma's trauma raised my mother. My grandmother had my mom at 15 or 16, and she had a baby already before that, my uncle. At the age of 12, my grandmother's mother passed away, and she was removed from her siblings, and their family chose to, their family, my family, chose to split up the kids because nobody could take in four kids. So... Everything that she knew was taken away from her. And within four years, she was a mother of two. One of those kids just so happened to be my mother. And my mother was raised by a 16-year-old woman, 16-year-old girl who had two kids and without a mother. And she didn't know what to do. And a lot of things happened to my mother. And my grandmother made a lot of mistakes. And By the time my mom was 19, she had three kids on the west side of Chicago without a job and without a high school education. And by the time she was 20, she had four. And my mother's trauma raised me. It's hard for me to talk to my mother because I'm talking to her trauma. She don't hear me. She can't hear me. She can't even acknowledge certain things because she did not experience them. Her trauma did. And she doesn't know that. My mom always asks, like, why don't you talk to me? What's going on? And for a long time, I had to pretend like her trauma did not raise me. I had to pretend in order to be around her to let her tell whatever story in her head she could tell. Because you can't talk to her about what really happened because she won't hear you. So I figured out at a very young age how to become whoever somebody else needed me to be so that they could be around. And I learned it from my mother. My mother's trauma. And Every time I go to therapy and every time I'm reflecting on things, it's all so my daughter don't have to. Because I want to raise my daughter, not my trauma. I want to raise my daughter, not my past. I want to raise my daughter with me, who I truly am. And the only way I can do that is if I know who I am. So I'm getting to know myself. And... I'm using every opportunity in my life and I'm working with a therapist to go through all of them. And I think everybody has to do the work so the next person don't have to. And that could be a son too, because I got sons. But there's such a strong and separate connection for all my kids, but my daughter specifically because my grandmother was assaulted. My mother was assaulted and so was I. And ain't nobody gonna touch Sola. Like, it's just not gonna happen. And I realized that, like, when people talk about generational curses, it's just generational trauma raising each other and all of these patterns going into how you raise your children and you will most likely end up in the same situation. There's a lot of times I was in relationships and abusive ones specifically that there was... some sort of familiarity. Like I knew it. I didn't know how because I wasn't able to face it because I was still letting my trauma lead. But it just, it was something I knew. And I remember one particular time, and I'll talk about it on another episode, but I remember something happened to me. And while it was happening to me, I remember thinking in my head, like, this has happened before. And it wasn't until I had to sit back and process and be like, my mom did that to me. My mom's trauma did that to me. She either thought she was going to beat the fear of God in me when she did believe in God, she was going to lock me away literally and figuratively, or she was going to disappear. So being put on a shelf as a woman, dating, seems familiar to me. Because my mom would always leave and come back and show up like everything was okay. So when a man did that to me, it felt like love. It felt like home. Regardless if your home is on fire, it's home. So do the work is what I'm telling myself so my daughter don't have to. I want her to have her own page to scribble in, to write in, to draw in, to cry in. her own whatever she walks into but i can't let the words from my pages like bleed onto hers because she don't deserve it and that's what we're gonna go through all of my shit because there's some sort of shame and guilt and embarrassment and that's how i walk around in the world it's a lot of times where i'm like I'm watching people's story and I might think to myself, you can waterboard that information out of me. But that's how I walk around. I walk around like people know exactly what happened to me, when it happened to me. I walk around with my shame, my embarrassment, my guilt, my hurt, my sorrow, my anger. You already know it. The way you know me, you know it. And that's how I approach situations. So it doesn't really make a difference whether I say it on here or not because I'm embodying it every day. And that's what this is about. Because, yeah, like for sure, I'm definitely talking to you. But I'm talking to me too.