In the past when I would think of injuries, I imagined physical harm such as bruises and broken bones. It hadn’t occurred to me that since birth my human experience had been responding to not only healthy parenting interactions but also to the injuries of my parents that would later be added to my own. All of which I could feel, hear, see and smell. What happens when a person carries generational injuries?
My mother was an injured woman, who by the age of 26, took seven children into her damaged world. Born in 1950 in Little Rock Arkansas she carried the injuries of abandonment, rape, race, and its Jim Crow system. When her grandmother died, she packed up her injuries and moved to California to live with her mother. After trying to fit in and feeling rejected, she found a new family, in the streets. A new mother and father, prostitutes and pimps. The education they would give her in beatings, sex, and drugs would make her cold, numb, and emotionally unavailable. The energy each of her children would meet daily. Her injuries were now theirs.
The day I was born my mother took me home to the projects, where inherent injuries of a systemic human experiment compounded with my mother’s new dependency on the most dangerous drugs guaranteed an uncertain future for me and my siblings. As I grew older, my mother would often just stare at me. Not in a loving way, but in a contemptuous pitiful way. It became clear to her that I lacked certain skills that she believed were required to survive in the harsh world that she knew and raised us in. To her, in an injuriously plagued environment where takers rule, there was no room for my blind kindness and naive nature. In fact, my mother immediately identified this as a weakness.
More than once my mother would say with an absolute look on her face, “This world is going to eat you alive. You are only book smart, Shannon. You have no street smarts.” It wasn’t until the world and its agents began to bruise and batter me did I understand what she meant. With her actions, her words, and my trauma-filled beginnings, not only did I carry my mother’s injuries, I now had new ones of my own.
My dear daughter, you are here now, and I know nothing. I am scared because no one told me that generational injuries could be healed. I promise to try my best. Cursed? Not at all. Only lack of tools, access, and knowledge. All of which I hand to you today.
S
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