My Mom Always Said "Imagine That"...So I Did

There's something about motherhood that pushes you to grow beyond your upbringing. Your perspective shifts as your body changes. Your imagination runs wild with hope and hormonal fluctuation. Your joints ache, your feet swell, and the constant awareness of new life brings new meaning to the concepts of resilience and emotional growth. There's a slow-but-somehow-sudden influx of weight, not only in pounds and ounces but in the burden of accepted responsibility to teach and guide and protect.

The labor starts, and everything changes again. The mother suffers excruciating pain—and yet she carries on, driven by anxiety and survival instinct, drowning in the inherited fear of unimaginable risk.

All this, for the sake of hope after hardship.

Often, there's a complicated grief that settles in your spirit as the womb empties and the child within becomes real in a whole new way. The mother's body is still overcoming survival mode as the child is placed in her arms, small and helpless and so often screaming with mindless need. Birth itself is the beginning of generational trauma.

In those moments, when a mother first looks into the eyes of her child, emotional resilience becomes a superpower. In the years to come, she'll blend trauma and imagination into perspective and healing. She'll spend stolen moments healing invisible wounds and growing through pain.

And if she's anything like me, she'll strive to rewrite generational stories by finding humanity in broken parents and meaning in the past. Imagine that.

Mother daughter relationships are weird even when they're great. Good or bad, mothers and daughters float together for a time, on a steadily shifting tide of tradition so deeply steeped in generational patterns they sometimes seem written in stone. Maybe the stories we inherit are lush with color and filled with gentle love, punctuated by annual vacations and family reunions and people that keep in touch because they want to.

Or maybe they're not.

My stories are fossils from the wildlands of trauma recovery. They're faded finger-paintings in forgotten caverns, fragmented drawings of emotionally immature parents who never knew that hope after trauma was possible. They're the old bones of childhood emotional neglect, surrounded by soggy scrolls, where cycles of pain and healing make the thought of becoming soft after survival feel like a fairy tale. I am only a chapter in a timeless compilation of stories, each with a heroine struggling. One woman after another, surviving difficult childhoods, healing while parenting, searching for life after trauma...and not always healing from the past.

My mother's chapter ended in 2019, and while so much of her life showed me the power of becoming different than your parents, her death taught me more about PTSD and healing than I could ever hope to fit in a blog post.

My mom was...quirky. Eccentric. Cynical. The older she got, the more bitter she seemed. The more bitter she was, the more isolated she became. And the more she withdrew from what she saw as an impossibly dangerous world, the more she embraced paranoia. For her, safety was a darkened living room with foil on the windows—and history was the stack of forty-gallon totes hidden in her bedroom closet, filled to the brim with unexpected perspective.

I remember sitting alone in her house after she was gone, surrounded by the scents of fresh laundry and old cigarette smoke. I sat on the floor in the bedroom I'd helped her decorate, my lap slowly vanishing under piles of paperwork. Photos, birthday cards, bills so old the papers were faded with age. Cancelled checks from the 90s, when our favorite way to spend an evening was Pizza Hut and WWE. I wept for her hope when I found a hidden invitation to her first wedding—and for her sorrow as I read the details of the divorce.

I took a break to throw up, halfway through the medical record of gangrene and amputation at the end of her second marriage.  And as I walked, page after page, through the secret parts of her life, I listened to the echo of her spirit in my heart.

"Imagine that." Two simple words, held together with infinite meaning. She said it when she was bitter, when she was angry, when she felt defeated. She laced it with surprise when I told her I'd finished my first novel, filled it with pride when I gave her the first paperback. And injected it with rage and disappointment when I couldn't drive an hour away to bring her a gallon of milk—because my youngest daughter was in surgery.

So often, my mother's history drove her to imagine a world waiting to betray her. A hard and hopeless landscape where all the colors are muted and the light at the end of the tunnel will always be attached to a train. Her survival mindset was built on stubborn determination to win a war she never realized was over, but the legacy she left is more than dusty trinkets and ink on paper. It's a record of imagination as survival, and a daughter still learning to imagine hope as healing through stories.

Imagine that.

*****

Honestly, healing after childhood trauma is never easy, and breaking generational cycles can feel almost impossible. I know, because I've been there—and if you've read this blog for long, you know that most of the time, I still live there. Nobody's perfect, and we're all going through things. But when you face motherhood and healing as a dual process, you can't help but realize that reclaiming your story takes time.

Learning compassion for your parents requires a certain intentionality, especially when you're young and struggling to see them as people. It's easy to resent the things they couldn't give or didn't have, and looking at them in a different light often means making peace with complexity. But it takes another level of purposeful growth to learn empathy for abusive parents and the stories they lived before we came along.

And I'm not saying it's okay, because it isn't. I shouldn't have to break cycles my parents started, and there are parts of my life I'm not sure I'll ever be able to forgive. I'm just saying that maybe sometimes, I understand. And maybe sometimes, the growth that comes from that understanding is the very thing that helps me...