The Chain

Listen to the wind blow; Watch the sun rise; Run in the shadows; Damn your love, damn your lies

I’ve seen the family tree that spans three hundred years and three continents - full of stories as rich and fascinating as anything penned by Gabriel García Márquez. I wondered how long the chain had been toxic. In the chain imagine child holding the hand of parent, holding their parent and on - repeated generation after generation. It is a good way indeed to imagine time.

But in my chain generational trauma was passed along the chain on both sides. How long? I don’t know, but certainly prevalent in family folklore. I is an inheritance of toxic pain, survival strategies, emotional patterns and pure anger passed down whether we wanted it or not.

I was a very odd teenager and I make no apologies for it. That intense cocktail of psychological abuse, ADHD and autism has actually stood me quite well. And I was a teenager I made a quiet but absolute decision: Not a tattoo. Or a motorbike. Of mind numbing drugs. I make a resolution that the chain would stop with me. Dead. Severed. Even if I had to become the person who could do that.

So I had watched it scream through my family like an inheritance no one wanted but everyone carried. I decided then that whatever pain, patterns, or survival strategies had been handed down to me would end right there. I started to plan. And to work on myself. The work has never ended. finito. Kaput. Terminat.

I took about 10 years to become the person who could stop it. And I moved forward in my life. Quickly - ADHD you know. But precisely. I started early and I built exactly the life I visualized. Well the universe is more duplicitous than you know - and more viciously, fractally predatory of you plans and dreams. But winding forward . . .

Winding forward - I have four children now. And amazingly they are all adults. Resilient and fiercely independent. And free from the chain - free to go out into the world and make their own mistakes - well sometimes. And all the time a was watching, listening, learning. I think the years (and honestly there aren’t that many of them - I started early and moved fast), the years have made me better man and according to those who count a better father. They are the most wonderful people. I don’t follow the modern myth of doing down teenagers and young adults. I never fail to be impressed. And now they are their own people. The oldest has some scars from the chain because their generation overlapped with the toxics who strove to bypass me - but they are free.

Could I do it again? They say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. I quick calculation shows that I’ve done about 16 times that. And it was fun. More difficult than a poxy concert violinist with their meagre 10,000 hours - but these are skill worth doing. I learned to regular and co-regulate, to teach, to nurture, to love unconditionally. Hard work. But I think I can to this one pretty well. And those who matter agree.

Could I do it again? Well I wasn’t planning to but the universe sometimes throws down a golden opportunity. Sometime there are people who have profound strength and a deep, quiet softness under their armour. They may struggle in pain and fight to test love, but I know that story well. I’ve lived it from the inside. I know how when such a person feels truly safe, they become the kind of mother every child dreams of having. Even if they never had such a mother themselves. I have, what I think they call, lived experience.

There would be children who would never have to carry what their parents carried.

Children who would grow up knowing, from the very first day, what it feels like to be deeply wanted, deeply safe, and deeply, unconditionally loved by both their mother and their father.

In such a home generational trauma ends and something new and whole begins.

Not because anyone needs saving, but because we have free will (or a very good facsimile of it) we can shape our universe and can choose to create the kind of safety neither of them had growing up.

That is the future I believe is possible when the right people meet - often far easier and more enriching - less tiring because of resources built for just this purpose along the way. But each person has to be brave enough, wise enough to lay down the armour take an existential leap, to see the future without their own past poisoning it and build something deep and true steadier, warmer, and more true.

I finally got to where I want to be.
And now I see a whole new world ahead.