Author photo: Cape Cod

The Cycle of Trauma Can Become a Healing Cycle

Accepting that trauma cycles through generations is a hard lesson. I had to face that my own childhood trauma inevitably affected my children. But healing operates in the same way. Though my children are adults, my healing becomes theirs as we change and grow together.

Only when I let you leave

will I discover you are not gone.

Small crimes lie beneath my eyelids

like tiny silver forks

even as the sun tells me I am here, now,

not there, then.

Then I did not know. Then I was eating

with tarnished silver, in secret, during the night.

(Let’s eat with our hands! It’s Anything-Goes-Night

for the rest of our lives!)

When you were in France,

Iceland,

Utah,

Istanbul

I heard your infant wail

all the way inside my sanctuary.

I named you Freedom.