The Afterwards: Broken Mothers Of Broken Daughters Made By Broken Fathers

My mother is on borrowed time, and it was time to give her just one more chance. What I learned was shocking. Perhaps, I was too broken and too young to have seen. Perhaps, I was so trapped in my own brokenness that I failed to fully understand how crushed she was. There was nothing but pieces of her left, and it was the beginning of her own self-destructiveness. I wasn't the only one crawling out of a dark hole; she was crawling and losing. It took her more than three decades to climb that deep hole and scrape her pieces back together.

Suddenly, I catch glimpses of the mother she was in between. I started remembering little moments that weren't filled with anger and hatred. I remembered moments between us that had drowned under our brokenness. I did not fully understand or realize how terribly broken she was, and how my father shattered her life. With no family, mother or father to ask for help, she was trapped in a life she was desperate to escape. My father broke her, and then he went on with his life.
We were all products of a darkness in this world. We were all caught up in an evil we couldn't escape. Not my father. Not my mother. Not us.

I understand that today, and most things make sense. I still have moments of anger towards my father, but it's different now. They are moments of anger infused with an overwhelming sadness that causes me to shout out to him about all our what-if's and what-should-have-been's. Some days, I berate him loudly for his stupid mistakes, and other days, I wonder what broke him?

The thing is, I don't know much about my father's younger years or childhood. I don't know about a traumatic event he might have suffered, or if perhaps history was repeating itself. I don't know? I never asked. I never wanted to know because, at the time, it would never have justified what he did to us.

So today, I want to ask mothers and daughters to talk about this. Talk about your brokenness and don't wait three decades to get it right. Understand one another and pick up your broken pieces together.

Broken Mother, tell her about your own shattered heart.

With love,
Alex