Breaking the Cycle: Honest Reflection on Anger, Awareness, and Becoming.
I had a moment while driving recently. A quiet, uncomfortable moment of truth. I found myself reflecting on how I’ve been showing up as a parent. And what came to the surface was this: anger and irritability have been living in too many of my interactions with my son.
That’s not the parent I want to be.
I am meant to break the generational cycles. The shutting down of feelings. The emotional repression. The parenting with power instead of presence. I am meant to be different. And yet, here I was, replaying patterns I’ve worked so hard to unlearn.
The realization scared me. I started to spiral, worried that I was doing irreparable harm to the relationship I hold most dear. I thought, “He deserves a better mom. Maybe that isn’t me.”
The spiral was familiar. But what happened next was not.
Therapist-me entered the chat. That version of myself that knows how to hold space, how to listen deeply, how to be with hard truths without shrinking from them. And for the first time in a long time, there was enough inner spaciousness for me to pause. To actually be with the discomfort rather collapse into it.
I gave myself permission to feel the shame, the sadness, the fear. And I still held myself accountable. I held both. The ache of my missteps and the hope for who I want to become.
I remembered something important. Because if I can hold love and hope for my mother, despite her imperfections, then perhaps my son can hold that same space for me too.
This is the space between. Between who I am, where I come from, and who I long to become as a parent.
The difference between me and the generation before me is not perfection. It is awareness. It is willingness to be honest, to be accountable, to change.
Awareness is the first step. And I have been standing in this step for a while now. Frustrated at the distance between where I am and the version of myself I ache to become.
But I am not stuck. Awareness is doing its work, softening my edges and widening my capacity.
Still, I am tired of just knowing better. I want to feel the change. I want my son to feel it too. Because he deserves that. And so do I.
Tomorrow, I will try again. Not because I failed today. But because this is what healing the lineage looks like.
