Hope and Trauma; A Cycle

Growing up was a mess, so I made a vow to my unborn children:

You will have the best of me.
The love my parents couldn't give, I promised to pour out in floods.

I clawed through the ache of a childhood starved of warmth,
clinging to the hope that I could build something better.

Academics - checked.
Job - secured.
Husband - found.

But I married a man still bleeding from his own unhealed wounds.
Two broken people don’t make a whole. They just bleed on each other.

So even before I could hold my pristine child,
the furnace of marital strife had already scorched the softness in me.
I became the version of my mother I swore I’d never be.
And my father? His ghost lives in me too;
passive aggression leaking out like stench from an open sewer.

I thought I was free. I thought I’d left lies behind.
But my own faults stacked up like cargo,
and suddenly, I was always on the defensive.

Then came the comet's flash;
that bright, burning promise of the mother I’d be.
But it died before it ever touched the ground.

Now I see it in her eyes:
the flinch when my voice rises,
the quiet defeat when her father won’t listen.
And Lord, the things she’s seen;
flying fists, flying words, flying plates.
She might grow up to be a wrestler,
just to make sense of the battles she was born into.

She’s a girl, my child.
Maybe one day she’ll sit where I sit,
holding the same dream I held:
to break the cycle, to get it right.

But here I am, asking the same tired question:
Why is it so hard to get it right?

Must life always be a seesaw;
easy one moment, hell the next?

Maybe the planet doesn’t want peace.
Maybe that’s why it loads us, daily,
with more weight than we can carry.