Our Parents' Sins

 Mother thought she was doing us a favour by hiding the scars and black bruises with elongated sleeves and sunglasses but we never looked at her skin, we looked at and searched her eyes. We felt her pain in the lashes she delivered whenever we would slightly shift from the perfection she expected, which she never achieved herself. Powerless to father, we became her portal for anger transference, all the while absorbing trauma that would take us a lifetime to unravel and dismantle.

Father's food had to be served first and hot, just like his temper, for he was the king of a broken home, with stained fragments of dysfunction splattered all the across the fragile wooden walls. Some days it felt like the house would crumble. They felt they were raising us right but instead we were tainted by the blood of their unhealing, heavily pouring and seething into the obscured slivers of our minds, opaquely teaching us that abuse is love and wiring into our being that unless pain is felt, then love is not deserved.

By the sins of mother and father, we came to know coitus too early because the house was small and the walls were thin and the children slept on the floor but in fact, we were never asleep. We listened to father demand for sex and mother sighing, wanting to oppose yet she gave in. And so, we grew up not learning boundaries and fearing that if we say no, we shall be chastised. We should always surrender.

We never heard what mother said, we only learned what we saw. She would tell us to love ourselves and keep our chin upright yet she was afraid of her own mirror. She told us that school was important yet she kept us away most times to work the house and plant the fields. She told us that a man should love us for our mind, but we saw her become a slave to father's money, never daring to think for herself.

We grew up and the transgressions of mother and father became our harshest reality. Generational trauma weaves a tail of destruction through our veins and allows our hearts to pump an inversion of our beings. We became scarred ourselves and adapted to pain, but to our own demise. Living should be no means be an arduous task, yet it was so every minute of our lives. For a long time, we rejected the notion of healing because it fought back with hard blows against the hard brick wall of trauma that had been cemented in our minds.

Yet, we cannot blame mother and father, for the opportunities for them to see light and heal their wounds never came and so their only hope was to live vicariously through us but sadly they were blinding us too. If there is one thing, however, that we can aspire to, is the hope that healing is ongoing. While to be completely healed is but a mere facade, we must be intentional in seeking out our triggers and taming them. Why? The obvious of course..........so that our children now, do not have to spend a lifetime scrubbing off our sins from their skin, the sins of the mother and the father.