From the time my mother told me she didn’t know who my biological father was the hole she blew into my identity has informed - everything. It’s certainly not something I have thought of every day, and in fact I spent my twenties ignoring it. Outworking it, outthinking it. I was better than my gaping wound. Smarter, stronger, more compassionate, a work ethic that all became who I was instead of that half of me that wasn’t there. But when I could no longer suture by rationalization in my early thirties, it began to slow-roll into the ground my strength, my intellect, my compassion, my work ethic. And by my forties, with years of therapy holding up my new shaky legs I realized that my wound affected everything whether I knew it or not, Like someone with a physical injury that learns to function with a bad back, or to get dressed with only one arm, without it dominating their thoughts - but it is still with them. A stronger eye learns to make up for a weaker one. Our brains are amazing.
But recently two things converged and I think it’s safe to say you won’t guess what they are. The first thing is my fulfillment of a promise made to myself when I realized DNA could help find biological relatives and I found and formed a relationship with my father and my family. I wasn’t able to make the promise to my mom because only seven years ago when she died the technology was not available to us. But it remained important to me.
I’ll save the longer story of how I found my maternal grandfather for another time, and all the details of what happened back then, but it ended up being more shocking than I imagined and made me finally launch this newsletter I’ve been meaning to start for a while.
The short version. (The short twisted southern gothic version) My grandmother was Emma Walton, and she died in her early twenties in a car accident. My mother, Mary, was born when Emma was still a teenager and the decision was made to tell my mom that her parents were my great-grandparents not Emma. They told her Emma was her sister.
When my mom was seven — after Emma’s death — a great-aunt got drunk and told my mom the truth. The two people raising her were her grandparents not her parents and her real mother was dead. And they said no one knew who her father was. Emma was not there to decide what my mom got told.
Clearly this kind of identity shattering experience affected my mom in so inconceivable ways. Science has shown that people with the personality disorder she developed are likely the sum of a genetic predisposition and childhood trauma. One thing I know she felt in devastating ways was being illegitimate, not knowing who her father was, during a time when this was a very big deal in the rural south. That thing she carried in her bones was shame. It was a tragic amount of shame that affected everything. Even the way she ended up passing this terrible wound down to me, now with the compounded repercussions of hers and of mine.
That’s how generational trauma becomes so difficult to unroot from the family tree. Each generation the roots and vines of trauma grow more intertwined and thicker and of course much of it is buried underneath where it is not visible but still continues to feed everything from below.
One thing I always talk about is how difficult it is to be the one who uproots the rotted parts so what is left can live with less struggle. Most people told me to stop caring who my biological father was, even knowing it wasn’t like a case of an adoption where I had a father who chose me instead. Most told me it was not the open wound harming me, it was my choice to think about it. To dwell on it. And I tried and tried to take the advice, but it always came back. So once I realized that the knowing did actually bring the healing potential I had hoped, I figured I should keep going for my mom and grandmother, too.
In truth, it was a matter of pride, too. These women before me were called the crazy ones and in many ways sacrificed so men could live their lives. Uncovering the truth felt like I was giving them something back that had been wrongfully taken.
What I found out was that after my family was forced from their farm by the government for the construction of Camp Lejeune, my grandmother, Emma, was sent to stay in a nearby town with relatives. After my Emma’s aunt Bessie had children, she she also died young of tuberculosis in her twenties. Soon her husband remarried and that’s where Emma was sent to live. There simply wasn’t enough food to go around anymore.
In this photo, my grandmother Emma is on the bottom row and my mom is the little girl in the back who thought she was hanging out with her big sister.
And it turns out that while Emma was staying with the relatives in a nearby town, Bessie’s young adult son, Emma’s first cousin, got her pregnant with my mother.
I have a lot to learn about all of this and certainly have my own speculation about what happened, but for today’s purpose the point is my mom told herself all her life that she was the daughter of a rich man in town and that she looked like his other children. I can still see and feel the pain in her green eyes when she spoke about it.
But the truth was she was the daughter of two first cousins - which makes me the granddaughter of those first cousins.
My great-aunt Bessie, who I named my bar and billiard parlor after, turns out to also be one of my great-grandmothers.
When I was a little girl, the great-grandmother I knew used to call me by her sister’s Bessie’s name by accident - immediately telling me I looked and acted just like her.
Now I know why. The secret. The truth. The trauma.
The second and odd thing that came along with this discovery was my Dungeons and Dragons character coming to life. I’m playing a Rogue who is a Phantom, which means has some connection to the dead, and I’m having such a blast returning to this game I played as a kid.
During one of the sessions, when I was still processing my new grandfather news, our band of adventurers found themselves in a cemetery and I was thinking of the description of phantom rogues: “These rogues take knowledge from the dead and become immersed in negative energy, eventually becoming like ghosts,” and it dropped into my head that this is what we all do every day. I have taken knowledge from the dead, and live with negative energy created before I was born.
And this, is generational trauma. And what we must do is make sure we don’t pick up so much from the dead that our lives are still theirs, but we also should not neglect to tend to the poisonous secrets that “attach themselves as scars attach and ride the skin,” according to the great poet Lucille Clifton in her poem Sorrows.
In the coming weeks I will be writing much, much, less personal takes on trauma and really deep-diving into neuroscience and psychology, history and medicine. The next installment will be a building block on the nature of trauma as we work our way back to generational trauma and how to shield from it, as best we can, not only ourselves and our children, but the people we spend our lives with and our society.
I’m incredibly happy to have all of you here and hope to build a community to help us navigate these traumatic times we are living through. If there is one thing I know about all of this, it’s that in so many ways the hard part will actually come when we attempt to return to a state we remember as normal.
To use the case of a combat veteran with PTSD, it is so often the way that they are able to function on deployment but suffer the devastating effects of past trauma when they do things like try to go grocery shopping back home.
Clearly I am not comparing what we are going through with combat, but this kind of sustained chronic trauma certainly has big effects on our brains. When the time comes and we are told it’s “safe” and we are made to feel pressured to feel “safe” when we try to go places without a mask or social distancing — our brains will not simply snap into the present day. That brain has been dutifully doing its job cementing the threat of a virus for the future. Imprinting it onto our every thought whether we know it or not.
This coming time, this attempt to be like we were, is the time I fear will be most difficult for some people and will have the least amount of understanding from others, and that is why I wanted to do this project now. I hope we can begin to ripple out the understanding of trauma in order to help us all be like a diver who when it’s time to decompress understands it must be done slowly, carefully, thoughtfully, with science in mind, in order to safely re-crack the surface and to return to the world left behind.
Thank you for your support and for coming along for this project and as always feel free to get in touch.
Peace,
Lori
Some Weekly Trauma News Links:
Trauma in Children During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Increase in Trauma Patients in Houston During Pandemic
Responding to the Trauma of COVID-19
Using expressive writing techniques to help Covid-19 healthcare workers overcome trauma