To Inherit The Wound And Become The Knife

He looks at me like I have the answers. Like I know how to protect him from the world. Like I’m strong, steady, whole.

And some days, I can pretend that’s true.

I take him to school. I teach him how to shoot the soccer ball. I laugh at his jokes. I tell him I love him—because I do. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anything. But in the quiet moments, when he’s asleep and the house goes still, the fear creeps in like a draft under the door: What am I giving him without meaning to?

Because I was raised by absence. By silence. By people who taught me how to disappear emotionally and still pass for functional. People who said I love you through control, or guilt, or distance. And no matter how hard I try to unlearn that script, some of it still lives in me.

Sometimes I catch myself drifting when he talks, like my body’s there and my mind is locked in a room I thought I’d left years ago.
Sometimes I hear my own father’s voice coming out of my mouth—and I flinch. Sometimes I say it’s fine when it isn’t, because that’s what I was taught to do. To keep everything pretty on the outside and cracked to hell on the inside.

And I don’t want that for him.

I don’t want him to grow up thinking love is something you have to earn. I don’t want him to feel like he has to be perfect to be safe. I don’t want him to look in the mirror one day and see a man who knows how to smile but doesn’t know how to feel.

He deserves more than that. More than me, maybe.

But I’m here. And I’m trying.

That’s the truth—I’m trying. To show up. To break the pattern. To say the words I never heard. To hold him without armor. To let him see that even when I’m tired or scared or full of doubt, I stay.

Because maybe that’s how the cycle ends. Not with grand declarations or perfection. But with small acts of defiance against the ghosts that raised you.

And maybe—if I’m lucky—he’ll grow up and never have to write something like this.

Maybe that’s the legacy I’ll give him: A childhood that didn’t need to be survived.

But there’s something else I can’t ignore—something that lives in the basement of my mind, where the air is colder and the lights flicker. A question I don’t say out loud, but one I feel pulsing beneath every decision I avoid making:

“If I walk away from this life to chase the possibility of something else… am I just becoming her? Am I repeating her mistake?”

My mother didn’t slam a door. She didn’t scream. She just… reoriented her life around someone else. One day I was her center, and the next, I was furniture in a house that no longer felt like mine. She called it a fresh start. Stability. A new beginning. And maybe that’s what it was for her.

But for me, it was abandonment disguised as reinvention.

So now I live in this brutal paradox: There is someone I want to be with. She sees me. I mean really sees me—the way no one ever did, the way she never did. With her, I feel present. Alive. Known. And when I imagine a life with her, I feel that flicker of something I thought was long extinct. Something like home.

But if I pursue it—if I leave this life I’ve built with its shared routines and guilt-ridden affection—am I just re-enacting the same pain that gutted me as a child? Am I handing my son the same wound I’ve spent decades stitching shut?

How do you choose between your own happiness and the person who looks at you like you are their whole world? How do you make peace with the possibility that to save yourself, you might have to fracture someone else? You own fucking son? How do you chase love without becoming the villain in someone else’s story?

These questions don’t have answers. Not honest ones. Just weight.

So I stay. I freeze. I perform stability. But somewhere inside me, there’s a voice whispering that I’m sleepwalking through a life that was never meant for me. It’s saying for me to go and be happy. And there’s another voice, darker and older, that whispers back: If you leave, you’re no better than she was.

And in between those two voices, I stand still, watching the clock, smiling when I’m supposed to, aching in ways I’ve learned not to show, and quietly wondering which version of me my son will remember.

The one who stayed and lived a secret miserable existence? Or the one who left and shattered him?

And that’s the thing no one tells you about breaking cycles: It costs something either way.