The Curse I Carry

I hear your voice still—quiet, smug, whispering “I told you so” to anyone foolish enough to earn my love. I used to think I was the one who was callous and cruel, a painted smile on stained fabric. But you recognized those ragged edges long before I did. You grew your own to survive me, or perhaps to survive the people who made us both. You saw me, heard me, saved me—and then you threw me away.

Sometimes I think I wear your name like a curse, a brand burned into the softest places of me. Not out of devotion, but as a reminder of how easily love can rot when the roots are poisoned. I infect others with what you left behind: a virus already circulating among the fragile few. The traumatized. The ones with stories stitched into their DNA.

We are a generation too enthralled with our own pain to realize it isn’t entirely ours. It beats through our veins on behalf of those who never learned to speak it. And so we ask impossible questions: How do you react when the feelings come, but the pain stays buried?

You suffer. Quietly. Violently. Inevitably.

You saw what secrets did to them—the racism, the homophobia, the betrayals, the suicides swallowed whole. You watched how shame hollowed them out, and you kept your own tongue still until silence was its own kind of death. Shaking like a leaf under your family tree, you carried the weight that dragged generations before you underground. You inherited their wounds like heirlooms.

And then, somehow, you chose motherhood.

Sometimes I think motherhood is our first true moral injury: the moment you place an innocent life into a world you already know is terrible. You suffer the slow erosion of hope long before the due date—ten months of agonizing anticipation, imagining every shadow that might touch them. You are already weary to your bones by the time they arrive, haunted by the knowledge of the evils that will one day meet them.

To love a child is to betray them to reality.

Yet—and this is the unbearable part—the world they inherit is also beautiful.

When they gasp at a rainbow with eyes untouched by cynicism, the earth becomes new again. Through them, you witness a kind of resurrection: youth pouring like clean water through your tired hands. They see what you forgot. They feel what you hardened yourself against.

Maybe that’s the curse and the cure.

Maybe parenthood is not a moral injury but a moral reckoning—a confrontation with everything you buried to survive. It demands that you hold both truths at once:

the world is devastating, and the world is miraculous.

You are wounded, and you are capable of wonder.

You were thrown away, and you are building something worth keeping.

Motherhood doesn’t save us from the trauma we inherited, but it reveals the parts of us still capable of softening. The parts willing to grow new edges, cleaner ones. The parts that remember how to love without swallowing ourselves whole.

Perhaps the greatest rebellion is simply this:

to raise a child in a broken world, and to still believe—against reason, against history—that beauty can outrun the curse.