Inheritance

Not all inheritance is what we think it is.

Inheritance
I was born into a house
where love wore conditions
and silence learned to speak before I did.
Where age gaps felt like oceans,
and power decided who was heard
and who learned early
to disappear without leaving.
My father’s love arrived
only when I behaved,
left bruises when I didn’t,
called names that settled into my bones
before I knew what bones were for.
My mother stood close enough to see
but far enough not to act,
working, surviving, choosing quiet
over protection,
later calling that love.
I learned early
that pain could live next door,
touch you, mark you,
and still be called nothing
because no one asked the right questions.
I carried secrets like chores,
children that weren’t mine,
responsibility shaped like obligation,
while my own childhood
waited patiently to be mourned.
I tried to leave the only way I knew how—
by growing up too fast,
by choosing escape over safety,
by making decisions
with a nervous system that only wanted out.
They called those choices flaws.
I call them survival.
Addiction came not as rebellion
but as relief,
a quieting of a body
that had never known rest.
And still—
I came back.
I got clean.
I chose my children.
I learned to stay.
That is the part they never hold.
Because if I am allowed to change,
their past must speak.
So they reach backward,
drag old versions of me into the present,
throw history like stones
and call it truth.
But I see it now.
This was not love lost—
it was love misshapen,
filtered through fear, control,
and generations afraid to feel.
And I am not broken.
I am the one who noticed.
The one who stopped the echo.
The one who said,
this ends here.
I am still standing
in the middle of the wreckage,
holding tenderness with both hands,
learning how to give myself
what no one else could.
And that—
that is not dysfunction.
That is beginning