Content Warning: This essay discusses sexual assault, childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence, victim-blaming, and family trauma. Some sections may be emotionally difficult to read. Please take care of yourself while reading.
Author’s Note: This essay reflects on inherited blame, maternal wounds, and the impossible work of loving someone without carrying what belongs to them.
Cuando le dije a mi madre
(when I told my mother)
pensé
(I thought)
que me iba a abrazar
(that she would hold me)
esta vez
(this time)
Pero volteó la cara
e hizo un tsk con los dientes,
tan decepcionada de mí.
Y en pocas palabras me dijo
que era mi culpa otra vez…
Like so many things had been my fault throughout my life.
My dad cheating on her. The abuse I survived as a child. The priest who crossed a line he never should have crossed. All of it. Somehow, all of it had been me.
Except this time, I stood up.
This time, I realized it was not me. I was looking directly at what was to blame.
Or maybe not what.
Maybe where.
For a long time, I blamed my dad. Not entirely, not simply, because even that is not clean. My dad and I have been sitting outside for our balcony smoke sessions for a couple of years now, and lately he has started looking back at his life: his childhood, his family, the way he treated us, the way he raised us, the way he was raised, and how all of that may have shaped the whole dynamic.
A few days ago, he called it una mancha on the family.
A stain.
He said it almost like a curse, like something placed on us. But the truth is, what my dad was naming was a long line of trauma. A long line of hurt people who kept hurting other people. And inside some of those hurt people, there were good people trying to make their way out of the loop, not knowing how, so they continued it instead.
It is painful. It is sad. You can see them trying not to repeat the same malice through their children, but they fail. Then the same wish repeats and repeats, hoping someone will somehow get it right in the next round.
But that is not how it works.
You are not supposed to get it right in the next round. You are supposed to get it right with you.
And that was the message my mother, my father, my grandparents, and their parents never quite understood. That is why all of this is so sloppy. The good is never quite where it is supposed to be, and the malice spills through to us.
As I tried telling my mother that my father was part of the reason I had ended up in the situations I had been in, she looked at me and shook her head no.
I remember that head shake. Always in my father’s defense. It was that same defense that always put him before her children. She never quite understood how dangerous that was. Neither did I, not fully. But as I got older, and now, in what feels like my final, most painful awakening lesson, I saw that the problem was not only him.
That was the part I had not understood until then.
My father may have taught me fear, but my mother taught me how to explain it away. He was the violence. She was the permission. Not because she wanted to hurt me. Not because she did not love me. But because she had been trained to survive by protecting the man who hurt her.
And somehow, that became my inheritance.
As she sat there telling me, “I told you to defend yourself,” and “I never would have let that happen to me,” she defended my father again.
She defended the same man whose violence had shaped our home. The same man whose anger taught us how to shrink, how to listen for danger, how to make ourselves smaller before the room could break open. The same man who hurt her and still somehow remained the person we were expected to love, respect, and protect.
I had to love this man. I had to respect this man. I had to carry the weight of what he did to her, too.
Even as a child, I became part of their marriage. I became the witness. The messenger. The one who knew too much. The one who said something and was blamed for what saying something revealed.
My fault.
I still do not know how to ride a bike. And now, with an inner-ear problem, it is a little harder.
Years later, when I would tell her what happened to me as a child, she would say, “Well, who told you to be alone with him? I told you never to be alone with him.” As if telling me never to play with boys would have stopped me from playing with people my age. As if a child should have known how to protect herself from people she trusted.
You can tell a little girl not to go upstairs with a boy. You can warn her. You can make rules. You can call that protection.
But when you teach that same little girl to accept abuse from her father, you are teaching her something louder than the warning.
You are teaching her to stay.
You are teaching her to doubt herself.
You are teaching her that love and fear can live in the same room, and that if something happens to her inside that room, she should ask herself what she did wrong before she asks who hurt her.
Even after growing up, even after fixing and reframing that, a part of me will still ask the question: Am I the reason? Is it me? And I will always be apologizing for shit men do. Always.
And they will begin to allow it. They have. I have allowed things to happen that, in most situations, I would have stopped. Because I have been afraid to do something. Because I am afraid of what will happen to me. Because I have always been afraid.
I have seen what happens to the door. I have heard what happened to my brothers. I have seen what happens to me. And as rebellious, as loud, as violent as I can be, I am still that little girl. Scared. Frozen. Unmoving. Afraid of what will happen if I scream.
I raised my voice and said, “I’m starting to see maybe you’re part of the reason too. You’re always defending his actions when you should be on the side of your children.”
And then she said what she always says when talking about us:
“I let you live your lives. What you do is your doing.”
I used to hear that as distance. Now I hear it as defense.
It is the kind of sentence that tries to take responsibility off the speaker and place it gently, almost politely, onto the child. As if freedom and abandonment cannot sometimes wear the same face. As if letting us “live our lives” meant we had been protected inside them.
Anyone who knew us growing up would have called my mother overprotective. But she was not exactly protective. She was strict. Paranoid. Performative in the way fear can become performative when it does not know how to become care.
We were not free. We were caged indoors and told it was love.
The worst part is knowing she did want to be there in some form. She did try. But she was never shown how to be emotionally giving or nurturing. She had been taught to mother entirely too young.
She never got to be a kid. She was a mother, a servant, a cook, a seamstress. She was her mother at the ripe age of three or four. A child does not know how to be a mother. A child barely knows how to be a child. Children learn how to be by being, and she never got to.
She molded herself by others and never fully experienced self-expression or freedom. So when she finally came into her own motherhood, she “let us live our lives,” but we did not really go to parks. We rarely went to museums with the family unless it was through school. We had a curfew that was basically: get out of school and come straight home. Not one sleepover. It was weird.
You would swear we were hiding something. And yeah, we were. We were hiding an abusive family. Turns out my childhood friend A was right.
But none of us were aware of it. Not even my mother. To us, this was normal. This was everyday life. This was how you were supposed to be raised, right?
Then, when we were in Colombia, the rules changed. The cage loosened. Family became safety because family was supposed to be safety.
But things happened there.
And when they did, the blame still found me.
Not the adults who may or may not have been watching. Not the people who caused harm. Not the family history that made harm so easy to hide.
Me.
A six-year-old girl.
“No, mami. That does not work,” I said. “Not for this.”
Then she started to say, “So I’m a terrible mother. I can’t do anything right.”
I began to feel the rage come up inside me, but it was not just my rage. I felt her sister’s rage. My great-aunt’s rage. And inside all of it, I could feel my abuelita, her mother. A different emotion altogether. A feeling of having failed somewhere. Missed something. Where did they go wrong for her to treat me this way? I did not have the answers because I was too busy about to yell at my mother.
“Not now, mami.”
I got up and started walking away. My mother started hitting herself on the chest and said, “Well then, just stone me for being a terrible mother!”
I swear you could almost hear her sister’s spirit fill the room, because the ENOUGH was that loud. It vibrated in my body, in everything at that moment.
“Do NOT make this about you when your daughter just told you she was raped!” I said, as I walked out of the room and then out of the apartment with my brother, breathing heavily, gasping, reaching for air.
The disrespect I felt that day is something my mother may never understand.
She may think it was only me she hurt, but in that room, I did not feel alone. I felt the women before us pressing against the walls. Her mother. Her sister. My great-aunt. Elders from our pasts I had never known, all of them watching this same wound repeat itself in another body.
I wondered what they would have said to her.
I wondered if they had ever been blamed for what was done to them.
I wondered where the first woman dropped the ball, and how many daughters had been forced to bend down and pick it up.
Later that evening, my brother volunteered as tribute and tried to mediate a conversation between my mother and me.
He wanted to see if anything could be repaired.
But I do not think repair was possible that night. Not because there was nothing worth saving, but because everything had finally cracked open. There was no putting it back into the shape it had been before.
What had been revealed could not be unrevealed:
I was carrying blame that did not belong to me.
And my mother was carrying blame that did not belong to her, either.
The difference was that I was trying to put mine down.
“You have to realize, mami, what you say has an effect on people,” my brother began.
Almost immediately, before he could finish his next sentence, my mother said, “You are all in charge of your own lives and responsible for your own actions. I’ve done my best. Now I’m treated as a bad mother for saying things.”
We both looked at her and immediately said, “No,” and, “No one said that.”
Then my brother asked the bigger question: “Who said it’s your fault?”
My mother replied, “It has always been my fault. Every time I do something, whose responsibility is it? Mine. Whose fault is it? Mine. When something was done wrong, who would my mother blame? Me. And I would have to figure out a way to fix it. I wasn’t treated like the boys. I wasn’t given chances like everyone else. I always had to do what my mother said, what my father wanted, no matter if it was wrong or right. And they raised me right, and I was grateful for it.”
That was where abuelita dropped the ball. That was the feeling that was not quite the same as the others in the room.
My mother had been living under someone else’s thumb her whole life. She never lived. She wanted to draw, to paint, to design clothing. She never got to. She was so limited. Her creativity was stifled by parents, doctors, priests, nuns, and people who constantly told her she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, she shouldn’t. And for all of those reasons, somehow, it was her fault. She grew to resent herself and the people around her, and to believe they were right. That she was right.
I hugged her.
I hugged her tightly.
I hugged her the way she did not hug me that day.
I hugged her the way my abuelita may have wished she had been hugged. The way my bisabuela may have needed to be held. The way all the women before us deserved to be held before somebody taught them that suffering was duty.
I wanted to tell them I loved them. I wanted to tell them I was sorry anyone had made them believe these were truths they had to live by.
None of them deserved it.
None of them deserved to be robbed of youth, innocence, softness, freedom, or the chance to let their dreams flourish.
But I cannot heal them.
I know that now.
As I released my mother, she looked at me and said, “I’m not going to change, you know.”
I sighed and said, “That’s not the point,” and sat down as we continued talking.
A hug does not magically fix generational trauma and roll us to credits. If it were that easy, man, we could fix everyone real quick. No. It was never about that.
I told my mother it was about what she had just said. “I always thought the reason I had been in so many toxic dynamics was because of my dad’s influence. It wasn’t until your nod in defense of him that I realized it was also your staying with him, how you allowed him to be in our lives, how you allowed him to treat us, and how you allowed abusive men around us, that may have influenced how I allow and cope with abusive people in mine.”
I told her, “I think you did it because you didn’t want Dad to be upset with you. You were afraid of what he’d think, and that fear sometimes mattered more than us.”
My brother said nothing. My mother was in denial. And in myself, I felt that maybe this was what my abuelita thought too. Maybe that is what a patriarchal society does at times. It teaches a woman to hold up her husband before her child. To put her man before her child.
And to throw that at such a young little girl, to beat that into such a young little girl, so impressionable and now so unchangeable—I felt terrible.
I understood the hardest loops I had to break out of because I saw a woman who just could not seem to get out of them herself.
By the end of the week, I was walking my mother to the door after taking her to the nail salon. It had been an awkward outing, filled with one-word sentences and sarcastic remarks back and forth. But by the end of it, she had said something in the salon about us to the manicurist, who just so happens to know all our family—small world.
When my mother said, “I just let them live their life,” the manicurist felt, much like me, that it did not hit the way it was supposed to and laughed at it the way you would laugh at a French dark comedy.
“Oh, Ms. Gonzalez,” she said. “You sure do have a way with sayings.”
As I walked with my mother, something got conjured up in me. Not anger. Not sadness. Just acceptance.
“Mami, I know you’re not going to change,” I told her. “I don’t expect you to. And honestly, at this point in your life, I don’t want you to change for me. I want you to live for yourself.”
I wanted her to write the way she wanted to write. Draw the way she wanted to draw. Sing. Dance. Live that vida loca she always says she is living, but truly live it.
“I don’t expect you to change,” I told her. “I expect you to live. And I expect you to accept that you made mistakes as a parent. That is the part you are having such a hard time doing.”
Saying she let us live our lives was her way of putting down a weight she was still carrying. But there were things she needed to carry honestly. Not everything was her fault. Some things were her responsibility.
“Staying with my dad was the worst mistake you ever made,” I said. “And we were worse off for it. You know that. Accept it. I love you.”
I kissed her on the forehead and walked away.
