Generational Trauma a story

Two more sleeps until the book is available in paperback on Amazon. You can pre-order the Kindle version now; it is available on December 15th. In contrast to yesterday's posting, this one is serious. Because, well, overall, the book is serious. Okay, it's more like 50/50 serious because, if you know me, I can't be serious for too long. Some of this is in the book but a lot of it was edited out for space.

How does generational trauma work? Besides studies showing it affects the DNA passed to your children, it's pretty simple to explain. For example, my mother was terrified of snakes. As a small child, when a harmless snake crossed our path, she would shriek, jump, grab me in her arms, and run the opposite way.

As a result, I learned to be afraid of snakes. I had no real reason to fear snakes, and I didn’t understand why, but I learned how to react based on my mother’s emotional responses to the situation. As an adult, I took my child to pet stores so she could pet snakes while I stood nearby, trembling inside and smiling encouragingly. I still dislike snakes, but my daughter has no unfounded fear of them.

We learn how to react, cope, trust, love, and respond to others from what we observe and hear from our parents. If, along the way, they dealt with trauma that led to maladaptive coping skills, then we learned those skills from our parents, and we inherited their trauma responses.  We reach a point in life where our internal reactions no longer make sense in a situation, yet we still feel comfortable with them.

Generational trauma isn't a new concept; it’s simply a new term for something we’ve always understood. We learn how to be adults from our parents, who are our first and most important teachers. I’ve tried to keep my mother’s worst parenting tendencies away from my daughter. Yet I catch myself saying things I swore I’d never say.

For example, I’ve heard the words come out of my mouth, “I guess if I want to keep something nice around here, I have to pack it up my ass.”

Even my daughter, who has never met her grandmother, will mirror her in ways I can’t ignore. At age five, when she argued with an emergency room doctor who asked me, “Is she five or thirty-five?”

And recently, when a doctor suggested she might have an eye tumor.  He dismissed her idea that it could be a residual of being micro-premature and called the possibility “rare.” I watched her transform before my eyes.

I grabbed a magazine from the corner of the room and felt my stomach tighten with pity for the doctor. With her arms crossed and her voice cold, she looked the doctor in the eyes and said, “Rare? Well, let me tell you about rare. I’m not supposed even to be alive. So, if you want rare, then I am rare.”

Lilly was right, of course, it was never a tumor.  Sometimes having a little of your ancestor’s DNA is a good thing.  My mom was tough because she had to be.

My mother was born in 1932.  By the time I came along in 1963, the entire world had changed.  What was common in my mother’s life and family was unheard of in mine.  My mother worked hard not to be her mother, just as I worked hard not to be mine.  Piece by piece, we heal.

One of the most heartbreaking stories I heard as a pre-teen was about Jamestown, North Dakota. My grandmother, a recent divorcee in 1942, decided to leave Wadena County. As I grew older, the story changed to include the unsettling detail that Grandma may have had to leave because of one or more married men in the area, hinting at a period of her “unsettledness.”

Grandma took two of her youngest children, my mom and her younger brother Lloyd, who were ten and nine, along with her to head "out west," a term that was never clearly defined but seemed to mean a place where she believed there would be work. She bundled the two children onto a Greyhound bus, and their journey from Wadena, Minnesota, began on a cold winter evening.

When Grandma arrived in Jamestown, North Dakota, she realized this wasn’t the "out west" she had envisioned and felt she needed to keep moving. After counting her money, she saw she had enough for only one adult to go as far west as Greyhound could take her. There wasn’t enough to bring the children along, and if she spent her money to send them back to their siblings in Minnesota, she would be stranded in North Dakota.

Ultimately, she purchased a ticket to a destination in the far west, leaving her ten-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son alone in a Greyhound bus station in a strange town far away from home.

Someday, I would like to visit Jamestown, if the old bus station is still standing, to tell the shadows, “I’m sorry.” I’m sorry for the pain you endured for all those years.

Grandpa Grow had gone north to work in a logging camp along the Canadian border and could not be reached. The other children were under the questionable supervision of their older siblings in Wadena (more on that later). They knew no one in Jamestown, North Dakota.

There was no one to call, and even if they had money for a long-distance telephone call, no one they knew had access to a phone. My mom and uncle sat in the Greyhound station, huddled together, hungry, frightened, and very alone for hours, through the day, into the evening, and throughout the night. Finally, after 24 hours, the office clerk contacted the local police department to have the abandoned children rescued.

Upon hearing their story, an officer took them to a local church and spoke with the minister.  In 1942, in the small town, the local clergy were the center of the community.  Not only the arbitrator of sins, but the minister and congregation would also have provided what was the only sort of social service available at that time.

The minister knew of a family that could always use extra help on their farm and might take in the abandoned children to work in exchange for room and board. Mom and Uncle Lloyd were driven out to the farm outside town, and after the officer's explanations, the farmer and his wife agreed to take them in, provided they worked. The officer who rescued them then left, leaving them alone again with strangers.

Mom and Uncle Lloyd worked on the farm and shared a room in a farmhouse.  Mom said that the house was “colder than a well digger’s backside,” but they ate three meals a day and got Sundays off for church.

They worked hard on the farm at ages nine and ten, from dawn to dusk. Mom never talked about going to school. I imagine it was ignored so the farmer could get his money’s worth from his young boarders. To their credit, once the spring crops were planted, the farmer and his wife bought two Greyhound bus tickets and sent them home to Wadena to reunite with their siblings and their father, who had returned from logging “up north”.

Mom said Grandma Edna showed up “a couple of years later like nothing happened,” claiming she had lost a job “out west.” Lloyd grew up to become a raging alcoholic, and Mom became a rage-aholic.  Mom died at sixty-eight from a heart attack.  Uncle Lloyd died at the age of 43.  The newspaper only said, “Found dead in car.”

When I was younger, I never understood why Mom kept a relationship with her mother after that incident. Still, she maintained it for nineteen more years until Grandma Edna died. Then I learned the irony of abused children.  The child who is abused will cling to the abuser, desperate for love, no matter how painful it is.

One thing I knew from the very soul of my being.  My mom would walk through Hell for her children.  She never had to say it to us; she showed it to us, giving us a sense of security that she never had with her mother.  In contrast, I think Uncle Lloyd abandoned his children with his suicide.