The Truth About Breaking Cycles

There’s a popular narrative among parents these days:
“My kids won’t go through what I did.”
“The pain I felt? They’ll never have to feel it.”
“What I didn’t have, they’ll have in abundance.”

And if you’re anything like me, you’ve said some version of those words before.

It comes from a place of love. From good intentions. From the deepest desire to protect and heal and give our kids more than we had. But, here’s the hard truth no one really wants to say out loud….

Your children will still have shit to overcome.

The difference?
This time, it will be your shit…

My shit…

My overcorrections.
My fears and insecurities.
My ignorance, my bad days, my short temper, my need to control, my deep exhaustion, my unresolved trauma.
My moments when I didn’t know better, until it was too late.

It’s sobering. And it’s humbling. Because the thing about parenting is that it doesn’t get to be perfect just because you want it to be. We are human. Flawed. Wounded. Learning. Unlearning. Surviving. And somewhere in the midst of all that, we are trying to raise whole and healthy children.

But we’re still bleeding from our own wounds.
Still tripping over the broken pieces of our own childhoods.
Still figuring out how to be a better parent without a perfect example to follow.

But we try. We really do.
We try to do better. Be better. Love better.

And one day, if we’re lucky, we will see the grace in our children’s eyes. We will hope that they give us the forgiveness we didn’t always know how to ask for. And maybe they’ll even say, “She didn’t get it all right, but she never stopped trying.”

It’s in that thought that I’ve also found a new kind of compassion for my own parents.

There are some people out there who shouldn’t be given the benefit of the doubt and this isn’t about excusing abuse or denying harm. But for many of us, our parents did the best they could with what they had. Some days, they were just surviving, same as us.

So if I’m going to blame them for the cracks, I probably need to give them credit for the foundation, too.
Same as I’ll one day ask my kids to do for me.

Because this parenting thing?
It’s a lot.
And we’re all just out here doing our best with tired hearts and hopeful hands.

Here’s to breaking cycles and still being gracious enough to know we’ll make some new ones, too.
Here’s to apologizing when we mess up.
Here’s to learning better, and then doing better.
Here’s to tomorrow.

And here’s to you, if you’re trying. You’re not alone.🫶🏼

-Casey