I won't break all the cycles.

On accepting my imperfect marriage.

Mar 27, 2025

After my mother’s death, a determination took hold.

I wanted to scream, ENOUGH!

I wondered what agency I had, if any, to set old patterns to rest.

“I want this weekend to think and write about you. But in so doing I’m really asking questions about myself. Who am I now, without you here? How are you in me? What must I do to heal—both of us—our whole line of women? It feels like my birthright.” –My journal: 9/15/18 (364 days after my mother died)

My mother, Granny, and Great-Grandmother had each experienced challenges with abuse/sexual trauma and reproductive cancer. I also saw a pattern of challenging mother-daughter relationships. In my Great-Grandmother’s case, a mother dead in her teens.

Intermixed with the grief of my mom’s death was fear. Would I be next? While my mom had protected me from the pattern of sexual trauma, I’d felt its imprints in my closed-off body, and primal fear of relationships well into my 20s.

My quest took me down beautiful rabbit holes.

Growing up, I’d only known of my great-grandmother Lille, who traveled to Ellis Island at 15, after both her parents died of the Spanish flu. I created an Ancestry account and traced 7 generations back, through my matrilineal line. I dreamed of visiting the small mountain town in present-day Romania.

I doubled down on healing and exploring my sexuality. A friend recommended a somatic women’s health coach who focused on the pelvic floor. She reached her hands into me, finding the numb spots and instructing me to do the same.

I took plant medicine and felt the fabric of the universe shift within and beyond me.

I read books about lineage, ancestry, and healing, and research on epigenetics.

I began to pick up small bread crumbs my mother, a holistic healer, had left behind. I studied herbalism, and then menstrual cycles. I began to open my mind beyond the rigid paradigms I’d been taught were the only way.

My mom’s first instance of breast cancer coincided with her broken heart.She believed this was no coincidence. She told me this once in the car, driving from our home in upstate NY toward New York City.

I was furious.

I thought she was full of shit.

No one gives themself cancer because they’re sad over a break-up.

And what about me, her daughter? Where did I fit in?

So furious.

My mom was married and divorced 3 times. Growing up, it always seemed like she was dating someone. I never was. Despite an abusive first marriage, despite the divorces, despite the cancer, she still believed in love and actively searched for it.

Later, after she was gone, I dove into epigenetics.

In grad school I’d learned terms like allostatic load.

I began to believe her.

I am walking to what is still my Denver apartment, if only for one more week.

This man could break my heart. He could break me.

Love is a vulnerable state to be in.

And I am in love.

What if he breaks my heart?

What if the stress or depression turns on the malevolent genes that lurk within me.

My mom had them. Inheritance is good and bad. We can’t always pick and choose.

What if love kills me.

I could die.

I could move to Montana and I could die.

I move to Montana.

I say yes on the side of a cliff in Kauai and slip on a too-big ring.

I say I do a year later, in front of friends and family, underneath big old trees, beside a deep cold lake.

In the days and months after, I fixate on all that went wrong– the assistant photographer who had COVID, the vegetarian dishes the caterers forgot, the last minute arranging of the chairs….

I’ll think of all the ways I’d do it differently.

I dwell on this more than all the perfect moments, of which there are so many.

I think healing my matrilineal lineage means I won’t repeat any of their mistakes; the wedding feels symbolic.

I want perfection in my marriage and my partner.

I want the perfect union.

I want to break all the cycles

This mindset leads to unhappiness.

I am critical.

My guard is up. I analyze every misstep, on some level terrified I might be repeating patterns.

In me, I see too much of my mom. In my husband, I see too much of my dad, my grand-father, and my childhood hurts.

I hold back. I criticize. I want imperfect humans to be perfect.

I begin to wonder if we’ll make it past our second year wedding anniversary.

If we’ll ever have kids.

I know something has to shift.

I never imagined that something was me.

I need to access another way of knowing. I set the day and the time.

I lie on the floor of my office.

Behind my head are photos of my mom and Granny, me and my husband.

They lean against a painting of an elephant. My version of a fertility elephant an old colleague lovingly suggested. Around the images are candles, crystals, and dried flowers.

For a while, it feels like nothing will happen.

A few ideas burst through my mind. Innocuous enough.

I fumble with my eye mask, reaching for a pen and paper to jot them down.

I go back into stillness.

I told my husband not to interpret me.

I told him I’d call if I needed him.

The wave that washes over me is all encompassing.

There are two paths before me.

Two paths that could be mine.

To the left I see freedom. I am unattached. My life is completely my own.

I get to evolve. I travel. I learn and grow wise. I live life on my own terms. And then, one day, I leave. I see myself fading away into nothing.

Fear rises up in me.

Is this what is required of me?

I am breaking a cycle.

Literally.

I am saying ‘it stops with me.’

I am fading away.

The despair of this washes over me.

Is it my destiny to break cycles? I am here to break cycles? Is this what I’m being called to do?

I focus my mind on the other path.

This one is a chain.

I’m looking at it halfway up in the sky. It comes from down down down.

I can’t see its full roots. I don’t try.

I’m fixating on my piece of it.

Not much is visible.

I understand this is by design.

I know I’m with my husband.

I see that if I stay in the chain I keep this transmission going forward. I see that there will be another link after me, and another and another.

I don't know where it is going.

I don’t know when it will get there.

I don’t know how it will be, to be this piece.

I can’t see too much.

Just that I’m a link.

A link that is required to move one step ahead.

I feel the relief in this.

My husband is sitting next to me. He’s here now. He’s holding my hand, because I’ve called him and asked him to. He reminds me to breathe.

I breathe.

And in my breath I decide to accept all of it.

I decide I am OK being one piece in the chain.

I choose fully to be in this life, with him, with me, with our imperfections.

I accept, for the first time, that we will not be perfect.

I accept that I won’t break all the cycles, and I fully choose this life.

Thanks for reading. Can you relate–have you ever felt like you have to break all the patterns?

3GenWell

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