Everything was chill. I sat with my Grandma, knocking back a five-year-old tin of Christmas popcorn and flipping through family albums. As I admired a high school portrait of my mother, my Grandma looked over. “Always a little soft around the edges,” she remarked. Everything came flooding back – 100-calorie snack packs, the Livestrong calorie counter, all the hoarded Jenny Craig treats. Well, well, well, I thought. The source exposes itself.
It was then that I realized: These motherfuckers fucked up our moms. This all might sound harsh, but it’s not like your Grandma wasn’t thinking the same thing about her Grandma at some point. It was just a little too late…after she had already instilled a generational trauma-based victim complex in your mother so complex it surpassed victimhood entirely. Shoot!
Hey, it happens to the best of us. The transgenerational epigenetic inheritance that we all refuse to heal within ourselves is at the root of the world’s conflicts. That’s a fancy way of saying it’s possible to pass on PTSD through DNA which we know but won’t address and isn’t that just fucked up? My Grandma’s shit is thus my shit? For fucking real? And I mean that literally, lots of IBS issues are linked back to compounded trauma. Did you know that? Our trauma manifests physically? In our literal shit?
The even more unfortunate thing is that since she didn’t deal with our shared generational trauma, then I have to. Which is mostly what I’m up in arms about. Why do I have to be the one to do it? COME ON GRANDMAS, but also: I’m sorry Grandmas. Ultimately what I’m trying to say is that you are your Grandma and that time is an invention. We are simply here and that’s all we know. You know? It’s not just two things existing at once, it’s everything existing at all times infinitely.
I understand the desire to project ethereal goodness onto some old lady you see twice a year. It’s easy! But you know what’s behind that? The person who called your mom a fatty, who in turn put you on Weight Watchers at the age of nine. See how this whole thing works? It’s a VICIOUS CYCLE! I’m just saying, the next time you bite into her famous cookies, don’t forget how much you’ve spent on therapy.