Before Your Eyes
A bit earlier today I watched a YouTube video of my favorite content creator playing the game Before Your Eyes. Within the span of about 5 minutes, I found myself crying.
There’s something incredibly sobering about seeing a parent struggle. I’ve always thought about how it’s a parent’s responsibility to give a child a good life and to be an appropriate parent for them, but it’s pretty gut-wrenching to see a parent lost. It’s a weird feeling to see someone blind to their own mistakes lay the ones they love down on railroad tracks. It doesn’t make it any easier when the train hits them.
I guess it all just boils down to my own childhood, doesn’t it? This is my blog after all, it’s not like this is written down for anyone else. I’m sorry she had to see her grandmother hung at a young age, but I also wish I didn’t have that pain passed onto me. I wish she was somehow unnecessarily strong enough to handle that pain and trauma and prevent it from being passed onto me. But it also wasn’t fair to her. I find myself blaming her less and less, when I think back to the neglect all I see is a traumatized little girl watching her dead grandmother, and god knows what else happened to her to make her so afraid of men.
I’m sorry that happened to you, but I’m also sorry about the things that happened to me. It’s not fair to you, but it’s also not fair to me. It is unfair to ask you to somehow handle all the generational trauma passed onto you, but I also wish you decided to confront that pain before it manifested its way onto me.
I feel like I push myself so hard to process things and to grow as a person mentally with the hope of giving a child a good life. I want to finally break the chain of suicides and stop the pattern of hurt. I’m afraid now though, as watching the game unfold, she loved us so much. Yet she hurt us the same way too. I fear what I do is not enough, and I fall victim to the same trap of my parents, and those before me too. Maybe I shouldn’t have a kid.
As much as that hurts to write, I think I need to consider that possibility for me to be able to consider having one in the future – I need to be confident that if I have a child it is because I think it is good, not because I want to prove I can stop this chain.
“I killed a plant once because I gave it too much water. Lord, I worry that love is violence.”
― José Olivarez, Citizen Illegal