Mother

Oscar Wilde once wrote, “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”

I still remember the first time I read those words.

I was mortified by the possibility of them.

At the time, I could only understand them through fear. I looked at my mother and saw a woman fighting her way through a terrible marriage and whatever it left behind, through survival, through emotions that seemed too heavy for one body to carry. I watched her struggle with the people who influenced her, with the life that had shaped her, and eventually, with the quiet loss of control over her own actions.

And because I was her daughter, I began to fear that I was not simply witnessing her pain.

I was inheriting it.

For a long time, that sentence followed me like a warning. I thought becoming like my mother meant becoming the most wounded version of her. The most exhausted version. The version who had been hurt so deeply that hurt began to move through her too.

But looking back now, both at Wilde’s words and at my mother’s life, I realize something I had not allowed myself to understand before.

He never said which version of the mother the daughter is meant to become.

Only that she will.

And because he called it a tragedy, I assumed it had to mean the worst version. Because when we hear words like curse or tragedy, we instinctively look for the most terrible meaning they can hold.

So I gave that meaning to myself.

I mistook inheritance for punishment.

And in doing so, I began fearing a future that may have never belonged to me in the first place.

Growing older, I started looking into it a bit more.

At first, on my own. Later, with the help of my therapist.

Inherited trauma.

That is what it is called.

Inherited trauma is not the inheritance of a person’s exact life. It is not a daughter waking up one day and becoming her mother, as if the body has no choice but to obey the blood that made it.

It is the inheritance of reactions. Of fears. Of silences. Of the ways love was offered, withheld, begged for, or survived.

It is learning the shape of pain before we have the language to name it, and then mistaking that shape for personality.

A mother does not only pass down her eyes, her hands, or the way she laughs when she is not thinking about being watched.

Sometimes she passes down the way she flinches.

Sometimes she passes down the way she forgives too much.

Sometimes she passes down the belief that suffering is proof of love.

And sometimes, without meaning to, she teaches her daughter that survival and womanhood are the same thing.

But here comes the contradiction that completely breaks Mr. Wilde’s quote apart, revealing it not as a curse, but as an observation romanticized into suffering.

Because just as we can let go of a bad memory, fight against our insecurities, or accept and move forward from a painful experience in our past, we can do the same with what we have inherited.

Not only from our mothers, but from our entire surroundings.

Putting the weight of destiny only into a mother’s arms, saying that her rights and wrongs are enough to seal the future of her daughter, feels deeply rooted in patriarchy.

A mother can live her life.

She can make her own mistakes, own up to them or not, survive in the ways she knows how, and raise her children in the way she believes is best.

A mother does not stop being human because she gave life.

She is not, by any means, perfect.

And no matter how hard one tries, there will always be fears, insecurities, beliefs, and wounds that are passed down. Not only from mother to daughter, but from generation to generation.

Each woman tries, in her own way, to raise a life with the tools she was given.

Sometimes those tools are love.

Sometimes they are fear.

Sometimes they are silence.

And sometimes, healing begins when a daughter finally understands that what was passed down to her was never meant to be a prophecy.

It was only a pattern.

And patterns can be broken.

So instead of saying that the way we react to an argument, the way we choose to raise our voice or keep silent, is simply because that is what our mothers would have done, we can choose to look at it differently.

Instead of excusing our own bad behavior at the altar of “that is how I was raised,” we can learn to own up to our wrongs.

There are countless ways a person can be traumatized. Countless ways a person can be hurt. Countless reasons why someone may act the way they do.

But none of these reasons are excuses.

They may explain us, but they do not absolve us.

So we either accept what happened and move forward, or we remain in the same place, fighting forever over what feels fair and what feels painfully romantic enough to give our suffering a purpose.

It is in our hands.

It is our choice.

It was not prewritten by our mothers, nor sealed by their actions.

And still, I suppose there are parts of her I do not want to escape.

Because I am my mother, too.

Not in the ways I once feared. Not in the ways that kept me awake at night, wondering whether womanhood was just a repetition of pain. Not in the ways that made me believe my future had already been decided for me.

But in the softer ways.

In the way I curl into myself in the early morning with a book resting in my lap and a warm cup of coffee between my hands. In the way I open all the windows in my living room, letting the air move through the house as if it is cleaning something invisible. In the way I create small rituals of comfort without even realizing I learned them from her.

She used to do that.

She still does.

And maybe that is the part Wilde forgot.

That becoming like our mothers does not always have to be tragic.

Sometimes it means inheriting the tenderness, too.

The quiet habits. The small comforts. The instinct to survive, yes, but also the instinct to make life beautiful in the middle of survival.

I can let go of the pain without rejecting the woman.

I can break the patterns without denying where I come from.

I can choose which parts of her I carry, and which parts I finally put down.

So no, I do not believe becoming like my mother is my curse.

I believe the real tragedy would be to think I had no choice in the matter.