Somehow I blinked and I’m 33 weeks pregnant. This sure has flown by. I have been so busy, I’ve had no time to write. Many many thoughts have crossed my mind that I wanted to write about, but I honestly haven’t made it my priority. As many women know, pregnancy is a whirlwind and before you know it those 9 months are over. My pregnancy has been a roller coaster of emotions ranging from pure joy to extreme anxiety. As I get closer to the end, I feel nervous, excited, and unsure of myself.

At the start of the year, I set out on a quest to heal myself pre- pregnancy. I wanted to prepare my vessel before embarking on this long journey into motherhood. I focused on my mind, body, and spirit. I sought out a life coach to address a lot of the trauma I was carrying with me and my personal anxieties. This really started to help me address why I am so insecure, why I’m a people-pleaser to a fault, and why I don’t love myself. After three months of coaching, I thought I had overcome the trauma I experienced of sexual assault, the bullying in middle school, and the need to be perfect I developed at birth or maybe in the womb. Obviously though, you can’t overcome these issues overnight.

I was on a great path and then had to cut my work short due to lack of financial means for the Life Coach. Now, I worry every day that I’m going to pass this trauma on to my child without even realizing it. He’s going to see mama is insecure and tries too hard to be liked. I also work myself to the bone to prove myself and I’m supposed to be his role model. I just don’t want to fuck him up with my issues. I want to heal these wounds so he doesn’t carry them with him. Now I’m afraid it’s too late.

Generational trauma is so detrimental to families. When we don’t heal ourselves, we just keep kicking that can down the road to our children and their children and so on and so on. We have to do the work to really heal ourselves so that we can allow our children to grow into their own person without the burden of their parents’ experiences. We actually do a lot of this trauma-informed care with the Latina mothers at my work. The more I hear about the work we do to help them, it makes me think about the work I need to do on myself to heal.

I want my son to have a fresh start in life. I want to teach him to love himself, feel confident, and hopefully he won’t experience any big trauma’s in life, but that is ultimately out of my hands beyond what we can ensure in the home. I hope he isn’t like me in the way that I had a relatively easy life and decided to go out and seek danger abroad. I don’t regret seeing the world and feeling that freedom traveling, but I can’t help feeling like if I hadn’t of run off to Ecuador alone, I wouldn’t have been sexually assaulted multiple times. Of course, part of healing is forgiving myself and forgiving the men who hurt me. Some days I feel I have and others not so much. I’ve mostly just buried the pain deep inside me.

We can’t protect our children from the horrors of the world, but we can hopefully prepare them to face those dangers with strength and common sense. I think a lot about all the things I will teach my son to prepare him for the hard things in life. I don’t plan to make life seem rosy and safe, but I also don’t plan to scare him. I want him to see life as a winding road with forks, bumps, ditches, and clear paths. I don’t want him to feel entitled to anything in life (besides Human Rights of course) or like it should all just be easy for him. Life isn’t easy and we can’t fool our children into thinking it is. Not everyone gets a trophy and that is okay.

I want him to eat dirt, skin his knees, lose a few games, get his heart broken, and have to work hard to achieve greatness. I also want him to experience pure joy, find the love of his life, travel the world if he wants to, and be successful. I don’t plan to give him everything he wants. I don’t want him to be spoiled. I won’t deny him treats on occasion and gifts, but no child needs everything. The one thing I plan to spoil him with is LOVE. All children really need beyond clothing, food, water, and a roof over their heads is love.

I hope he loves himself and loves all human beings equally and without judgement. I hope he loves nature and animals. I plan to love him whether he is gay, straight, bisexual, trans, asexual, gender neutral- he can be whoever he wants to be as long as he’s a good person and I will love him unconditionally. All I ask of him is to have a big heart and care for those around him and recognize that though he may receive privileges for being white and male, he shouldn’t use these privileges to get ahead in life.

I feel an obligation to raise him to be better than white males before him. We can raise all the little girls to be strong warrior women, but the real change will come when we raise the next generation of men to see women as their equals and treat them with all the respect they deserve. My son will be a feminist and a crusader for human rights. I hope!

Anyway, these are the thoughts that cross my mind these days and I know I won’t be a perfect parent, since those don’t exist. I just hope I’m not a shitty parent who messes up their kid.