a different flavor of intrusive thoughts

and reflections on intergenerational trauma

nobody prepares you for the intrusive thoughts you’ll have to deal with around death when you become a parent. like straight up wondering/fantasizing about what happens when i’m not around. when i say fantasizing, i don’t mean the flavor of fantasy you may be thinking, commonly associated with pleasure or delight or day dreams. i mean it more as an exercise in following a what if thought and watching it play out as a story in my mind. what if i was hit by a car while crossing the street and became coma induced? how would my baby get fed? what if the plague took me out? what if someone pushed me onto the subway tracks? would my baby know that i’m not around to smile and giggle and squeal at him anymore? how would my husband cope? who would be sad? who would wail? how long would the life we know stop for before a new normal sinks in? what would that new normal even look like?

there’s nothing pleasure seeking or delightful about these sorts of thoughts. it’s an exercise in control where I try to understand what life might look like without me.

losing a parent and becoming a parent all at the same time makes these kinds of reflections almost impossible to avoid. they make up the wallpaper of my mind — along with the extreme joys of raising an infant, squealing so hard i lose my voice, watching him experience awe as i in turn, experience awe, too.

my family doesn’t have a lot of elders who are alive. both sets of grandparents died either before i was born, or when i was a kid. my mom has one sister who is younger than her, and an older brother who died a couple years ago. all of my dad’s siblings died except for his younger brother. him and his family live in lebanon and dubai, and we’ve spoken mostly through facebook messenger and whatsapp. we have some other family related to my dad that i only connected with through whatsapp after he died, but i’m not sure if we’ll ever have the chance to meet.

i’m deeply aware of the fact that my siblings and i have almost no examples of people who have lived longer than us left. all the older people i know in my life are people who are a little older than me, max 15-20 years. i don’t have close friendships with any of these people. i yearn for closeness with blood relatives who have lived twice as long as me, knowing very well that it is not something i will ever have. there’s something profound about seeing my bloodline terminate so early, knowing that it is the responsibility of me and my siblings to carry on. it’s no wonder that i think about death so much — nobody with our dna has shown me that the odds are in our favor.

and when you don’t have a lot of older people related to you by blood to look up to or even just look to without admiring, things get murky. you start to wonder, will your life terminate early, too? you make people uncomfortable by talking about death at inappropriate times, mentioning things like, “well I could be dead tomorrow” maybe a little too often for people’s liking. and it makes you question why you’re doing all this work to break the cycles of intergenerational trauma that live in your dna, and how much control you even have at the end of the day around what gets passed down. and it also makes you wonder, does doing that work mean that you’ll get to live a little longer? life is unpredictable and cruel and beautiful. it’s really hard to know what the story will be.

i think part of what makes breaking the cycles of generational trauma so painful is that i’ll have to continue to live without certain experiences that i’d hope doing the work of breaking the cycles, would afford me. i won’t get to see my dad experience the joys of watching an infant grow to become a grown up all over again — whether he was still alive, or not. at the end of his life, he was the most isolated i’d ever seen him. i won’t get to see multiple generations in one room, to observe their mannerisms and similar physical attributes. it feels like martyrdom, especially when the future always feels uncertain. i hope i live long enough to pass on the positive things i’ve worked on in myself, so that future iterations of my family may experience a life that was different than the one i experienced for such a long time.

and i have to be imaginative in positive ways, too. maybe the work that i’ve done manifests in such a way that when my son is older, around my age, he gets to have a mom who can still hang out with him and his friends. and maybe all my friends get to be his friends too, so maybe he gets used to being around a lot of people who are 30-40 years older than him. maybe the decade of therapy between my 20s and 30s pays off so that i can be the parent i never really had, in unimaginable ways.

i actually “graduated” from therapy just this week, and if i can take anything away from all that time working and self reflecting, it’s that my narratives around victimhood and abuse have really shifted. i don’t see my parents or any of the people who have caused me harm, as bad people… despite whatever pain and suffering they may have put me through. i see them as people who were suffering themselves and doing their best. and no that doesn’t mean that i’m going to be enlightened through every negative experience in my life, or that i’ll never have disdain for someone who causes me harm again. i guess that’s where the work will continue to have to happen, with or without therapy.