The Burden of Stoicism
How Intergenerational Trauma Shaped My Life
Her name was Leucadia and she moved here from Poland in the late 40s, following WWII. Her entire family had been killed by Germans. She arrived with her husband and small child. She would go on to have a daughter shortly after arriving in Canada. That daughter was my mother.
My grandparents’ relationship was not good. My grandfather was an emotionally abusive alcoholic. Many nights, he would get drunk and call my grandmother every name in the book. My poor mother did the best she could to ignore the screaming and study for school. (“At least he never beat her,” my mother would tell me. “His brothers, who stayed in the old country, would beat their wives.”)
From time to time, my grandmother told my Mom how badly she wanted to leave, but how could she? She wasn’t going to leave her children, and besides, she barely spoke English.
My grandmother died at age 74. Just a few years older than than my Mom is right now. She was crushed in spirit and body by the toxic relationship she had been enduring all these years, isolated from everyone but those children she vowed never to abandon.
My grandmother was in her mid 30s when she moved here. Who knows how she felt at the time. Was she sad to leave her home country, or just relieved to escape all the ghosts of a past that would never return?
When I think about my own life, and my Mom’s life, it’s clear that there is a pattern we have all followed.
My Mom also moved, at her husband’s behest, to an isolated farm far from the career and social life she had painstakingly built in her 30s. He is not an alcoholic, but his abuse manifests in other, more subtle and insidious ways.
I find myself in an eerily similar situation today. I’m in my late 30s, having left a career making opportunity when my husband was offered a job closer to his family. I was told to either move, or accept that our marriage was over. The thought of raising my one-year-old child alone, in one of Canada’s most expensive cities, seemed absolutely unfathomable, so I agreed.
That’s how I ended up in a city thousands of miles away from everything I ever knew for the first 3 decades of my life, without a friend or relative of my own.
My husband is a good man… when he’s sober. When he drinks, which is every night, there is a chance the emotionally abusive alcoholic will emerge. I have learned to bury my feelings deep, deep inside, lest something I say trigger him. Even so, fights erupt a couple times a month and he says things I never imagined I would hear from my spouse, let alone accept.
When I cry, alone in the bathroom or in the car, I wrack my brain for a place to go. How can I get out of this? I can see no answer.
Only lately have I noticed the pattern. How my maternal grandmother and my own mother have all been through the exact same thing. Isolation and mistreatment. That isolation is so easily justified by the normal course of living — after all, it’s reasonable for your husband to want to be near his family, right? But no one has truly considered the cost to us women. We are sacrifices to the family, trapped forever.
We learn what is normal from our parents. Even though I don’t consciously believe it, my upbringing has taught me that it’s okay for the woman to sacrifice her entire being at the behest of the man. Maybe if my own mother’s life had been different, I would have overcome my fear of being a single mother and refused to move.
We have been here for almost three years now. I have been slowly exploring career options and trying to figure out how to make enough money to give my child a good life, on my own. But my plans to build my own career and escape have been massively thwarted by the pandemic.
And in the meantime, life isn’t so bad. The good days are good, and on the bad days I seem to have an endless capacity for absorbing the casual cruelty and abuse of my spouse.
Therein lies the problem. In some ways, my strength is my curse. Maybe if I could reach a true breaking point, I could feel justified in leaving.
But like my mother and grandmother before me, we can take it. I wish I wasn’t so strong. Or rather, I wish I was strong enough to face my fear, instead of just endlessly absorbs the verbal blows to my psyche.
I never knew my maternal grandmother. I don’t know what she would say to me today. I don’t know how she truly felt about her situation. I wonder what brought her joy, and how she got through the day to day.
But if her suffering was truly the way my Mom describes, I owe it to her and to future women of my line to change the pattern. Throw down the yoke and break the curse of stoicism. Just because you can bear the weight of years of emotional abuse doesn’t mean you should. And somehow overcome the fear of financial hardship and loneliness and see what’s on the other side.
If you find yourself in an abusive situation, there is support. Call 911 if you are in danger or find resources at https://www.thehotline.org/ in the US. There are also support systems in your local area that can be found on Google. You are not alone.
