The women in my family have years of trauma. I refuse to pass it down.

I watched my mom plan her mother’s funeral while I’m planning to become a mother myself. It’s making me think a lot about the wounds passed down from woman to woman in my family—and which ones I’m determined not to pass down myself.

My grandmother was a beautiful and petite woman, who worked as a nightclub singer and a model before she had children. It must have been hard being her daughter, always feeling pressure to be thin and glamorous like her. (Her obituary proudly listed her waist size!) She kept an immaculately clean home and sacrificed everything for her family. Those expectations were passed down to my mother and then to me, and I felt bad for never being able to meet them, until I decided that I could break that cycle.

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