The Space Between Us

The sound of my daughter's laughter echoes through our home, but I find myself flinching. My mother has been staying with us for three months now, and I feel myself shrinking, becoming smaller with each passing day. At two, Toddler-Bear doesn't understand why Mama's hugs have grown stiff, why my voice catches when I try to sing her lullabies. She doesn't know that behind my tired eyes, I'm fighting battles that began long before she was born.

"The most damaging thing about trauma," Dr. Gabor Maté writes, "is not the trauma itself, but the way we hold it in our bodies." I watch my mother move through our house like a ghost, carrying the weight of the life of an orphan and subsequently a refugee, compelled to a life of encumbrances. She never talks about the Ugandan exodus. She claims she doesn’t remember it. I don’t blame her. The 90-day deadline. The stripped citizenship. The midnight escape. Instead, she measures her life in lists of duties fulfilled and obligations met.

Last week, Toddler-Bear fell and reached for her Nani (grandmother) instead of me. My mother helped her up efficiently, dusted her off, and walked away. No kisses, no cuddles, no comfort. I watched my daughter's face crumple in confusion, and suddenly I was seven again, learning that love doesn't always look like what we need it to be. Dr. Bruce Perry notes that "the most powerful buffer in times of stress and distress is our social connections." But what happens when those connections are severed by historical trauma, when the very people meant to shelter us carry their own unhealed wounds?

The hardest part is watching history repeat itself in my own parenting. Yesterday, Toddler-Bear had a tantrum, and I felt my mother's emotional distance seep into my bones. I heard myself say, "just ignore it" – the exact words that built walls between my mother and me. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk reminds us that "the body keeps the score," and in that moment, I felt the scoreboard of generational trauma light up with terrible clarity.

My mother's presence in our home acts like a catalyst, activating old patterns I thought I'd outgrown. I find myself becoming emotionally unavailable, mimicking the very behaviours that wounded me as a child. The guilt is overwhelming. Toddler-Bear doesn't deserve to inherit this legacy of distance, this emotional armour forged in the fires of displacement and survival.

"In detaching from our emotions, we detach from our children," says Dr. Peter Levine. I see it happening, this terrible dance of disconnection. When my mother is here, I catch myself avoiding Toddler-Bear's eyes, rushing through bedtime stories, treating her natural needs for attachment as inconveniences – just as my mother once did with me. The realisation brings waves of shame and anger that I struggle to contain.

Dr. Rachel Yehuda's research on epigenetic transmission of trauma helps me understand why my mother's presence triggers such profound regression in my parenting. It's not just learned behaviour; it's cellular memory, passed down through generations. The hypervigilance that kept my mother alive in her childhood becomes my emotional rigidity with Toddler-Bear. Her survival mechanisms become my parenting failures.

I find myself raging (not-so) silently at my mother for things she cannot help, for wounds she never chose. It doesn’t help. Then I redirect that anger at Toddler-Bear's innocent demands for attention, for connection, for the very things I was denied. Dr. Maté would call this "the compensation for what's missing" – how unmet needs transform into unconscious resentment.

The truth I have struggled to accept is that my mother may never be able to give me what I needed as a child, what I still desperately need as an adult. Her emotional absence isn't a choice but a survival mechanism, borne in the chaos of being orphaned in Uganda and shipped off to India, and is reinforced by her continued lack of agency. Understanding this intellectually doesn't make it hurt less when she treats my daughter with the same distant duty she showed me.

Dr. Bruce Perry's work on attachment and resilience has become my guidebook. "The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely they will be to recover from trauma and thrive," he writes. So I focus on building a village for Toddler-Bear – not the traditional extended family we lack, but a chosen family of friends, mentors, and community members who understand our unique story.

I'm working with a somatic healer to attempt to process my anger before it poisons my relationship with Toddler-Bear. We talk about what Dr. Daniel Siegel calls "making sense of your story" – how understanding our parents' trauma can help break its hold over our own parenting. But some days, when my mother's presence fills our home with its familiar coldness, all my therapeutic insights crumble.

Yet in my better moments, I can see how Toddler-Bear might be our generation's chance for healing. When I catch myself withdrawing, I force myself to move closer. When I feel the old patterns rising, I name them out loud: "Mama's feeling scared right now, but that's not your fault. I love you, and I'm here." It's messy and imperfect, but it's different from the silence that raised me.

In those moments, I realise that while we cannot change the past, we can change how its story lives in us. As Dr. Maté says, "Trauma is not destiny." We can choose to see our complex heritage not just as a source of pain, but as a wellspring of strength.

Maybe this is what breaking generational trauma looks like – not a clean break, but a series of daily choices to do things differently, even when our bodies remember differently, even when our mothers remind us of all we couldn't change. As Dr. Maté says, "The wound is not the past. The wound is the present disconnection."

I'm particularly moved by Dr. Rachel Yehuda's research on how trauma can alter gene expression across generations. It helps me understand why certain fears feel so ancient, so much bigger than my personal experience. But it also gives me hope - if trauma can be inherited, surely resilience can be too.

So, I keep trying, even on days when my mother's presence makes me want to disappear, even when Toddler-Bear's needs trigger all my unmet longings. I keep choosing connection over distance, emotion over duty, love over fear. Because somewhere between the ghost of tradition and the promise of tomorrow, there's a little girl who needs me to be more than my inheritance.

This is perhaps the most important lesson I've learned as a mother: that our role is not to shield our children from the reality of their inheritance, but to show them how to carry it with grace, how to honour the pain while not being defined by it, and how to find beauty in the complex tapestry of their existence.