Are You There, God?
It's Me, girl ben Elohim...
I have never had children, yet I have spent my entire life as a mother. To myself. To my siblings. Sometimes to my parents. Sometimes to my friends. My cousins.
If you are the eldest daughter in a family shaped by historical weight, you know exactly what I mean. You are born into the role of the parentified child, the emotional anchor, the shock absorber for the adults around you. You learn to carry the grief, the logistics, and the spiritual maintenance of your bloodline before you even learn who you are outside of them.
But to understand why this dynamic exists in my family, you have to look backward. You have to look at the dirt.
The bones. The blood. The Bibles.
My ancestors are native to this land.
And no, I will not stop reminding people.
Because much has been erased for entirely too long.
We carry the lineage of the Pekowi (Turtle Clan) Shawnee. And of local indigenous legends like Tecumpease, Tecumseh, and Tenskwatawa.
When the forced removals began. As in, when the government demanded that our people gather up what they could carry and walk... On foot... All the way to Oklahoma....
My ancestors made a radical, dangerous choice.
They refused to walk.
They refused to be told what to do. How to live. How to exist on their own land they had tended for centuries.
Instead, they stayed.
They hid in plain sight in the foothills of Appalachia.
They assimilated with the men and the women from the boats just enough to survive,
each generations children becoming lighter, remembering less, while burying their true names and traditions beneath the soil,
passing down their resilience through whispers and closed door,
"family only" loyalty.
When your entire existence depends on remaining hidden and sticking together to avoid eradication, family ceases to be just a support system.
It becomes a fortress.
That deep, visceral need for pure survival evolved into what modern psychology calls codependency. We cling to each other because, for hundreds of years, trusting the outside world meant death. That survival tactic still lives in my family today. It is why I was born with my hands already full of other people's burdens while being expected to pick up more pieces that I didn't break.
And with that deep ancestral loyalty comes the generational trauma. The "curse."
I didn't fully comprehend the magnitude of this curse until recently, through a collision with my own bloodline. I briefly dated my 4th cousin—a bizarre, chaotic crossing of paths that felt less like a romance and more like a spiritual reckoning or a netflix special for the ancestors.
During that time, he brought up our family's "curse" completely unprompted. He saw it. He named it without me having to explain it.
For once, I wasn't the one bringing it up with someone telling me to "pipe down, would ya??"
He brought it up. He already knew. I didn't have to explain it or sound like a crazy person for once. And I didn't treat him like a crazy person.
When someone from your own bloodline holds up a mirror to the generational wound, it forces you to remember it.
But his presence in my life ultimately taught me the most vital lesson of my spiritual journey, I will never be able to heal this lineage by allowing it to consume me.
For years, I thought honoring my family meant fixing them.
Rescuing them.
Mothering them.
But I have learned that the truest way to honor my mother and my father, and the ancestors who hid in these hills, is by using my independence they helped nurture in me to choose myself over and over again.
Because yes, its cliche, but you cannot help someone if you do not know how to help yourself.
How are you supposed to hold someone up if you are falling down and looking for a stable place to brace yourself?
We think trauma is just a psychological event, but it is not. The bones and the blood remember. The spirit remembers. It holds the memories, the terrors, and the sacrifices that the human mind simply cannot handle or keep.
My family survived by hiding who they were. My job in this lifetime is the exact opposite. My divine assignment is to stand in the light, to uncover all the buried memories, to name the curse, and to finally release it. I am no longer just the parentified daughter keeping everyone safe in the dark; I am the architect of my own spiritual freedom.
God, do what Thou wilt with me.