Modulating Tones

After revisiting a video that had been made years ago of a friend of mine who is now deceased, I found myself reflecting on both her testimony and my own life. She shared that all of her children had become drug addicts, which she connected to her parenting as an alcoholic and to the abuse she suffered from her own mother. I also thought about other children’s stories I had heard—stories of adult children who had been deeply affected by parents who were not whole and who functioned in dysfunction. Altogether, it made me think even more deeply about why I chose not to have children. For personal reasons, and because of choices I made, I decided a long time ago that motherhood was not for me. I simply had too many issues. Much of that was tied to insecurities I believed were rooted in traumatic events from my childhood. I was also stuck in a cycle of whining about those events, blaming my father’s aloofness and the fights between my parents. I turned to alcohol and other mind-altering s...