I woke up this morning thinking about a wall.
More specifically, the complete absence of one.
In my dream, I was trying to put away a gun for my husband when my daughter touched it. It discharged and somehow blew an entire wall off our house.
Dream physics. Don’t ask.
A storm was coming.
And while everyone else seemed to have the luxury of reacting to the fact that an entire wall of our house had just disappeared, my brain immediately went into problem-solving mode.
We have to fix the wall.
The storm is coming.
I tried to reach my husband.
I couldn’t.
So I called someone else for help.
That created another problem.
Then the dream moved on, as dreams do, except the feeling didn’t.
Different places. Different people. Different problems.
At one point, I watched something I had once begged people to support receive more than $17,000 almost effortlessly after I was no longer part of it.
Why $17,000?
No idea. Apparently my subconscious keeps financial records.
But the feeling stayed exactly the same.
Something was wrong.
Someone needed something.
Relationships felt strained.
Help wasn’t where I expected it to be.
And I was running around trying to hold everything together.
Then I woke up.
And I couldn’t shake it.
Normally, I can wake up from a ridiculous dream, tell Cory about whatever nonsense my subconscious produced, laugh about it, and move on with my day.
This wasn’t one of them.
I had to sit with it. Pick it apart. Replay pieces of it. Figure out why my sleeping brain had apparently decided to spend the night putting me through an emotional obstacle course.
And I kept coming back to the wall.
A storm was coming, and there was nothing separating everything inside my home from everything outside of it.
My instinct was simple:
Protect the house.
Somewhere in the middle of thinking about that wall, my mind wandered somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
Generational curses.
I grew up in a faith tradition where that phrase wasn’t particularly unusual.
Things passed through bloodlines. Spiritual strongholds. Patterns that seem to repeat themselves from one generation to another.
I also grew up in a family where I didn’t need theology to recognize that generations can hand things to each other.
My dad used to swear that my maternal grandmother practiced witchcraft and had a voodoo doll of him.
As a child, I thought he was bat-crap crazy.
As an adult, I’m still not prepared to confirm the existence of the voodoo doll.
But I do understand now that there was a lot happening in my family that I couldn’t understand as a child.
There are stories there that aren’t mine alone to tell. And there are others that are mine, but I’m not ready to tell them yet.
What I can say is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become increasingly aware of the things that seem to travel through families.
Divorce.
Manipulation.
Broken relationships.
Mothers who were wounded by their mothers and then struggled to mother their own children.
Silence.
Hurt.
Survival.
Some of it I understand.
Some of it I probably never will.
But I can see the pattern.
And lately, I’ve found myself wondering what it actually means to break a generational cycle.
Because saying It ends with me sounds powerful.
Living it is considerably messier.
I’ve been thinking about accountability lately.
About how easy it is to recognize the ways we were wounded and how much harder it can be to recognize the ways those wounds shaped us.
I know things about the generations before me that make me angry.
But if all I ever do is look backward, I could completely miss what I’m carrying forward.
I’m a mother now.
Which means I’m no longer only somebody’s daughter looking backward.
I’m somebody’s mother being looked at from the other direction.
And that changes the question.
Someday my children will have stories about me.
There will be moments I remember differently than they do.
There may even be things they remember that I don’t remember at all.
And when they tell me, I hope I have enough humility not to confuse my intentions with their experience.
I hope I can listen.
I hope I can examine myself.
I hope I can say:
Tell me.
Scripture has an interesting way of talking about generations.
In Ezekiel 18, God confronts a proverb being repeated in Israel:
“The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”
In other words, the proverb reflected the feeling that one generation makes the choices and the next generation lives with the taste of them.
I understand why that proverb existed.
Sometimes that’s exactly what family feels like.
We inherit consequences from decisions we never made. We learn patterns we never consciously chose. We carry wounds we didn’t create.
But God doesn’t leave the people there.
The rest of the chapter keeps returning to personal responsibility. We aren’t given permission to simply point backward forever.
What came before me matters.
But so does what I do next.
Maybe that’s what breaking a generational cycle actually looks like.
Not standing at the end of a long bloodline declaring:
It ends with me.
That’s powerful language.
But it’s also easy language.
The harder work is asking:
What reached me?
What did I learn without realizing I was learning it?
What survival mechanisms became personality traits?
What ways of communicating feel normal only because they’re familiar?
And then:
What am I handing down?
Maybe inheritance isn’t only something to fear.
Psalm 78 describes one generation intentionally telling the next about God so their children would know Him and eventually tell their children too.
That’s generational, too.
Faith can travel.
Wisdom can travel.
Repentance can travel.
Tenderness can travel.
The ability to say I was wrong can travel.
The willingness to listen can travel.
Maybe breaking a cycle isn’t only about deciding what stops with me.
Maybe it’s also deciding what starts with me.
Which brings me back to the wall.
Maybe the dream meant absolutely nothing.
Maybe it was just my brain throwing stress, relationships, responsibility, and a completely fictional $17,000 into a blender while I slept.
I don’t know.
But I know what I felt when I realized the wall was gone.
Protect the house.
I can’t change everything that reached me.
I can’t rewrite the generations that came before me.
And I can’t promise my children that I will somehow mother them without ever getting anything wrong.
But I can pay attention.
I can listen.
I can repent when I need to.
I can decide what deserves to keep traveling through this family and what doesn’t.
I am not the beginning of this story.
And I won’t be the end of it.
But this part?
This part is mine to steward.
Fiercely,
Jessica
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