It wasn’t my father
who frightened me.
It was the rage
that lived in him
before I ever did.
It wasn’t my grandfather,
or his father,
or the men whose names
are now just stories.
They weren’t monsters.
The rage was.
It moved through them
like weather—
a season nobody questioned
because everyone learned
how to dress for it.
My father didn’t wake up
wanting to harden.
He learned early
that anger kept him upright,
that silence was safer than softness,
that love had rules
and penalties
and consequences.
His father learned it
in his body—
from work,
from war,
from God-as-command
instead of God-as-companion.
And his father—
I knew him.
By the time I met him
the rage had nowhere left to go.
His hands were gentler,
clumsier,
sometimes crossing lines
no one had taught him
how to see.
The same force
that once raised its voice
now leaked out sideways—
as familiarity,
as entitlement mistaken for affection.
Not because he was evil.
Because rage doesn’t disappear.
It adapts.
It ages.
It learns new languages
when the old ones stop working.
The men aged.
The rage didn’t.
That is one inheritance.
But it would be dishonest
to say that is all I was given.
Something else lived
alongside it—
quieter,
steadier,
refusing extinction.
It came mostly
through the women.
My mother—
sixteen,
a child raising a child,
growing up beside me
instead of ahead of me.
She didn’t have the luxury
of becoming hard.
Love wasn’t an idea to her—
it was food,
rides,
showing up anyway
when there was nothing left.
She taught me
that responsibility
and tenderness
can share the same body.
Her mother—
who loved without conditions
she never had words for.
A woman whose mind
was always a little too loud,
whose grief stacked and stacked
until it tipped into something
no one knew how to hold.
She loved our neighbors
like blood.
Our block like family.
Community not as concept
but as survival.
By the time Alzheimer’s arrived
she was already being taken
piece by piece.
We buried her
long after we lost her—
but her way of loving
never left the house.
Then there was Annie.
Our cheerleader.
Our witness.
The one who saw us
and said yes
to all of it.
She loved with her whole chest.
Showed up like instinct.
Made room without asking
who deserved it.
And then she was gone.
Sudden.
Unfair.
Another lesson:
love does not guarantee time—
only impact.
My sister—
who became a mother young
and decided
the cycle would not win.
She learned in real time
how to be the parent
we needed but didn’t have.
Sometimes mother.
Sometimes father.
Always trying.
Trying counts.
Trying is everything.
And the aunties,
the grandmas,
the cousins—
women who taught me
that gentleness is not weakness,
that care is a skill,
that patience can be practiced
even when it wasn’t modeled.
They taught me
how to soften
without disappearing.
So when I speak of inheritance,
I speak of both.
A rage that taught men
how to survive
in a world that never taught them
how to feel.
And a love that survived anyway—
despite the rage,
despite the losses,
despite everything that tried
to harden it.
And then there was
the Father.
The capital-F one
they were handed
to make sense of it all.
A God of order.
Of testing.
Of obedience.
A God who looked a lot like rage
wearing a robe.
No wonder it stuck.
So I don’t indict my fathers.
I name the thing
that moved through them.
And I don’t romanticize the women.
I honor the labor
of gentleness they carried
when someone had to.
I grieve the boys
my fathers never got to be.
And I thank the women
who showed me another way
without ever calling it one.
I stop it here—
not with blame,
but with attention.
By noticing when rage enters my body.
By refusing to confuse control with care.
By choosing tenderness
even when my nervous system
expects a storm.
The men were not the monster.
The rage was.
And love—
quiet, stubborn, inherited love—
is how it ends.
Not by being fought.
But by being seen,
held,
and finally—
not passed on.
#MightyPoets #MentalHealth #Addiction #Trauma #PTSD #Depression #Grief
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