The Letter

How discovering an old letter opened old wounds and affirmed my own parenting choices

It’s January 4, 2017, just three days after my Granny passed away due to health complications, and I find myself sitting in her old, creaky wicker dining chair at her “suppa” table. I am solemnly leafing through my Granny’s “cookbook,” a three-ring binder that holds mismatched papers with her “old-school” cursive handwriting, and I am furiously taking pictures with my phone to capture my favorite recipes, like her Christmas-time nut pound cake. I notice that the last step of all her recipes is “recite Psalms 23,” a reflection of her devotion and faith. 

Her cooking was a love letter to us all: her children and grandchildren. With her recipes in my possession, I hope to continue to share her “love letter” with the ones that I loved the most: my family and friends. And I think about how one day I would share her recipes with my own children. 

I smile at the idea, and a tear streams down my face because I know that my kids will never meet her, that they will never feel the warmth of her embrace that always felt like a homecoming of some kind, or that they would never become completely drenched in her musky scent after said-hug.

Up until her passing, during my visits to the home that her father built, I’d often find her deep in prayer in the very chair that I am sitting in. As I eavesdropped as a child, I noted that her prayers always began with pleas for guidance and strength for herself and for an extensive list of family members and close friends, and her prayers always ended with a long list of gratitude, starting with the roof over her head, the food and drink at her table, and her very own breath.

She was 68 when she passed.

My sweet Granny sitting in “the chair”

As I continue to flip through the tattered-and-torn pages, I discover a letter that my mother had written to my Granny. The letter is dated January 21, 1989, and is handwritten in my mom’s cursive on letterhead from the Hyatt Regency at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. 

It reads:

“Dear Mom,

I sure do miss y’all. I wish we had more of a chance to see each other more often. But I understand that you have to work and the car and all. I also miss you having a phone. I’m always calling to see if it is working again.

How [are my sisters]? Maybe sometime y’all can all come down and stay a few days. We stay so busy all the time. We just got back from Hilton Head at the Hyatt Regency. That was fun. It was rich and sophisticated. I kinda wished we had a babysitter, but it worked out fine. 

Katrina misses all of you. She’s growing so much. But we’re getting to that place where we have to discipline her more. It just seems like she’s never going to learn to be obedient. I guess she’s just going through those terrible twos. I just hate to spank her. It hurts my feelings too bad.” 

My body freezes in fight-or-flight response, remembering the trauma of my childhood that generally began or ended with a spanking of me or one of my siblings.

“But I know that if we don’t start now, then it’ll be harder later. And I do want her to be a good child, and I want to raise her the best that I can, and not just let little things slide by. She will be an obedient child. I’m determined on that.

Well, anyways, I can’t wait to see y’all. I better go for now, but call me sometime O.K.?”

My mother’s letter

As I read the letter, my body becomes hot with anger. “I just hate to spank her,” I repeat back to myself. I think about how I wouldn’t have turned two-years-old for another four months. I was barely two. Mom was 19 at the time of the letter.

I, a 30-year-old woman who lived in New York City and thought she knew the world and understood injustice as a public school teacher, sit stupefied and contemplate my own mother’s words with a grimace. 

My anger greets sadness, and I begin to shed both loud, hot tears and quiet, cool ones, intermittently, in the modest kitchen where many holidays and birthdays were celebrated and also where our family gathered to grieve the losses of our nearest and dearest. Just two years prior, we had mourned the sudden and tragic loss of my little brother, Preston, in this very space. He killed himself at the age of 14.

Stunned by the letter, my body is an iceberg and in its icy walls, every spanking, every beating, every raised voice is frozen and recorded in time like the ancient cave paintings of Lascaux in France. I’m incandescent. And, at the same time, I’m crestfallen because of the shoddy hand my mother was dealt in life: an unstable childhood, an unhealthy marriage, and an unprepared motherhood. 

As I re-read this letter now as a 36-year-old mother of two daughters, sadness welcomes compassion.

The days are trying in motherhood. I should know as a stay-at-home mom. I don’t think I ever fully understood the phrase “like watching paint dry” until I became a SAHM. Yes, there are moments of unbridled joy and enormous gratitude, but there are a lot of logged hours with very little “adult” conversation, very little “me-time,” and very little cognitive exercise.

I wince just thinking about the idea of spanking my girls. And then I wince thinking about my own limitations and how I also yell at my children in moments of high stress in the midst of their expression of big emotion, about how I also see the fear in their eyes when I raise my voice, about how my oldest tells me “to never yell like that again because it makes me very sad, Mom.”

In their eyes, I see the eyes of little Katrina, too, and I feel a new layer of shame form on top of the old one that was just being established whenever I was their ages: two and four. In their eyes, I see their sadness in the wake of my distress, and I see little Katrina’s sadness—the same sadness that I feel right now reading my own mother’s words to my grandmother.

Why did my mom so firmly believe that her method of discipline was the right way–the only way? 

My mom was also raised by a young mother, who was married at the age of 15 and grew up in the deep South, right in the buckle of the Bible belt. My mother, married at 16, was passed the torch of knowledge from her mother and the mothers before her—the torch that she used to guide her through the darkness that was parenting.

In this context, it’s no surprise that the advice given to new parents for disciplining a “strong-willed child” was the oft-repeated Bible verse, Proverbs 23:13-14, which states, “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod you will save his soul from Sheol.”

This sacred scripture was law for many Southern households of a certain generation, religion, and kind. The words, interpreted as literal instruction, permitted parents to use any type of “rod” to discipline. In my household, a “rod” could have been my mother’s hand, my dad’s leather belt, a “switch” or tree twig, a shoe, or even a flyswatter.

I have countless memories of my mother pulling our midnight blue Chevrolet Lumina over on the side of a dirt road or sometimes even a paved two-lane highway, yelling at one or two of the five of us to choose our “switch,” the flimsiest tree branch we could find, and to pull down our pants and underwear. As cars whizzed by, she would swat our white behinds until the skin shone red in the scorching sunlight.

I remember the sweat dripping from my nose as I hung my head low. I remember the burning of my palms on the hot metal as I held myself up on the side of the van. I remember hearing the cacophonous chirping of the cicadas all around. I remember feeling relief when it was over, as I re-entered the air-conditioned backseat. 

I also have countless memories of my dad asking my mom where his belt was and that he needed it to “teach us a lesson.” I can’t recall a single lesson learned, but I can remember the rage in his voice, the fury of his hand, and the sting of the whipping belt on my naked buttocks felt up until the age of 16.

***

We moved a lot whenever I was a kid: ten schools by the time I reached my last year of high school. I remember walking into my second school of second-grade and seeing the words “Knowledge is Power” on a giant, primary-colored banner over the main foyer. For whatever reason, these words were cauterized into memory and became a mantra that I recited to myself in both the quiet and peaceful solitude of nature in my many backyards and in the turbulent and discordant environment of my home in my bedroom closet.

I remember thinking that if knowledge was indeed power, then that was surely my way out. And so, I spent the rest of grade school reaching for perfection—reaching for power. 

I felt so imperfect, so powerless, for eighteen years under my parent’s roof. 

Me, circa 2005, on a visit to NYC during college

It was college that opened the doors to more knowledge, and I became hungry for more as I matured—not just for knowledge and power’s sake but also for understanding and healing’s sake.

Who was I? Was I forever broken?

***

Now, when one of my daughters is in the middle of an intense meltdown, I have to fight with everything in me to resist my body’s natural response: a fight-flight-freeze mode and also my parent’s typical responses to my own emotional dysregulation whenever I was a child.

Sometimes, I lose the battle.

As I’ve learned in my pursuit of knowledge, emotion regulation and working memory have been linked to genetics. In other words, my body’s response to my daughters’ big emotions is an automatic response passed down to me, based on my parents' genetic dispositions.

I have also learned through reading, listening to podcasts and audiobooks, and talking to my therapist that humans are miraculous human beings and can alter their own gene function. (If you’re unfamiliar, this is called epigenetics.) 

The science is rather astonishing, frankly. It gives me motivation. It offers me hope. 

I am not my mother or my father; I am a completely different human being. 

I am me; I am not them.

And so, with this new knowledge, I am empowered. I do what only can be done after losing the fight to my own emotional dysregulation: I repair with my girls.

My process looks a bit like this these days:

1. I validate their fear or sadness caused by my words and actions.

2. I tell them that I made a mistake and that I need to find healthier ways of expressing my emotions.

3. We brainstorm a list together, so that they can reference it, too, when they have their own big feelings.

4. I kiss them on their soft, round cheeks, and I hold them tight and close my eyes and focus on the beating of their hearts and the warmth of their bodies—two physical confirmations that these two miracles who came from my body are real and are human, like me. I whisper in their tiny ears with the utmost sincerity, “I’m sorry.”

Side note: Somatic therapy has also been pivotal in my quest for understanding and healing, and I am so grateful for the knowledge and power it has given me. I encourage you, dear Reader, to investigate if you’re looking for a way to manage your own emotional dysregulation. 

***

My Granny’s house burned down on April 8, 2023, due to an electrical wiring malfunction. I can’t help but think about how my grandmother had kept my mother’s letter hidden in plain sight in her cookbook for all those years. I can’t help but think about the fact that I could have very well never found the letter, or that it could have been lost along with so many other sentimental objects in the fire. I can’t help but think about my mother’s longing to hear from her own mother, seeking her love and approval of her parenting choices.

I hope that one day when my daughters become mothers that they too will write to me—that they too will long to hear from their mother and seek her advice. And, I hope that they will remember to find their “calm” in the midst of a storm created by a tiny human who is still learning, still developing, still discovering the full spectrum of what it is to be human. Above all, I hope that their children will also seek to understand and to heal rather than to simply pursue knowledge for the sake of power.