Here Be Dragons: Treading the Deep Waters of Motherhood, Mean Girls, and Generational Trauma

It’s often the wounds caused by our families that cut the deepest and leave the most apparent scars, but God can absolutely heal those wounds. Your family history doesn’t have to be your future. Ask Him to stop the dysfunction and create a new legacy, and then watch what He does. He is the road map that will guide you into a new land of promise and freedom if you trust Him enough to walk that path in obedience.

There is something incredibly healing about getting to be the thing in someone else's life that you wished you'd had in your own.

It’s always painful to heal all the things that lie beneath the surface because it means you have to acknowledge the root cause of the trauma. We are masters at making things look better on the surface, but when we decide we really want to heal the deepest parts of ourselves, a lot more work and a lot more pain are required as we break away from people and things that once felt comfortable to us.

People are going to screw up a good thing approximately 100 percent of the time in our delightful tendency to believe we can make anything better, so the church placed in our hands is going to look a little messy. We’ve gotten it very wrong at times and will continue to do so. But Jesus is good and true and bigger than any of our minds will ever be able to fathom, and I think He’s more than okay with the doubts we wrestle with until we come to that realization.

Our kids become who we allow them to be. If we choose to ignore our child’s bad behavior or justify it as kids being kids, we’re condoning every bit of it.

if I’m always trying to be Caroline’s savior, then I’m not letting her lean into the fact that He is her Savior.

We bought into the lie that we need to focus on building up self-esteem in girls, which causes them to focus inward, as opposed to self-respect, which shows them that the way to find joy and contentment is to believe in something bigger than themselves.

I wish I would've learned earlier on to be myself and express what mattered to me and how I actually felt about things.

In his book Those Who Remain, G. Michael Hopf said, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”[

As I mothered Caroline, I grieved for the younger version of myself who missed out on having a mom who was able to love me in a healthy, supportive way. However, the key to letting God completely heal you is to fully grieve as you surrender the hope you had that things could be different and trust that He will redeem what you've been through in ways you can't see at the time. He will truly give us beauty for the ashes of things in our lives that have burned down. I knew that everything my mom had done and said had been out of her own woundedness and brokenness, and I could look at her life and see the choices and events that had caused much of that. It makes me sad for her. Could she have been capable of more? Absolutely. Did she choose that path? No.

...But then I decided to dive a little deeper and said, "I wish I would've learned earlier on to be myself and express what mattered to me and how I actually felt about things." I didn't really know how to do that. I'd grown up hiding my feelings because there wasn't room for them while I lived with Suzanne [mom]. My goal at all times was to try and keep everything as calm as possible. I lived in a constant state of "Don't anger it." ...I hadn't meant to bring those things into my marriage, but the people pleaser in me had been forged by my first eighteen years. It turns out that wasn't just something that living on my own or being married could fix. It took me many years to figure it out that it was okay to voice discontentment or disagree with someone I loved.

My mom was my first mean girl.

You have to leave behind what you were born into to become who God meant you to be.”[

However, the key to letting God completely heal you is to fully grieve as you surrender the hope you had that things could be different and trust that He will redeem what you’ve been through in ways you can’t see at the time. He will truly give us beauty for the ashes of things in our lives that have burned down.

Proverbs 14:30 says, “A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones,

sometimes the best prayer we can pray as parents is “God, this one is Yours. You are the author of her story, and I trust You to write an amazing one.

Whatever we value or pay the most attention to in our children’s lives are the things we’re telling them are the most important. So if they see us focus on social standing, athletic achievements, academic prowess, and material things more than on kindness, contentment, humility, and respect, we’re failing them as humans.