My Daughter Will Not Be Raised by Ghosts

I come from women

who did not name their sadness.

They stirred it into stews—

ají amarillo clinging to their fingers—

let it simmer with garlic and guilt,

fed it to their children

without saying a word.

My mother swept floors

like she was punishing the dust.

She pressed silence into every shirt she ironed.

When I asked for comfort,

I got instruction.

When I cried,

I learned to do it quietly,

behind doors that never closed all the way.

Still—I became a mother.

I thought I’d be haunted,

but when she was born,

the ghosts stepped back.

Not gone—

but quiet.

Watching.

They rise when I raise my voice.

When my tone catches

on something sharp and ancestral.

But I stop.

I kneel.

I apologize.

Something no one ever did for me.

My daughter will know

that love doesn’t arrive

wrapped in fear.

That she doesn’t have to shrink

to fit anyone’s comfort.

She will inherit my language,

but not the silence between words.

My skin tone,

but not the burn of being misunderstood.

My strength,

but not the armor I had to wear too young.

The cycle ends with me—

not in denial,

but in the deliberate choosing

to raise her in truth,

not tradition.

I carry the past,

but I do not pass it down.

My ruins are buried beneath us,

but her roots grow wild and clean.

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Author's Note

This poem is a reckoning—with memory, with motherhood, with the silence I was raised in. I grew up surrounded by strong women who held in their pain, who survived without naming what hurt them. But survival isn’t the same as healing. When I became a mother, I realized I had a choice: to repeat the cycle or to rupture it.

This piece is for the mothers who did the best they could with what they had, and for the daughters who are now choosing to mother differently. It’s about ghosts—those inherited behaviors, unspoken rules, and generational shadows—and what it means to face them with love instead of fear.

The cycle doesn’t end by forgetting. It ends by remembering and still choosing a new path.