We teach a child to be quiet.
Not with cruelty. With love.
We say: not now, not so loud, careful, hush —
and every time, we mean it kindly.
We are protecting the vase, the neighbors, the evening, the nerves.
We are protecting the child, we think.
And the child learns.
Not the words. The lesson under the words.
That to be loved is to be smaller.
That the good ones are the quiet ones.
That everything alive in her —
the noise, the want, the reaching —
is something to fold up and put away
where it won’t disturb.
She learns it so early
she will not remember learning it.
It will feel like her own nature.
It will feel like virtue.
And she believes us.
Of course she believes us.
Who else would she believe —
we are her whole world, her first and surest protectors.
If the ones meant to keep her safe
say the reaching is too much,
then the reaching is too much.
The most trusting ones learn it deepest.
The gentlest, the most obedient —
they believe us completely,
because we are the ones who were supposed to keep them safe.
I know this from the floor.
Both of them at once — my mother and my father,
turned the same way, the same words:
you mustn’t, you mustn’t do that.
Two grown voices joined into one,
and the one was against me.
When the whole of your world stands together
and the together is aimed at you,
there is nowhere to take your side.
You don’t argue. You fold.
She grows.
And somewhere along the way
the lesson stops needing a teacher.
She carries it herself now.
When she is afraid, she goes quiet.
When she most needs to be seen, she hides.
Someone says stop —
and she stops.
Not for a moment. For hours. For years.
She dims her own light
so no one has to ask her to.
And we admire it.
We call it humility. We call it grace.
We almost never call it what it is:
a small voice that was taught
the world prefers it folded.
Then the quiet child grows up
and stands over a child of her own.
The chaos comes — the noise, the mess,
the small body that wants everything at once —
and something rises in her,
fast, before thought,
and out comes the same word.
Hush. Not now. Quiet.
She doesn’t choose it.
It chooses her.
It was waiting in her all along,
patient as an inheritance,
for its turn to be spoken again.
This is how it travels.
Not through cruelty.
Through tenderness, hand to hand,
each generation certain it is only keeping the peace.
No one ever wanted to make the next one smaller.
The inheritance is not the trauma.
The inheritance is the gesture.
We pass down the dimmer switch,
still warm from our own mother’s hand.
Once my grandson started to tell me something.
And then he stopped.
Never mind, he said. It’s not important.
So small, and already he knew
how to fold his own words away
before they could be in the way.
And something turned over in me,
because I remembered.
How many times I had said it to my own children.
Not now. It’s not important.
I heard my own voice come back to me
through the mouth of a three-year-old.
And it wasn’t only my voice in those three words.
It was my mother’s. And her mother’s.
And hers.
A whole line of women, reaching back further than I can see,
each one taught the same thing before she could speak:
that what you feel does not matter.
That what you think does not matter.
That the small movement toward the world that rises in you —
does not matter.
He is three years old.
And already he is carrying all of them.
The whole inheritance, generations deep,
came up through him in a single small sentence
and laid itself at my feet.
It’s not important.
They said it to me. I said it to mine.
And now it had reached the youngest of us,
who had done nothing, wanted nothing,
except to tell me something —
and folded it away instead.
The switch I thought belonged to the generation before me —
it had been in my hands too.
I had passed it on already, without seeing it,
and here it was, sprouting in him.
This is the part that is hardest to bear.
Not that our parents did it to us.
That we have already done it —
quietly, lovingly, certain we were only keeping the peace —
to the ones who came after.
And here is the worst of it.
Sometimes I see it happening in front of me —
two grown ones, turned the same way against a small one,
you mustn’t, you mustn’t —
and everything in me knows that floor,
knows it from the inside, from my own childhood,
and wants to step in.
And I shrink.
I do not dare.
The old lesson holds me by the throat
in the very moment I most need to break it.
I, who can see the whole mechanism,
who could write all of this down —
I fold, exactly as I was folded,
and say nothing,
and carry it for years afterward:
why didn’t I speak, I saw, I knew.
Knowing is not the same as being able.
The body folds before the thought arrives.
I am the grandmother now.
The kettle is boiling in the kitchen.
It is shrieking, actually — that high whistle
that says come now, attend to me, this matters.
And in the next room
my grandson is drawing on the wall.
In red.
Great looping red lines, low down where his arm reaches,
across the clean paint, with his whole body,
the way you draw when no one has yet told you
that walls are not for this.
And I stand in the doorway.
And the old word rises in me too —
I feel it come, hush, stop, not the wall —
the inheritance reaching for my mouth,
warm, familiar, certain it is helping.
And I do not say it.
I let the kettle scream.
I let the wall be red.
I think, quietly, with something that is almost grief
and almost joy:
let it be. I will not stop him.
The wall can be repainted.
That is all.
That is the whole of it.
The wall can be repainted —
but the hour in which a child drew with his whole body,
unafraid, unfolded, loud and red and alive,
that hour cannot be painted back.
And then we grow up,
and we want to speak of this.
To carry it out into the open, finally, and name it.
But it comes out wrong every time.
It comes out as a complaint against our parents.
Or it comes out as rebellion.
Those are the only two shapes the language seems to offer,
and both of them are a kind of betrayal.
So there are things we try to bring to the surface
and cannot find the words for —
because any word we reach for
lands as ingratitude.
Or as a child’s old grievance.
This is the second silence.
The first one was don’t make noise, in childhood.
The second is the silence about that silence —
kept in adulthood, on purpose,
because to name it feels like striking the love
that was, also, completely real.
The inheritance protects itself this way.
It is made of love,
so any hand raised to point at it
looks like a hand raised against love.
And we lower the hand.
And we stay quiet.
Again.
That is why this needs a third shape.
Not complaint. Not rebellion.
Something that can hold the love and the lesson in the same breath
without setting them against each other.
Understand me.
This is not a story about a bad mother.
My mother loved me.
In everything she was warm, and I was her good girl, her beloved.
There was only one thing she ever asked.
Don’t make noise.
One sentence. The rest was love.
That is what makes it so hard to see.
It does not arrive as harm.
It arrives inside the embrace,
so gently you would never think to question it,
because everything around it is real love.
To unlearn is not to blame her.
It is not to rebel.
It is something much smaller and much harder.
It is to stand in the doorway,
feel the old word rise,
and simply — not pass it on.
To let the kettle scream.
To let the wall stay red.
To pause, one time, before the gesture completes itself,
and choose not to make the next one smaller.
That is all the freedom there is.
It is also all the freedom that is needed.
The wall can be repainted.
The child, once folded, takes a lifetime to open.
So let him draw.
Let him be loud.
Let the red go all the way to the ceiling if his arm can reach.
The kettle is still screaming.
Let it.
— Lintara
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Wise!
From you, that lands. You’ve stood on both sides of that wall.
Wow, my friend. I do understand this one. I grew up with the well-worn adage from the previous century, “Children should been seen and not heard.”
I’d no idea you were a grandmother. Just wanted to point out for this piece in translation, because the narrator is a woman, all the references in English to her should be “she” rather than “he”. Spanish is the same way. My husband always uses “he” without thinking about it 🙂
You found something real — and you found it through a wall of translation, which only makes it sharper.
I read everything in Google Translate. It flattens gender every single time — to me all English arrives sexless, and I honestly can’t see whether a line says he or she; the machine smooths it away before the text ever reaches my eyes. Even my own comments, when I’m plainly speaking to a woman, come back from the translator with the gender flipped. It’s a permanent fog between the two languages.
So it wasn’t carelessness. It was the blind spot of the machine standing between me and my own text. And you walked straight through that fog and heard the wrong gender ring under the line. That isn’t proofreading — that’s a poet’s ear, working in a language that isn’t even your own. Thank you, truly.
<3 hope you are welll!! I miss you on SS ~t
Tina — I miss you too. Not only you: all of you, the whole circle the ban scattered to the winds. You read me more closely than almost anyone, from the very start, back when it still had another name. And you found your way here on your own. That undoes me a little. Don’t go far — this is home now. ♥
The subtle power of this in not just the surface obviousness of the mechanism (which is in no way discounting it, which I know from the tears welling up during the ascertaining of its truth in reading) but the bigger unconscious and institutionalized mechanic that keeps the healing value of it’s truth minimized.
This is the propensity towards minimization.
The internalization of “never question the love your family has for you” may not even be a process, it may be completely hardwired.
John Bradshaw noted decades ago that the difference between the adult viability of a child Auschwitz survivor vs a child exposed to great mental and/or physical abuse at the hands of thir caretakers, is that no one ever told an Auschwitz child that they could not hate or hold their oppressors responsible for the harm being done AS IT WAS HAPPENING.
Very few children (particularly at the ages where the life long embedding of these external falsehoods masquerading as truths occur) possess the awareness that these things are artificial limits that if internalized will hamper them throughout their lives.
Few caregivers ever realize the formation of multigenerational impacts as they are passing them on, cementing these beliefs with ever increasing depths of shame and self doubt.
And if questioned about it, (and I garner this from my personal experience as well as the shared experiences of others so emboldened as to attempt it) is typically responses of:
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about”
“Why do you have to keep digging in the past”
“Nobody ever gives you a manual for child rearing”
“We did the best we could”
The latter of these is the most common response, but it ignores this truth – It wasn’t enough. Had it been so, all these adaptive behaviors that have crippled me for the majority of my life would not have been present in the first place.
This is not an attack, a judgement call, a referendum on their intents, or the vengeful result of a resentment, it is a statement of fact.
There is a catch 22 (of monumental proportions) of this, which is that by the time most adults are able to begin to comprehend these effects, they have already become parents themselves, and in the doing of that at some level either conscious or not, have begun to fortify their own denial of the process happening at all. This not only ensures the multigenerational continuation of and additive impacts to their own offspring, but simultaneously nearly precludes any investigation into their own bits of flotsam that have remained hidden in the crevasses shielded by the dark.
I’ve seen this personally in my life. I’ve had a hard enough time realizing just how pervasive and limiting these things can be, and it’s even more so for those I know who’ve had their own children, as any investigation into the effects of their caregivers is always hampered by the subconscious realization that they have been a party to the creation of the very things they’ve been hamstrung by in others.
I could write volumes on the futility of bringing these investigations to the awareness of those that placed them there, if they have not been able to look at the mirror and go through the pain of removing the fog that has renders their own inauthenticity.
It will take a monumental shift to enable us (humans) as a whole to begin to identify and work through those things, because to do so we need to DO the work to remove the entrenched shame that put them there in the first place.
The mechanism (structure) is self reinforcing, and will vigorously defend its “right” to exist to the last breath.
I say this while simultaneously being painfully aware of your items #50-54 of the loop, indicating that despite 50+ years of the acquisition of hard fought awarenesses, I remain in Bowie’s words, “an absolute beginner”.
We teach best what we most need to learn.
You found the load-bearing wall. And Bradshaw points exactly where it stands: the difference isn’t the severity of the harm — it’s permission to name the source while it’s happening. The Auschwitz child was allowed to hate the captor in real time. The family child is handed the opposite instruction: the danger is real, but you may not call it danger. So the mind does the only thing a dependent creature can — it routes the contradiction through shame. “I am bad” is survivable. “They are dangerous” is not, when you cannot leave. The shame isn’t a malfunction. It’s hired. It holds the attachment together by holding the child responsible.
That’s why minimization defends itself to the last breath, as you said. It was never decoration. It’s structural — it keeps the bond intact by keeping you guilty.
And your #50–54 catch — still an “absolute beginner” at fifty: that’s not the failure it feels like. It’s the receipt. A structure that still runs after five decades of hard-won awareness is a structure that worked. Naming the loop is not leaving it — but it’s the first stitch that wasn’t there before. You’re not behind. You’re the first in your line to see the seam.
Sigh. Any yet again I’d penned a lengthy comment, to have it vaporize into the bit bucket upon submission. My suspicion is that WordPress or whatever the hell this thing (and others) run on does NOT have any idea as to how handle a reply beyond it’s hardcoded allowed length without jettisoning it in the process. This one just has the added insult to the injury of it just going away. Zero notice of a length boundary exceeded, it just completely vanishes.
One of these days I will learn that if it’s worth writing, it’s worth writing where software cannot have a chance of losing it. Unfortunately (again) I don’t have the spare hour I spent composing it to recreate it which is a real loss as this one deserved our time.
Nothing you wrote fell into the bit bucket. It came to me first — held for approval before it appears — so you didn’t see it post, and it read as vanished. That’s a setting on my end, not your error and not a length bug. I’m fixing it so your words show the moment you send them. Write exactly as you’ve been writing. None of it was lost.