An open letter about invisible abuse, generational wounds, the women we judged before we understood them,
and the love I pray you never mistake for suffering.
Jessica Choate RN
Dear my sweet daughters,
There is something I need you to understand about the woman I was before I became your mother.
I was once you.
I was once a little girl looking at my own mother, questioning the decisions she made, the relationships she stayed in, and the behavior she tolerated.
I remember wondering how she couldn't see what seemed so obvious to me.
Why does she keep allowing this?
Why doesn't she just leave?
Why would she stay with someone who treats her that way?
Doesn't she see what this is doing to us?
I couldn't understand it.
And because I couldn't understand it, I was angry.
I carried that anger for 32 years.
Thirty-two years of resentment, judgment, disappointment, and questions I didn't have answers to.
I thought she should have known better.
I thought she should have protected herself.
I thought she should have protected us.
I believed that if I ever found myself in a similar situation, I would recognize it immediately.
I would never tolerate that behavior.
I would never let someone make me feel small.
I would never allow a man to come into my life and disturb the peace of my children.
And I certainly would never stay with someone who was slowly destroying me.
I was so sure.
Until one day, I found myself standing in the very shoes I had spent my entire life judging.
And suddenly, the questions I had asked about my mother became the questions I was asking myself.
How did I let this happen?
How did I not see it?
How did I become someone I barely recognized?
And for the first time in my life, I began to understand something I wish I never had to learn.
Sometimes the woman who stays isn't the woman who doesn't see. Sometimes she's the woman who has been taught, little by little, not to trust what she sees.
And by the time she recognizes what's happening, she may be so exhausted from surviving that she can barely imagine how to find her way out.
It Doesn't Start With Abuse. It Starts With Love.
I need you to understand this, because it's the part nobody explained to me when I was young.
Abuse doesn't always walk through the front door announcing itself as the villain.
Sometimes it arrives carrying flowers.
Sometimes it cooks dinner.
Sometimes it plays with your children, builds forts in the living room, helps with doctor's appointments, and makes you believe you've finally found someone who wants to share the responsibilities you've been carrying alone.
Sometimes it looks like the answer to every prayer you've whispered into the darkness.
Someone who chooses you.
Someone who seems to understand you.
Someone who makes you feel safe enough to imagine an entirely different future.
And you fall in love.
Not with the suffering that comes later, but with the beautiful beginning.
With the affection.
The laughter.
The companionship.
The promises.
The way you felt when you believed you had finally found your person.
That was my experience.
I was raising seven children, working long hours as a nurse, and doing everything I could to give you a beautiful life.
I was tired.
Not tired of being your mother.
Never that.
I was tired of being the person responsible for absolutely everything.
And then someone came along who seemed to want to stand beside me.
He showed up.
He helped.
He appeared to love the life that came with loving me.
And I believed him.
Why wouldn't I?
I wanted to believe that I had finally found the kind of partnership I had always dreamed of.
And for a while, there were beautiful moments.
Real moments.
Moments of affection, laughter, tenderness, and connection.
I won't erase those memories simply because I eventually learned that the relationship was unhealthy.
But I need you to know something.
The beautiful beginning of a relationship does not guarantee a beautiful future.
And sometimes, the memory of who someone was in the beginning becomes the very thing that keeps you holding on after the relationship has changed.
You keep waiting for that person to come back.
You remember how they used to look at you.
How they used to treat you.
How loved you used to feel.
And you convince yourself that if you can just figure out what went wrong, you can find your way back.
You don't realize how much of yourself you're sacrificing in pursuit of someone who may no longer be showing up the way they once did.
It Happens So Slowly That You Don't Recognize Yourself Disappearing
There wasn't one moment when everything fell apart.
It happened gradually.
A little criticism here.
A dismissive comment there.
A conversation where I walked away feeling like I was the problem.
A need that went unmet.
An apology that never came.
A moment of excitement that was ignored.
A boundary that was questioned.
A concern that somehow became my fault.
And because these things didn't happen all at once, I explained them away.
Maybe he was stressed.
Maybe I was being too sensitive.
Maybe I misunderstood his intentions.
Maybe I needed to communicate differently.
Maybe I was expecting too much.
Maybe this was my trauma.
Maybe I just needed to heal.
And one by one, I began making excuses for things that were hurting me.
Not because I enjoyed being hurt.
Not because I lacked intelligence.
But because I loved him, and I was trying to understand how someone I loved could repeatedly leave me feeling so unloved.
One of the most confusing parts of emotional abuse is that it can make you question your own interpretation of reality.
When you tell someone something hurt you and they repeatedly deny it happened, minimize it, dismiss your feelings, or make your reaction the problem, you can begin to lose confidence in yourself.
You stop asking, Why did that hurt me?
And start asking, What's wrong with me for being hurt?
I began rehearsing conversations in my head before having them.
Trying to find the right words.
The right tone.
The right moment.
The right way to explain myself so that maybe, this time, I would be understood.
But somehow, I kept walking away feeling guilty.
I wasn't just managing my own emotions anymore.
I was anticipating his.
And eventually, I began making myself smaller because it felt easier than risking another argument.
That is how invisible abuse can work.
Not always through one dramatic event.
But through hundreds of small moments that slowly change how you see yourself.
Until the confident woman who once knew exactly who she was begins questioning everything.
Her memory.
Her judgment.
Her needs.
Her worth.
Her ability to make decisions.
And sometimes even her sanity.
I Thought I Was Healing. Sometimes I Was Learning to Tolerate More.
My daughters, you know how deeply I believe in healing.
You know I've spent years exploring trauma, psychology, spirituality, consciousness, and the ways our childhood experiences shape us.
I've written books about it.
I've built a business around helping others understand their wounds and find their way back to themselves.
I believed relationships could serve as mirrors, revealing the parts of ourselves that still needed love.
And I still believe there is wisdom in that.
But I need you to understand the dangerous place I found myself in.
I became so committed to examining my own wounds that I stopped giving equal attention to what was happening around me.
When I felt rejected, I searched for my rejection wound.
When I felt abandoned, I questioned my attachment patterns.
When I felt unheard, I wondered why I needed so much validation.
When I felt unsafe, I asked whether my nervous system was reacting to something from my childhood.
When I wanted to leave, I questioned whether I was self-sabotaging.
I looked everywhere for an explanation.
Except, far too often, at the behavior that had caused the pain in the first place.
I could spend hours explaining why someone might struggle with emotional intimacy.
I could understand how their childhood might have shaped their defensiveness.
I could recognize their fears.
Their insecurities.
Their wounds.
I could find compassion for almost anything.
But compassion became dangerous when I started using it to excuse behavior that was harming me.
Understanding why someone hurts you does not make it your responsibility to endure the hurt.
And having wounds of your own does not mean every painful experience is something you've imagined.
Sometimes your past is being activated.
Sometimes someone is genuinely treating you poorly.
Sometimes both things are true.
Healing requires learning to recognize the difference.
And I wish I had understood that sooner.
I Was So Busy Trying to Be a Good Wife That I Forgot I Was a Person
I wanted our marriage to work.
Desperately.
I wanted a home filled with love.
I wanted you to grow up seeing a healthy partnership.
I wanted you to witness affection, teamwork, respect, laughter, and two people who genuinely enjoyed sharing a life.
And I tried so hard to create that.
But slowly, the partnership I thought I had found began to feel like another responsibility I was carrying.
The children who had once been embraced became the subject of frequent complaints.
Their behavior was criticized.
Their needs became inconveniences.
I was left feeling as though I had failed to provide enough structure, enough discipline, enough consistency.
Never mind that I had been raising seven children while working exhausting hours to provide for them.
Never mind the circumstances we had survived.
I began feeling like the life I had worked so hard to build wasn't good enough.
And when I wanted to do something for myself, there was often some reason I needed to be home.
The kids might make a mess.
They couldn't be trusted.
Something might go wrong.
And I needed to be there to prevent it.
I began feeling guilty for wanting time that belonged only to me.
Guilty for having dreams.
Guilty for wanting intimacy.
Guilty for needing help.
Guilty for wanting to rest.
Guilty for being overwhelmed.
And the more I tried to express what I needed, the more I felt like my needs were unreasonable.
I was writing books.
Building Plant Medicine Healing.
Finding my voice.
Creating something meaningful from the pain I had survived.
I worked harder than I can begin to explain.
But the man whose encouragement I wanted most never read a single page.
I don't remember him celebrating those accomplishments.
And eventually, I stopped expecting him to.
Imagine that.
A woman who had spent her life giving to everyone else finally begins creating something for herself.
Something she's deeply passionate about.
Something she believes can help others.
And instead of feeling celebrated inside her own home, she learns to celebrate herself quietly.
I was beginning to shine.
But I was still living as though my light needed permission.
I had started to believe that perhaps I was too much.
Too emotional.
Too intense.
Too needy.
Too complicated.
And when I began exploring my autism and understanding myself more deeply, even that experience was dismissed.
I was told I couldn't be autistic because I hadn't been autistic when we first got together.
I was told I was incapable.
And after hearing enough criticism, I began to believe it.
The woman who had spent years handling emergencies, caring for critically ill patients, and raising seven children began doubting whether she could handle ordinary life.
That is what frightens me most when I look back.
Not simply how he treated me.
But how much I began believing the worst things about myself.
It Felt Like Drowning While Someone Insisted There Was No Water
I don't know another way to describe it.
I was drowning.
Emotionally.
Mentally.
Spiritually.
I felt like I couldn't breathe.
I was anxious all the time.
My self-esteem deteriorated.
I became deeply depressed.
There were moments when the despair became so overwhelming that I struggled to want to keep living.
And I was terrified by how far I had fallen.
Because I knew who I had been before.
I knew I was strong.
I knew I was capable.
I knew I had survived things that should have broken me.
But somehow, I couldn't seem to find that woman anymore.
And every time I tried to explain how badly I was struggling, I felt like I had to defend the legitimacy of my suffering.
I wasn't asking for perfection.
I was asking for compassion.
For partnership.
For someone to recognize that I couldn't keep doing everything alone.
For someone to look at me and say, I see how hard you're trying. Let me carry some of this with you.
Instead, I often felt criticized for breaking under the weight.
And perhaps the most devastating part was that I began criticizing myself, too.
Why couldn't I handle this?
Why was I so emotional?
Why did I need so much reassurance?
Why couldn't I just be happy?
Why did I keep creating problems?
I became both the person suffering and the person blaming her for suffering.
And that is a loneliness I would never wish on anyone.
I Finally Understood My Mother. And It Broke My Heart.
For 32 years, I looked at my mother's relationship choices through the eyes of a daughter.
I saw the consequences.
I felt the instability.
I experienced the confusion and hurt that came with decisions I couldn't understand.
And I carried resentment because, from where I stood, it seemed like she should have known better.
I believed leaving was a simple choice.
That you recognize mistreatment and walk away.
That you see the warning signs and refuse to tolerate them.
And I couldn't understand why she hadn't done that.
Until I found myself in a relationship where I was questioning my own memories.
Where I was afraid of bringing up certain conversations.
Where I had spent so long explaining away painful behavior that I struggled to recognize how much I was suffering.
And suddenly, I began seeing my mother differently.
Not simply as the woman whose choices had hurt me.
But as a woman.
A human being.
Someone who may have been carrying wounds I never understood.
Someone who may have experienced loneliness, fear, confusion, and shame in ways I couldn't recognize as a child.
Someone who may have believed she was doing the best she could with what she understood at the time.
I don't know every truth she carried.
I don't know every private conversation, every fear, or every reason behind the choices she made.
And I won't pretend that my experience explains hers entirely.
But for the first time, I could imagine how a woman might find herself somewhere she never intended to be.
I could understand how gradual mistreatment might become normalized.
How hope could keep someone trying.
How shame could make asking for help feel impossible.
How responsibility, children, money, fear, and love could become tangled together until leaving felt almost unimaginable.
And something inside me softened.
Not because the hurt I experienced as a daughter suddenly disappeared.
Not because every decision had become acceptable.
But because I began recognizing the humanity of the woman I had spent so many years judging.
I could finally understand her without pretending that my childhood hadn't hurt.
And I realized that understanding and accountability can exist together.
I can have compassion for my mother.
And still acknowledge the ways her choices affected me.
I can recognize that she may have been suffering.
And still believe that I deserved protection.
I can release some of my resentment without erasing the experiences that created it.
And perhaps that is what forgiveness really asks of us.
Not to rewrite history.
Not to excuse what happened.
But to loosen the grip of the story we've carried long enough to see the people inside it more clearly.
I Am Not Telling You This to Make Excuses
My sweet girls, please hear me.
I am not writing this to ask you to excuse my choices.
I am not writing this to make you responsible for understanding my pain.
And I am certainly not writing this to suggest that because something was difficult for me, its impact on you doesn't matter.
I am your mother.
It was my responsibility to protect you.
To create stability.
To recognize when something wasn't healthy for our family.
And I wish I had understood certain things sooner.
I wish I had recognized the patterns before they became so deeply woven into our lives.
I wish I hadn't spent so much time trying to make something work that was costing me my sense of self.
I wish I had known how to distinguish healthy compromise from self-abandonment.
And most of all, I wish you hadn't had to witness any of the pain that came with my learning.
I am sorry for the moments when my hope for the relationship kept me from fully seeing what was happening around us.
You deserved a mother who felt safe.
You deserved a peaceful home.
You deserved to see love expressed through kindness, consistency, respect, and genuine partnership.
And when I couldn't give you all of that, you deserved a mother willing to acknowledge it.
You are allowed to have feelings about the choices I made.
You are allowed to be angry.
Confused.
Disappointed.
You are allowed to ask why I stayed.
And I will not make you feel guilty for asking.
Because I remember what it was like to be the daughter on the other side of those questions.
I remember how badly I wanted answers.
And I never want you to feel that protecting my feelings requires silencing yours.
My pain does not cancel yours.
My intentions do not erase the impact.
And your love for me does not require agreement with every decision I've made.
I hope that when you look back, you can see that I was trying.
But I also hope you always feel free to tell the truth about what you experienced.
Even when that truth is difficult for me to hear.
Especially then.
I Pray You Never Truly Understand
There is a strange grief in finally understanding something you spent your life questioning.
Because I didn't gain this understanding through a book.
Or a class.
Or a conversation.
I gained it by living through pain I once believed I would never tolerate.
By loving someone while slowly losing myself.
By questioning my perception until I struggled to recognize what was happening.
By reaching a place where survival consumed so much of my energy that imagining a different future felt overwhelming.
And that is why I pray you never truly understand.
Not because I want you to be naïve.
Not because I want you to be sheltered from every difficulty.
But because I never want you to have to learn this lesson through suffering.
I never want you lying awake beside someone you love, feeling more alone than you ever felt when you were single.
I never want you to rehearse conversations because you're afraid of the response.
I never want you to apologize for needing affection.
I never want you to feel guilty for being excited about something you've accomplished.
I never want you to question your intelligence, your worth, or your sanity because someone repeatedly dismisses your reality.
I never want you to believe that asking for basic respect makes you demanding.
And I never, ever want you to become so committed to loving another person that you forget you are someone worthy of that same love.
Because there is a kind of suffering that changes you.
A kind of pain that reaches so deeply into your identity that you begin forgetting who you were before it.
And when you finally recognize what's happening, the road back to yourself can feel impossibly long.
I pray you never have to walk that road.
But if you ever do, I pray you recognize what's happening sooner than I did.
And I pray you know you never have to walk it alone.
Here Is What I Want You to Know About Love
My daughters, I cannot promise you will never experience heartbreak.
I cannot promise you will never meet someone who disappoints you.
I cannot promise you that every person who says they love you will know how to love you well.
But I can tell you what I've learned.
Love should not require you to disappear.
You should not have to make yourself smaller so someone else can remain comfortable.
You should not have to beg someone to care that you're hurting.
You should not have to prove your worth by how much you're willing to endure.
You should not have to earn affection through obedience.
You should not have to sacrifice your dreams to protect another person's insecurities.
You should not have to choose between loving your family and loving your partner.
And you should never confuse someone's occasional tenderness with a consistent pattern of respect.
Pay attention to how someone treats you when you're disappointed.
When you say no.
When you disagree.
When you succeed.
When you need help.
When you're sick.
When you cannot give them what they want.
When you're no longer able to be the person who handles everything.
Because love is not measured only by how someone treats you when life is beautiful.
It is also revealed in how they treat you when life becomes difficult.
Notice whether they can acknowledge their mistakes.
Whether their apologies lead to meaningful change.
Whether they remain curious about your experience even when they see things differently.
Whether they celebrate your growth.
Whether they respect your independence.
Whether they are kind to children, animals, and people who have less power than they do.
Notice how you feel in their presence over time.
Do you feel increasingly free to be yourself?
Or do you find yourself becoming quieter, smaller, and more afraid of making mistakes?
Healthy love will not always feel easy.
There will be disagreements.
Misunderstandings.
Disappointments.
Seasons of stress.
But conflict should not cost you your dignity.
And a difficult season should not require you to surrender your reality.
Choose someone who wants to understand you, not someone who needs you to question yourself so they can remain right.
And please, when something feels wrong, do not dismiss it simply because you cannot immediately explain why.
Your feelings are information.
They are not always the entire truth, but they deserve your attention.
Look at the facts.
Look at the patterns.
Look at what happens after you express a concern.
Listen to people you trust.
And remember that you are allowed to leave a relationship even if you cannot convince the other person that your reasons are valid.
You do not need permission to protect your peace.
You Are Not Responsible for Saving Someone With Your Love
I need you to understand this perhaps more than anything else.
You will meet wounded people.
People who have suffered.
People whose childhoods shaped them in painful ways.
People who struggle with emotional intimacy, fear abandonment, or have never learned how to communicate safely.
And because you have beautiful hearts, you may want to help them.
You may see the frightened child behind their anger.
The loneliness beneath their control.
The insecurity beneath their criticism.
And there is nothing wrong with having compassion.
But compassion does not make you responsible for healing them.
You can love someone deeply and still recognize that they are not capable of participating in a healthy relationship with you.
You can understand their pain without becoming the place where they discharge it.
You can encourage healing without making your own life the price of their growth.
And you can walk away without becoming cruel.
I spent so much of my life believing that if I could just love deeply enough, patiently enough, and unconditionally enough, I could help someone become the person I saw inside them.
But loving someone's potential while repeatedly being hurt by their behavior is not a sustainable foundation for partnership.
People have to choose their own growth.
They have to take responsibility for their own actions.
And no amount of devotion can do that work for them.
Your love is a gift. It is not a rehabilitation program.
Please don't spend years trying to earn a version of someone they are not actively choosing to become.
I Want to Be Where the Cycle Changes
For much of my life, I believed breaking generational cycles meant making sure I never repeated my mother's mistakes.
And I was so certain I wouldn't.
But now I understand that generational patterns don't always repeat themselves in ways we recognize.
Sometimes we repeat what we witnessed.
Sometimes we overcorrect in ways that create entirely new wounds.
Sometimes we become so determined not to be like our parents that we fail to notice the patterns we are still carrying.
I thought I had escaped certain lessons.
But I had only learned to describe them with different words.
Where I once saw weakness, I later called compassion.
Where I once saw tolerating mistreatment, I later called unconditional love.
Where I once saw staying too long, I later called commitment.
And where I once questioned how a woman could lose herself in a relationship, I eventually found myself writing hundreds of pages trying to understand why I no longer recognized the woman in the mirror.
That realization humbled me.
Because breaking a cycle is not simply refusing to repeat what your parents did.
It requires learning to recognize how the same patterns can return in unfamiliar forms.
It requires honesty.
Accountability.
The willingness to challenge your own beliefs.
And sometimes, the courage to leave a life you worked desperately to build.
I cannot change what I experienced as a daughter.
And I cannot undo every decision I've made as a mother.
But I can choose what happens next.
I can stop teaching you that a woman's greatest virtue is how much suffering she can endure without complaining.
I can show you that recognizing a mistake does not make you a failure.
I can model what it looks like to take accountability without drowning in shame.
I can teach you that forgiveness and boundaries can exist together.
That kindness does not require self-sacrifice.
That strength includes asking for help.
That love does not have to be earned through exhaustion.
And I can show you that a woman is allowed to begin again.
Even when she's frightened.
Even when she doesn't have all the answers.
Even when the future looks nothing like the one she imagined.
I cannot promise to break every cycle perfectly.
But I can promise to keep examining them.
To keep listening.
To keep learning.
And to never demand that you abandon your own experience to protect my version of the story.
I Hope You Remember the Woman Who Chose to Leave, Too
I know there are parts of our story I wish I could rewrite.
I wish I could go back and protect us from moments we never should have experienced.
But I cannot go backward.
What I can do is choose how the story continues.
And I hope that someday, when you look back on this chapter of our lives, you remember more than the pain.
I hope you remember that I eventually listened to myself.
That I stopped waiting for someone else to validate what I was experiencing.
That I chose an uncertain future over continuing to lose myself in a familiar one.
That I was afraid.
Terrified, actually.
Seven children.
Limited money.
An uncertain place to land.
A life that needed to be rebuilt.
I had every practical reason to be frightened.
And I was.
But I had reached a place where I could no longer ignore the cost of staying.
So I left.
Not because leaving erased the love.
Not because every moment had been terrible.
Not because I suddenly had everything figured out.
But because I was finally willing to acknowledge that loving someone did not require remaining in a relationship that was harming me.
And because I wanted something different for us.
For you.
For me.
For the future we still have the opportunity to create.
I hope you remember that courage doesn't always look like confidence.
Sometimes it looks like a mother with trembling hands, packing what she can, gathering her children, and walking toward a future she cannot yet see.
Sometimes it looks like admitting you were wrong.
Sometimes it looks like starting over.
And sometimes it looks like choosing yourself for the first time in a very long time.
To the Little Girl I Was, and the Women You Will Become
There is a little girl inside me who spent years wondering why her mother didn't leave.
A little girl who was angry.
Who wanted someone to recognize what was happening.
Who wanted to feel protected.
Who couldn't understand why love seemed to require so much suffering.
I see her differently now.
I no longer want to tell her she was wrong for being angry.
She was a child trying to make sense of things no child should have to understand.
Her feelings mattered.
Her experience mattered.
And she deserved to be heard.
But now, standing here as a mother myself, I can hold something else beside her pain.
Compassion for the woman my mother was.
Compassion for the woman I became.
Not excuses.
Not absolution.
Just a fuller understanding of how complicated human beings can be.
Of how suffering can distort our choices.
Of how fear can disguise itself as loyalty.
Of how hope can keep us holding on long after something has stopped nourishing us.
And of how difficult it can be to recognize harm when it comes from someone we love.
My daughters, I hope your lives are different.
I hope you inherit my curiosity without inheriting my tendency to overexplain mistreatment.
I hope you inherit my compassion without believing you must sacrifice yourselves for it.
I hope you inherit my courage without ever needing the circumstances that forced me to discover it.
I hope you learn that you can love people deeply while still having boundaries.
That you can forgive someone and choose not to return.
That you can have empathy for another person's pain without making it your responsibility.
That your dreams deserve space.
Your voice deserves to be heard.
Your body belongs to you.
Your needs are not inconveniences.
Your success is not a threat.
Your boundaries are not punishments.
And your worth is never determined by how useful you are to another person.
I hope you find love that feels like companionship rather than constant negotiation.
Love that celebrates your victories.
Love that makes room for your humanity.
Love that can sit beside your pain without immediately trying to dismiss, explain, or defend against it.
Love that doesn't require you to be small to be safe.
And above all, I hope you never mistake the depth of your suffering for the depth of someone's love.
Because they are not the same thing.
My Final Prayer for You
My sweet daughters,
I spent 32 years questioning my mother's choices.
It took finding myself in a similar kind of pain to begin understanding how a woman could become trapped in circumstances she never would have knowingly chosen.
And I pray with everything inside me that you never have to learn this lesson the way I did.
I pray you recognize emotional manipulation before it becomes your normal.
I pray you believe yourself when something consistently feels wrong.
I pray you never have to search desperately for evidence that your feelings are valid.
I pray you never confuse being chosen with being cherished.
I pray you never believe that loving someone means saving them from the consequences of their own behavior.
I pray you never lose your voice trying to keep someone else's peace.
I pray you never dim your light for someone who cannot celebrate its brightness.
And if you ever find yourself in a relationship that makes you question your worth, I pray you remember that you can come to me.
Not to be judged.
Not to hear, "I told you so."
Not to be told what you should have recognized sooner.
But to be loved.
To be believed.
To be supported.
To have someone sit beside you while you find the strength to decide what comes next.
You will never have to earn my compassion by making perfect choices.
You will never have to hide your struggles because you're afraid I'll be disappointed.
You will never have to protect my feelings at the expense of your safety.
And you will never have to prove to me that your suffering is severe enough to deserve help.
I know now how much courage it can take simply to say, Something isn't right.
And I will listen.
Because I remember what it was like to be the daughter who didn't understand.
And I know what it is to become the mother who wishes she had understood sooner.
I pray you never truly understand the pain that taught me these lessons.
But I pray you inherit every ounce of wisdom I carried out of it.
And if there's one thing I hope you remember from this letter, let it be this:
You do not have to repeat my story to honor me.
You do not have to suffer the way I suffered to become strong.
You do not have to stay where I stayed to prove you're capable of love.
You are allowed to learn from my life without living through my pain.
You are allowed to choose differently.
You are allowed to be free.
And that, my beautiful girls, is what I hope becomes our family's inheritance.
Not the suffering.
Not the silence.
Not the endless endurance.
But the courage to see clearly.
The wisdom to recognize love.
The freedom to walk away from what harms us.
And the beautiful, radical understanding that we can be compassionate women without becoming women who abandon themselves.
I once looked at my mother and wondered how she could stay.
Now I look at you and pray you always know you are allowed to leave.
And that if the day ever comes when you need somewhere safe to land, my arms and my heart will be open.
Not because I know everything.
But because I know what it feels like to be lost.
And I will never want you to feel alone while finding your way home.
With all the love in my heart,
Mom
Jessica Choate, RN
Founder, Plant Medicine Healing
Author's Note: This letter is a reflection on my own lived experiences, my changing understanding of emotional abuse, and the complex relationship between generational trauma, accountability, and compassion. It is not intended to suggest that every difficult relationship is abusive or that every person who remains in an unhealthy relationship has the same experience. If you recognize yourself in these words, you deserve support, dignity, and the freedom to make informed decisions about your life.