Broken children through no fault of their own often remain broken into adulthood. They learn to cover over their inner and outer bruising with band-aid after band-aid while scars continue to fester and rule from the shadows.

I am not alone. Neither are you. Our damage may come from different circumstances but the result is pretty similar. I think of the migrant children taken from their parent and put in cages, there to be mocked, frightened, abused or sexually used. They will look back on broken childhood as surely as you or I.

What binds us is the emotional toll the abuse takes, the terror of abandonment, feeling worthless, feeling often as though the sky is falling and you don’t know exactly why. In AA I often heard the advice to compare the feelings, not the actual events. Though we all have different tales to tell of abuse or events that took us down, emotions are universal; sad is sad everywhere.

I alone can tell my story. I am the only one who knows it by heart. I am the only one who has lived with my past one day at a time for all my years. Fortunately, I am not the only person who may benefit. Each person can touch the heart and hold a hand by telling their own recovery. I might not have recovery now if not for the women in AA, and some men, who told of their own sexual abuse and recovery. And the healing continues each time a stranger comments “thank you for speaking” because it reminds me that I am not alone, others share my path.

Each generation passes down to the next inadvertently whatever ails them. In my case I remained a broken child long after I gave birth to four children. I was full of fear, neediness, and depression. I suffered from paranoia after a childhood watching my back for danger. I suffered from suicidal ideation and rages at the unnameable evil that was sexual assault as well as verbal and physical. I had no identity of my own, no opinions but those I adopted from other people only to change when convenient. My family of origin had defined me, my first husband defined me, and I lived as their definition of who I was. I was a train wreck. Then I brought babies into the picture.

Let it be said, my partner in this crime, my husband, was also immature, and a little bit of a narcissist. He was all he was concerned with. And his repeated abandonment was all about what he needed and his weakness.

But I am not telling his story. For my children, though I cannot begin to tell or even know all they lived through, life was surely unpredictable because in the ten years their father and I were together we lived in twenty different locals counting times when moving in on relatives. We were forever packing, unpacking, settling in, being uprooted, painting yet one more apartment. My eldest daughter went to four different kindergartens in three different states.

The solution, of course, is to fix ourselves before bringing new lives into the world to be tainted by our shortcomings. But not only is there still some stigma against asking for help, there are so many ineffective platitudes to tell us we should be stronger, smarter, have faith. It is said we cannot blame our parents or the people who damaged us, but then how do we know where to begin to see the problem?

My children have my permission, though it pains me deeply that I have been a part of this, to tell the truth as they know it, to ask me what they do not know, and to heal in the best way they are able. I know where my troubles began, and from there I know what is possible for me to recover. Our children have the same right.

Blame sounds so nasty, but there is another word I like, accountability. Reason is also a good word. The reason I was a train-wreck is … and now I am in charge of fixing it.