Scent Experiment III: Stacking the House

  Ahh yes, time for another attempt at making the problem child behave if I group it with the proper stack of other scents. So far we have had rather middling results. But I'm going with a very different approach today. We'll see how it works.

Problem Child: Montale Sensual Instinct Top Notes: Roasted Coffee Beans, mostly, with hints and suggestions of other things Heart Notes: Praline and Rose Base Notes: Amber and Cedarwood

I suppose one of the benefits of my quest to figure out how to best stack the problem child that is Montale Sensual Instinct is that even if I never figure out the best grouping for it, I will be rid of it quickly because it's so frequently used these days.

Today I decided to go with just one fragrance house. In a way, there was the novelty of seeing what three scents from the same house could do. On a practical note, there is also the fact that these three are my less aggressive but certainly also problem children.

The house we are using is MALIN+GOETZ.

Genderless: MALIN+GOETZ Dark Rum Top Notes: Bergamot, plum, and anise Middle Notes: Leather, rum, and vanilla Base Notes: Patchouli, amber, and creamy milk

When I was first introduced to MALIN+GOETZ, it was in the form of a Dark Rum rollerball. And I fell in love. It was truly one of the most heady and sensual fragrances ever to mingle with my body chemistry. I loved it and I wore it every day. It made me feel amazing.

The scent was rich and sexy. The scent was my mythologized and romanticized theories about the Lost Generation writers: intense brooding while trying to come to terms with a broken world through warm liquors, physical proximity, and very late nights.

Everything about this scent worked. It was gender-neutral but leaning masc in a way that made me smirk. This was the leather and rum mixing with the plum, anise, and patchouli. It was indulgence as a means of self-defense. That was evoked by the vanilla, bergamot, and creamy milk. It was a short story that would get a high school teacher in trouble if she assigned it, even though it never said anything explicit at all.

I loved it deeply from the start. It was a very me scent.

Because of this, it didn't last very long. I knew I had to replace it. Instead of just getting another rollerball like a practical person, I looked for what was available to me at subscription houses. When I got the chance to get the Dark Rum body wash, I selected it. The body wash was more subtle than the rollerball but still wonderful.

When I started Scentbird, my first selection was the Dark Rum spray. When it came in, it was rather disappointing. Something about the delivery process stilted everything I had loved about my other two methods of exposure to this scent. It felt muted. I tossed it in my perfume drawer and ignored it.

Femme: MALIN+GOETZ Strawberry Top Notes: sparkling bergamot, mara strawberry, pink pepper Heart Notes: jasmine petals, jasmine lactone captive, woodland greens Base Notes: cedarwood, oakmoss, captive musks, orris root

Side note: Captive in this case means it is an isolated molecule or ingredient that has been developed in-house and is copyright-protected and illegal if duplicated. This is a lot more boring than anything I could come up with. I was imagining scents that were somehow metallic or leather in nature due to bondage. But no.

Okay. What this should smell like: Strawberry should be sexy as hell. That top layer should really open with something fun. I usually have a great time with pink pepper. It is light and airy with a suggestion of red fruits, which should lend itself well to the strawberry. The strawberry should be amplified by the bergamot, which leans tart and almost citrus.

The middle highlight should be the jasmine lactone, usually a rich, creamy blend of fresh jasmine petals, juicy peach, ripe apricot, and coconut milk with a soft dairy warmth. This should suggest a nice strawberries and cream on your skin kind of thing.

And that base is my favorite sort of base with oakmoss, cedar, and musks. Orris root is rather purple in nature, but in a thick, buttery, almost suede way. Again, I should be getting wild strawberries and cream here.

The fact that this is a rollerball should have amplified that.

In reality, though, it did not. This ended up smelling like very little of anything. It is subtle. And honestly, too subtle for me. I wanted something that said, “Heeeeyy, yeah, fresh bowl of strawberries and cream here,” and instead got something demure.

We don't do demure in this house.

Provocative: MALIN+GOETZ Cannabis Top Notes: Bergamot, black pepper, and orange Heart Notes: Cannabis accord, muguet, and magnolia Base Notes: Cedarwood, patchouli, sandalwood, amber, and musk

The problem with this one actually isn't its fault. I received it in the midst of being extremely ill in a way that all external stimuli made me feel a great deal of revulsion. I smelled this, recoiled, and instantly got a migraine. This was not a great start to our relationship. I was afraid to touch it after that.

But I'm better now, so I can handle the scent with more ease.

The top here is citrus in a way that only openly admits itself once, the orange. But both bergamot and black pepper have citrus leanings. They are not only zesty but rather bright, though black pepper often has a more smoky dry down.

Cannabis accord is always a dice roll because it does not contain actual cannabis at all. It is a collection of ingredients meant to simulate cannabis, but of course that means different things to different people. Sometimes this scent comes off as skunky. Sometimes it is very green and herbal. Sometimes it is more woody or more spicy. It always depends on your body chemistry and the way the house blended it.

Muguet is also a created scent. It is dewy and green, like water on leaves in the woods. It is fresh and can suggest citrus but only on certain people. Magnolia is a soft white floral with a citrus back kick. Between the top and the majority of the heart, they were really stacking citrus around the wild card of the cannabis accord.

The base, again, is fairly good for me. Cedarwood, patchouli, sandalwood, amber, and musk. The patchouli and sandalwood can be risky but usually work out well on my skin.

What I hoped for here... honestly, I don't know. As you can tell, all of these were a gamble for me. All three of the M+G scents should have worked better in theory than they did in reality. My expectations for this were pretty low, but given that I could do Problem Child plus everything else from one house, I wanted to give it a shot.

Results: 4/5

You know what? This really worked. It only works because I can handle the scent of anise better than I can the taste of it. It also works because I am always deeply pleased when my scent edges hard toward masculine, and this certainly does.

I kind of smell like the chemicals in the air of a Hemingway relationship. Intense, tumultuous, deeply full of the potential for trouble.

The scent pleases me deeply. It is actually the happiest I have been with anything I've done with the problem child that is Montale Sensual Instinct. I will certainly repeat this stack, especially if I'm going to have an evening out.

Of note: My roommate walked into the room and said it smelled weird, like an herbal cleaner, not in an unpleasant way. Then the anise hits.

That is not how it smells to me, but it is information worth keeping in mind.

Scent Experiment II: The Hotel You Drove By

 Scent Experiment II: The Hotel You Drove By

If my more creamy, milky scents weren't going to fix the Problem Child, perhaps it was best to lean into what the Problem Child was supposed to do. Montale Sensual Instinct is an Amber Vanilla/Floral Gourmand scent that is supposed to evoke the more heady, intense, and intimate moments of life. With that in mind, I gathered up some scents that do the same thing to see if we could harmonize.

Mysterious: Nopalera Flor de Madera Top: Tamarind, Mexican Citrus Heart: Violet, Jasmine Petal, Vetiver Base: Musk, Cedarwood

Tamarind can go a lot of ways depending on the delivery. It is most often a sour/sweet note with a mix of lemon, apricot, and dates suggestions, and I certainly get that, even if it seems like a strange grouping. Mexican Citrus is usually a mix of limes from the region blended with citrus zests, which adds a more oil-leaning and intense sour to the mix. This is rather logical, really, with the tamarind.

The heart here is adding a pretty stable layer of green earthiness with the vetiver and violet, mixed with the indole from the jasmine, a chemical compound that adds a deep, sensual, and slightly rich, animalistic warmth. I tend to see this as an Earthing layer, toes-in-the-mud-after-a-rainstorm kind of layer.

The base of musk and cedarwood is common, but for me, pretty safe and predictable.

To me, Nopalera Flor de Madera smells like a secret you needed to know, always wanted to know, and now someone is holding your hand and easing you into the new level of knowledge.

Genderless: Riddle Original Base notes only in amber and musk

Riddle Original is a skin scent. It is a simple blend with a complex concept. Basically, you put it on and it marries with your body chemistry, highlighting the natural scent you produce on your own. Some people find scents like this too revealing. It makes them feel exposed. But I rather enjoy skin scents and will often use them for this layer of my stack.

Basically, what this means for the whole concept of this stack is that I am banking on the idea that amplifying my own chemical makeup can actually make the Problem Child work.

Femme: Confessions of a Rebel Get a Room Top: Forbidden apple and mandarin orange Heart: Clary sage and crisp cypress Base: Liquid vanilla, praline, and stripped-down woody notes

Did I put this on my selection list because I loved the name? Yes. Of course I did. How could I not want to own something that suggested a world of bad decisions and fun stories?

Okay, I actually looked this up because I side-eyed "forbidden apple" pretty hard. That sounded like marketing. Turns out this is a thing. It is supposed to be a dark, seductive, and spiced red apple note blended with warm gourmand sweetness and rich, boozy undertones instead of, you know, just non-forbidden apple. Mandarin orange is going to blend beautifully with anything boozy.

Clary sage can be a bit of a risk for some people, especially if people are like me and do not exactly enjoy lavender, as clary sage shares some of lavender's aspects. Thankfully, it doesn't really dwell there for me. For me, clary sage actually drifts down to something like a soft musky floral tobacco, which I enjoy quite a lot. Cypress is mossy and green, of course, but often rather inviting and clean at the same time.

One of the odd things about Get a Room is that it almost seems like the base and heart notes should be reversed. The dry down of the scent being vanilla and praline is rather different. Normally, people would structure things so that the base was the more woody layer.

The overall way this hits me is always exciting. Get a Room feels like a promise. Get a Room feels like a promise that makes good on itself, even if the pleasure is temporary.

Provocative Problem Child: Montale Sensual Instinct Top: Roasted coffee beans, mostly, with hints and suggestions of other things Heart: Praline and rose Base: Amber and cedarwood

We are already familiar with Problem Child here. My hope was that Riddle Original would give the Montale a soft, musky skin-scent base that helps neutralize powder and makes the coffee note feel more intimate. I thought that Get a Room, given that it brings the apple, the warmth, and the flirtation, would lift Montale while also leaning into its sensuality. As for the Flor de Madera, I counted on it to ground everything with dry wood and a quiet, earthy presence. In other words, a stack that creates a warm apple-and-wood scent with Montale’s roasted coffee humming underneath. I wanted it to feel like a private moment in a hotel room, something warm, close, and a little dangerous.

Result: 2/5

This smelled like... nothing. Somehow, everything canceled everything else out. There was a scent, but it was vague, vague... something, but I wasn't sure what, and it just sat there. This wasn't a memorable night of questionable but fun choices. This was more like scrolling through Netflix and never actually settling on anything. Somehow, I took a bunch of scents that evoked a whole lot of things and blended them into something that evoked... perfume, kinda/maybe.

I won't be repeating this stack again because there is absolutely no reason why I should.

Scent Experiment

 In a perfect world, or even just a practical one, it is probably best to only own perfumes you have actually smelled on your skin before buying them. In my case, almost every scent I own arrived through one subscription or another, which means I did not smell them or see how they interacted with my chemistry before they became mine.

Most of the time this has not been a problem. I have been fortunate not only to find things that were acceptable, but things that were genuinely wonderful for me. Still, I do have some problem children. These are scents that, for whatever reason, were sprayed a couple of times and made absolutely no sense to me. After that, they simply sat there, taking up space in my collection. One of them has a very cute container, which pleased me, but outside of that, there was nothing redeeming.

I do not believe in letting things sit unused forever. There had to be ways to make these scents work for me. I have not set many goals for myself this year, but I decided I would set one for September. I am going to learn to work with the problem children. I will learn to stack my scents in a way that allows the difficult ones to function on my skin.

I began with the most problematic of them all.

Mysterious Problem Child: Montale Sensual Instinct
Top notes: roasted coffee beans with hints of saffron, citrus, and cardamom
Heart notes: praline and rose
Base notes: oakmoss, amber, and cedarwood

I could have sworn when I first received this that it listed chocolate. Maybe I dreamed that. The thing is, I do not understand why this scent does not work for me. I love coffee beans and the smell of coffee. Praline should not be an issue either, since toasted nutty depth, brown sugar, and buttery warmth are usually pleasant. Oakmoss is standard and forms the core of chypres, which I am normally drawn to.

But this is not really a chypre. It is an amber vanilla pretending to be one.

I started thinking about what might be going wrong. Amber can be wonderful, but it can also smell like bad baby powder. If the praline leans toward almond, that can be powdery too. Praline can also introduce a caramel element that sometimes goes sideways. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the powdery nature was the issue. That was what I needed to neutralize.

My first theory was to tone it down by making the entire stack cream forward. Something creamy would harmonize with the coffee and hopefully override the powder.

Attempt 1

Genderless: Commodity Milk (Expressive)
Top: Cold Milk Accord
Heart: Warm Marshmallow and Toasted Sesame
Base: Mahogany Wood, Tonka Bean, and Musk

Commodity Milk is sexy. There is no other way to put it. It feels like the crackle of fire on a late October night while you sing Lou Reed songs and make s’mores at your backyard fire pit with the person who stayed after the party just because of you. It is that moment when you realize, as you do every fall, that nothing tastes quite like a melty marshmallow. My hope was that the cold milk accord and marshmallow would ease the Montale down, smoothing its harsh powdery edges and making it into something reasonable.

After that, I added two scents I trust.

Femme: Everenden Darling
Top: Strawberry, peach, pineapple
Heart: Rose, jasmine, muguet (lily of the valley)
Base: Vanilla, musk

Often when it comes to trying to tone down something powder-heavy, fruit is the way to go. The top of this, with three fruits, plus the vanilla base, looked promising. Darling, as I have mentioned before, is so good at lifting my mood. It seemed like the best bet for my femme layer of the stack.

Provocative: onekind Bone Flower

Top: Orange blossom and pink peppercorn

Heart: Tuberose, jasmine, and Turkish rose

Base: Warm sandalwood and patchouli

Sandalwood and patchouli are two of the best ways to deal with powder. Pink peppercorn was my secret hope because it brings a fizzy brightness that can wake up a dull or heavy composition. I was taking a risk by adding more rose, but the rose in these scents has never overwhelmed me.

Results: 3.5 out of 5
The stack made the Montale wearable. It was the first time I put it on and did not instantly feel the need to bathe. If I find no better solution, this is at least a solution. The powder element was still present, though. It lingered on my skin. It did not linger in the deeply unpleasant way it had when I tried the scent alone, but more in a “I can handle this until it fades” way.

Tolerable is not the goal. Tolerable is never my goal when it comes to scent. When I wear perfume, I want to feel amazing, not “reasonable ish.”

The month is young. The scents are plentiful. I will figure this out.

Late August Scent Stack

 The end of August is always a time ripe with possibilities. There’s the inevitable reflection on what one actually did with their summer (in my case, made art and dealt with medical issues), but also the rich, bubbling excitement that autumn will soon arrive. It’s a season of harsh days and slightly more merciful nights, when sleep comes easier and dreams feel deeper.

Sometimes when I build my scent stack, I plan it out. This usually happens when I know I’ll be out in public. One should, of course, be more responsible about scent in shared spaces, given how sensitive some people can be.

Other days, I let my hands choose for me, working off impulse and whatever thematic feeling I want my day to carry. Today was one of those days.

As always, I build my scent stack around four primary concepts.

Mysterious: Korres Kyma
Top Notes: Lime, mandarin, orange
Heart Notes: Marine, watery, pepper
Base Notes: Cedar, vetiver, nutmeg

Kyma is my foundation. It is the scent I always pull first. It’s the central idea everything else builds around. On me, Kyma is beautifully balanced, each aspect singing exactly as it should: citrus that yields to watery notes, settling into something rich, woody, and earthy.

Genderless: Sucreabeille Blood Drunk
Top Notes: Pomegranate, apple, black cherry
Heart Notes: Dark rum, dragon’s blood
Base Notes: Cherry tobacco, a hint of blood accord

The top notes are all ripe, red things. It's open, inviting, juicy. Dark rum and dragon’s blood add smoky elements, scents I find attractive on men, and as always, if I find it arresting on others, I find it arresting on myself.

The tobacco is the star, lending a depth that carries the whole stack into something cohesive.

Blood accord is an engineered compound meant to simulate the scent of blood. It’s a complicated addition, one many people would find revolting. To me, it pushes the copper forward as a metallic thread that gives the entire stack the balance it needs.

Femme: Evereden Darling
Top Notes: Strawberry, peach, pineapple
Heart Notes: Rose, jasmine, muguet (lily of the valley)
Base Notes: Vanilla, musk

My femme layer is always where I play with contrast. I tend toward gender-neutral, unisex, almost masc-coded elements because they please me, so this layer often becomes the space where I reach for my most femme-coded scents. With Darling, the strawberry is the hero and becomes an instant mood-booster that layers beautifully with the vanilla. The peach and pineapple are subtle but present, melding well with the musk.

The heart notes are unabashedly floral. One of them is rose, which can be risky because it sometimes reads Old Lady. But Darling is youthful enough that it never tips into that territory. It doesn’t make me suddenly want to go to a yard sale or anything.

Provocative: onekind Bone Flower
Top Notes: Orange blossom, pink peppercorn
Heart Notes: Tuberose, jasmine, Turkish rose
Base Notes: Sandalwood, patchouli

When I first tested Bone Flower, it reminded me of… something. I still don’t know what. There’s a memory buried in it that I haven’t unlocked, which is one of the reasons it stays firmly in the provocative category.

All three layers do different things. Orange blossom has heady, honeyed aspects, but mostly reads clean and almost soapy. Soapy, as always, is a risky part of the mix.Soapy either feels refreshing or overpowering. In this case, though, it's rather mild. It’s a white floral, generally friendly and approachable. Pink peppercorn is a gentle, fizzy spice that leans rose, giving the top notes a clean, energetic feel.

The heart is thick and creamy, with tuberose and Turkish rose bringing milky elements. Jasmine is musky, sensual, and powdery. And yes, powdery can read Old Lady, here it simply reads clean.

The base is the real risk. Sandalwood and I have a complicated relationship. I adore it except when I don’t, and when I don’t, I can’t even be in the same room with it. Patchouli is often abused and overused, ranging anywhere from “earth mother goddess” to “regretful music festival goer who has not bathed in six days,” depending on how soil-forward it’s behaving.

Bone Flower manages to harness both without causing me problems. It’s risky, but done well enough that I’m pleased with it.

The end result of the stack makes me feel full of mystery and potential. It makes me excited for what fall could bring. Kyma is my warm foundation. It is the heat of late August sun that seems unwilling to yield to cooler days but knows it must. Bone Flower and Blood Drunk mingle into something dark red, reminding me that soon the trees will be a multitude of colors and my days will be filled with the sound of them gently crackling in the wind. Darling adds a candied suggestion, a whisper that Halloween is on the way.

It’s a good stack.

Monkey vs Ice Cream

  This is the situation with politics in my state.

So we got one party. For the sake of not really getting into the quagmire of real-life political issues, we'll call them the Monkey Party.

We have another party, and for the same reason, we'll call the Ice Cream Party.

Every election cycle, one party tries to offer the state a monkey. The other party tries to offer the state some ice cream.

During Primary Season, we usually get the following options.

1. A very angry monkey with a rusty knife that screams a lot and does a lot of rehearsed monkey dances.
2. Another monkey who is basically that first monkey, but does even more extreme monkey dances.
3. A monkey who is in a dress and has on a polite monkey diaper. This monkey screams, but often the screams are charming. But once you look deeper, you find out this monkey comes from a very destructive movement that wishes to infect everyone with monkeypox.
4. A monkey. Yes, still a monkey, but wearing a polite monkey diaper and a little hat. This monkey has a knife, but it's a pocket knife and kept in a cute little case.

If you don't get to vote in the Monkey Party Primary, you look at the monkey selection and just hope that those who do vote in it have the sense to choose Monkey 4 as their monkey.

They do not.

In the end, they'll select whatever of the other three monkeys screamed the loudest and did the best dance.

The Ice Cream Party offers up bowls of ice cream.

During the primary, you often get choices like the following.

1. A massive sundae with several different scoops of ice cream, toppings, cherries, whipped cream, and little cakes that are delightfully absorbing the ice cream as it melts to create an even better sweet treat.
2. An ice cream and candy blended treat with lots of large chunks of whatever it was blended with.
3. An old-fashioned ice cream float that may not have the level of toppings but still looks pretty great.
4. A scoop of vanilla in a paper cup.

This primary will go one of two ways.

There is about a 30% chance that 1-3 will win.
There is a 70% chance that 4 will win because everyone will decide that 4 is the safest option because toppings, blends, and being too old-fashioned might cost them votes.

When the Ice Cream Party loses (and they almost always do), if they chose 1-3, they will blame the loss on them selecting the ice cream that was too intense for everyone. If they selected 4, they'll blame it on vanilla being too bland to excite people enough to vote.

If it's a major election year, we might get half of our registered voters to actually vote. On an off year, that percentage greatly reduces.

If we had 10 people who could vote for either We Eat Ice Cream or We Get An Angry Monkey with a Knife, basically this is how it goes.

Five of those ten people do not select a monkey or ice cream.
They sit there.
Three people will vote for the monkey, in fact, scream with the monkey, do the dance with the monkey, and put flags of the monkey in the back of their truck.
One person will vote for ice cream.
The other person could vote for ice cream OR for the monkey, but it doesn't even matter because those five people who didn't vote for anything basically ensured that we got a monkey with a knife.

So yeah. Yay. Go democracy.

The Dolly of it All

 In the novel We Sold Our Souls, there is a moment where two characters with very strong opinions about music spend a long time trying to find anything they can both listen to without one of them seething. The only musician they can agree on is Dolly Parton. They put her music on, and both of them become happy. That was how it worked with Dolly.

Dolly wrote in a way that was true, open, vulnerable, and raw. All of it was delivered with a remarkable emotional clarity. She wrote about love with a self-reflective honesty that examined flawed patterns without judgment and invited listeners to choose better for themselves. She wrote about poverty in a way that was frank and real without ever being exploitative. She did not romanticize hardship. She dignified the struggle, the resourcefulness, and the strength of those who lived through it.

At the same time, Dolly used what she had to create pathways for people who were struggling. Millions of children own their favorite book because of her Imagination Library. She believed that fortune meant making a difference in as many lives as possible.

Dolly had a body shaped in a way that was automatically sexualized by the culture around her. I cannot say how this affected her private thoughts. What I do know is that she transcended that labeling so completely that she reclaimed any image or branding that might have been used to diminish her. Whenever someone tried to reduce her to her very obvious bust size, her response was essentially, “Oh yeah, hon. Sure. Now that we have that out of the way, look at all this other amazing stuff I can do.”

And that amazing stuff included a voice that sounded like sunlight reflecting golden on a flowing stream. It included writing iconic songs. It included playing multiple instruments. It included collaborations with other musicians. It included acting in several beloved and culturally significant roles. It included writing a Tony-nominated musical. It included a wig line and various lifestyle brands. It included business ventures, including Dollywood, a theme park that people adore.

Dolly was not naturally blonde. In her private life, she did not dress like a music star. The big blonde hair and the elaborate costumes were for her public appearances. She did this so she could keep her private life private and her loved ones safer. This says a great deal about her thoughtfulness and her sense of personal responsibility.

And that public persona carried a very specific energy. Dolly exuded joy. Dolly exuded acceptance. Dolly exuded a sense that you were welcome and that she saw the good in you.

Now we live in a world without her. That reality is profoundly sad. She leaves behind a legacy of actions that made the world better. That is amazing and rare. It is especially remarkable considering she was once an eighteen-year-old poor kid stepping off a Greyhound bus in Nashville with no idea how things would turn out but with a great deal of faith in her own abilities. We are all fortunate that the young woman who arrived in Nashville believed in herself.

Goodbye, Dolly. You will be missed. I will always love you.

Breaking the Cycle

 In my private women’s group on Facebook, someone posted about how proud they were that the younger generation of women are no longer tolerating the things that used to be considered normal. They are not tolerating violence, neglect, uselessness, or the lack of connection. It is genuinely wonderful to see. But in the comments, many women my age and older began blaming themselves for staying in bad situations as long as they did.

Since seeing that thread, I have thought a lot about the conversation. Not just about the original post, but about the comments from women asking themselves why they allowed certain things, why they stayed, and why they did not leave earlier. The truth is that leaving damage is incredibly difficult because most of us have a strong sense of hope and faith in people’s ability to change. And when it comes to men, the bar for what needs to change has historically been very low.

This is not a flaw in who we are. It is a flaw built into the system. It is the culture we were raised in, the examples we were given, and the messages sent to us both out loud and silently. Many of us are mothers and grandmothers who actively tell younger women not to repeat the patterns we lived through. We explain why. We talk about the actual damage done. But how many of us had mothers who did that for us. Some. How many had grandmothers who did that. Again, some, but not many.

In my own situation, my mother was essentially a cautionary tale. She moved from one disastrous relationship to another with such consistency that it almost became impressive. It takes effort to find men who do not just slip below the bar of tolerable but sink so far beneath it that they are practically buried in the dirt. I do not blame her for this. I know her history and the abuse she suffered. From my own experiences with mental illness, I understand hers. I know why she self soothed with substances and why she believed she was not worthy of decent partners. I know why she thought that if she could prove she was worth changing for, even to a terrible partner, then maybe she was worthy of love at all.

I have studied pictures of her at nineteen and realized that this is where I began. In this broken, damaged child. Understanding that does not erase or excuse the pain her children suffered, but it does allow me to heal through the situation.

My mother was part of a cycle. A cycle of untreated mental illness passed down through generations. A cycle of manipulation. Her father was, by all accounts, considered a good man. And in many ways he was. He met the basic bar for men and even went beyond it. He worked a steady job, provided for his family, was calm, did not drink or use drugs, and although he smoked, that was not considered an issue at the time. He was soft spoken, steady, and did not create a home full of nervous energy. He was a good Christian, a deacon of his church, helpful, humble, kind, caring, and would never have considered raising a violent hand to anyone. All of these things were true. None of it was fake.

But people are complicated, and another truth existed alongside all of that. He valued his birth family more than the family he created. He bought his parents a home before he built his own. When he finally built his own home, he placed it within a two minute walk of his parents so he could be there at any time. He paid their bills. As advancements happened, his parents received them first. They had indoor plumbing and electricity before his wife and children did. Only when he had additional funds did his own household receive those things. It is strange to think about now, but in rural areas during the 1950s and 60s, this was still common.

He bought cars for his parents and his sister whenever they needed one. Always. Without fail. And while that may still sound generous, it came at a cost. His wife and children were always last on the list, and it was not only that they were last. My grandmother had to cook for his parents, clean for them, run their errands, and take them places. She essentially ran two households and was not compensated for any of it.

When my uncle was eight or nine, he was sent to work at the general store his grandfather owned. The store was across the street, so he walked over after school and worked until eight every night, then worked full shifts on weekends. He was not paid. This continued for roughly eight years.

When my grandfather’s father died in the early 1960s, his mother asked for companionship. In response, my grandfather sent my mother to live with her. For some people, living with a grandmother would have been ideal. I wish it could have been that for my mother. It was not. It was servitude. My grandmother still did most of the domestic labor in her mother in law’s home, but my mother did the rest. Until she was around twelve, she was not required to cook, but she had to serve meals and wash everything afterward. She had to keep the house spotless. She once told me that her grandmother would walk through the house several times each evening, and if anything was out of order, my mother would be hit.

Her grandmother was verbally and physically violent. Often. Viciously. And my grandfather knew this. He allowed it. He created the situation that made it possible.

So was he a good man. Yes. No. It is true that his parents raised him to value them first, but at some point, when you see bruises on your child’s legs, something inside you should recognize that the situation must stop.

My point in telling this story is that my grandmother saw the patterns. She spoke up about how wrong the situation was. She did so often and loudly. For her efforts, she was labeled a nagging woman. And nothing changed.

When I was born, and the abusive grandmother died in the same year, my grandmother made decisions. She spoke to me about how things worked. She did not simply suggest that I choose differently. She insisted on it. I was fortunate to have someone who told me directly that the patterns could and should be broken. Not everyone gets that.

Modern girls walk away now. They do not allow certain behaviors to begin in the first place. They do not fear being alone because they understand that alone, for women, is often another word for peaceful and quiet. They understand that alone is misleading anyway, because people can have friends, family, roommates, and even their own children without involving a walking red flag in the matter.

They understand these things because they grew up with the message, spoken and unspoken, that they have personal value that does not depend on others. They learned that they have the right to safety, comfort, and peace. They learned that they are enough on their own.

You who raised the next generations deserve credit for telling them that the cycles should be broken. You showed them the beauty and value of independence and freedom. You worked hard to find your own healing, footing, and sense of self. I commend all of you for that.

TL;DR: We were shaped by the generations before us, but we are the ones who shape the future.