A question recently posted on Threads stopped me cold: Would you choose your mother again in your

Someone replied: I would choose to be her mom this time. My girl deserves a soft childhood.

And wow. Because yes.

I wish my mother had a soft childhood. But she didn’t. Neither did her mother. And probably not the woman before her. My maternal line is paved in tough love, in survival masquerading as parenting, in silences that bruised as much as words ever could.

My grandmother wasn’t great. If I’m honest, she was hard in ways that bent my mother’s back before she even had a chance to grow into it. And my mother carried that same hardness into her own motherhood, often without meaning to. Generational trauma doesn’t just live in the body; it moves through the ways we nurture, the ways we punish, the ways we define “love.” It’s inherited, the way cheekbones or a bad knee are.

For Black women especially, “softness” has been a luxury history didn’t afford us. Enslavement, Jim Crow, segregation, and everyday racism demanded strength, demanded discipline, demanded armor. And so our mothers—out of love, out of fear—handed us armor before we could even spell the word. They thought it would save us. Sometimes, it did. Other times, it kept us from knowing tenderness at home, the one place it should have been guaranteed.

When I think about my mother, I know she did what she knew. She parented with the tools she was given, sharp edges and all. She loved me, but she was not always gentle. And sometimes, love without gentleness leaves wounds that take decades to heal.

I also think about how many Black mothers raise daughters not just to survive but to out-survive: outlast racism, outmaneuver sexism, outwork everyone else. But survival without joy is just another cage.

That’s why that answer on Threads hit so hard. To say, I would choose to be her mother this time is to imagine interrupting the cycle. To imagine giving your mother, or your daughter, what she never had: softness. Patience. The freedom to cry without being told to “stop all that noise.” The freedom to fail without it being proof of the world’s cruelty.

Breaking that cycle is not easy work. It means unlearning instincts that feel like tradition. It means questioning whether discipline is care, or just fear in disguise. It means asking ourselves: What would it look like to raise a child who doesn’t have to recover from her childhood?

That’s the work I’m trying to do with my two daughters and son. To be the mother I wish my mother had. To be the kind of soft landing I never knew. I don’t always get it right. Sometimes the old armor rattles in my voice, sharp where I mean to be tender. But the difference is, I know. I name it. I apologize. I try again.

Because generational trauma may be inherited, but so can healing. And maybe the most radical thing I can do in this lifetime is to ensure the next generation—my girl, your girl, every Black girl—doesn’t have to wonder whether they’d choose their mother again.