It was a typical Wednesday evening. The kids had just gotten home, and we were deep in the post-school vortex of homework, playtime, screen time, and the daily exchange where parents beg for any crumb of information about their children’s day.
I was cleaning up while the kids colored at the dining table. The iPads hummed in the background with some combination of “Zombies” and YouTube Kids.
Then my daughter Millie padded over, holding something behind her back, and handed it to me.
My stomach dropped before as I made sense of the blocky first-grade letters my six-year-old had penciled onto an index card.
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“I am sad and I do not know why.”
I marveled at her handwriting and how much she had already learned in first grade. She looked up at me with wide brown eyes. Expecting… what? Answers?
I froze. Was this a moment? Was this the beginning of something bigger — childhood depression, anxiety, a shadow forming in the shape of mental health issues?
I panicked and did what mothers do when we have no clue how to hold something so heavy — we turn to snacks. I told her I’d be right back, ducked into the kitchen, and stared into the cabinet.
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That’s when it hit me: the weight of this moment wasn’t hers, it was mine. Millie wasn’t panicked. She knew about feelings — we have plenty of books about them on our bookshelves. There’s the Little Feminist Book Clubs’ “Little Faces Big Feelings,” which shows us what emotions feel like. “The Color Monster” teaches us almost nightly what to do when our feelings get all jumbled up.
And we’ve talked about feelings before, of course:
“How do you feel?”
“Use your words.”
“You dropped your ice cream cone. It’s OK to be sad.”
But never like this. Never in such a seemingly huge way. Never initiated by her, out of the blue, and delivered like an admission.
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I didn’t ask her then why she wrote it on a card instead of just telling me. I wonder if saying it out loud might’ve felt too big. Or maybe it was just easier that way. Safer. Or maybe it was just about something silly, like a squabble with her sibling.
We sat and talked together over tiny, smiling Goldfish crackers. The conversation went nowhere and everywhere all at once, and that moment cracked something open in me.
I began to revisit our family’s stories in my mind — the mental health of generations past and present that lived in whispers, that popped up through the lineage of our history. Addiction. Overdoses. Anxiety. Depression. Avoidance. Co-Dependence.
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My mom was 9 when her mother, Frances, tried to kill herself. She survived, only for cancer to take her life many years later. Still, she was never the same. She was in and out of mental health facilities, unraveling and coming home to relearn how to mother and how to live. Because of this, my mom essentially raised her baby sister for three years.
I think about my namesake and I try to focus on all of the beautiful stories my mom has told me about her, but I keep coming back to how sad she must have been on the day she tried to die.
Sometimes I imagine my mom making breakfast for her 2-and-a-half-year-old sister before school while also needing to prepare for a math test. I imagine her looking out the window, wondering if today was the day her mother would come home. If she would be the same. If she’d remember how to mother.
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I wonder what it did to her, wanting to fall apart but having to keep it together. She and her sisters asked what was going on with Frances. There were no explanations. “We’ll talk about it when you’re older,” they were told. Everything else was just silence.
So, when Millie handed me that card, I felt the weight of all those unspoken words — my mother’s, my grandmother’s, maybe even my own. That single index card written by my daughter sent me spiraling into the past, to the generations of women in my family who struggled quietly with mental health, to the trauma and unraveling they endured, and made me confront a big question:
Can emotional pain be passed down like eye color?
The question sits inside of me like stone.
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Motherhood complicates my own mental health because my responsibility extends beyond my own mind. My heart lives outside my body at all times — inside my little girl and my little boy. I feel their joy as much as I feel their pain. I feel what they feel, and I feel responsible for helping them understand their own emotions.
That night, after I put both kids to bed, I fell into the internet hole every parent knows: the desperate search for answers to impossible questions. I wanted to understand how to help Millie and how to help myself. Was this just a feeling? Or something deeper?
Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across the term “emotional inheritance” — the idea that trauma can be passed down through families, even if we don’t talk about it. It rang true for me, not in a clinical way, but in the way truth sometimes echoes in your bones. In this phrase, I felt my panic validated.
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In her book “Emotional Inheritance,” psychoanalyst Galit Atlas explores how past experiences, from interpersonal rifts to large-scale tragedies, can echo through families, shaping the emotional lives of next generations.
Another expert, neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda, adds a biological dimension to the phenomenon. Her research shows that trauma can leave actual chemical markers on DNA, altering how genes are expressed and predisposing future generations to conditions like depression and anxiety, even if they haven’t lived through the trauma themselves. Apparently, trauma can be biologically encoded in the body’s molecular code. If this is true, it complicates matters for my own motherhood. Trauma may not be just what my children hear or witness — it could also be what they are made of.
As a parent, I often feel both entirely responsible for my children’s emotional well-being and completely powerless to protect them from the weight of what they may have inherited.
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“Everything that’s ever happened to a person shapes their parenting,” author Emily Adrian writes in “Daughterhood.”
That’s a terrifying thought. But also a motivating one. Because if trauma can echo through generations, maybe healing can, too.
Some days I turn to my personal “motherhood doula,” Dr. Becky — a clinical psychologist, mom of three, and my favorite Instagram follow for parenting truths that don’t make me feel worse about how I’m momming.
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She says things like, “Your child’s big feelings don’t make you a bad parent. They make you a good one.” Usually, when I am parent-spiraling, her phrases help pull me back to center.
One thing she advises that I keep coming back to is: Don’t protect your child from hard feelings. Make space for them. Normalize them. Name them. I believe this is how we raise kids who are resilient, not because they never feel pain, but because they know how to feel it and keep going. This is true regarding big, capital-T trauma, but also the everyday annoyance we encounter.
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I first worried that the index card Millie gave me was a warning sign. But I now believe it was something else: a gift. It gave me a chance to respond. To say, “Sadness is OK. You don’t have to be afraid of it. You’re not broken. Feelings aren’t something to run from. Let’s figure out what’s going on.”
So, going forward, when my daughter or my son is feeling sad, or blue, or any other tough and possibly mixed-up emotion, we’ll talk. We won’t shy away from anything. And if words aren’t enough, we’ll find help together. Whatever it takes, we’ll face the feeling not alone, but side by side.
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Frani Chung is a writer exploring the intersections of motherhood, womanhood, and resilience — where they converge, conflict, and transform us. A mom of two, she balances her work in integrated brand marketing with a relentless pursuit of the perfect bite, an insatiable love for entertainment and pop culture, and the ever-elusive art of staying present. She is a passionate advocate for reproductive rights and awareness. Connect with her at franichung.com and on Instagram @flieb.
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