Everybody who comes into this world gets caught up in the cycles that people around them are fighting. There’s no way you can avoid dealing with the problems that your parents and family have probably inherited from their parents and family. But I know that you don’t have to spend your life trapped in those cycles. You can finish them and move forward.
-- Bertice Berry, Ph.D.

You never knew the presence or support of a father. You never knew what it felt like to be covered and cared for by a loving dad who protected and provided for you and showed you daily what it took for two adults to successfully communicate and work together to make a home comfortable and safe, and life pleasant and enjoyable. You never saw your mother slow down, breathe, and let go even a little because she had a partner she could depend on, and you never saw her held and loved and happy and made to feel beautiful, interesting, and important by a father who not only loved her womanly ways, but also loved who she was as a person.

So now, lying in your arms is an 8 pound newborn, gentle, delicate, and in need of her father’s brand of comfort and love. You have no idea how to give it and much less about where to reach inside yourself and pull it from. You’re scared, just as your father was, and you want to hand the baby back to her mama and run, just like your father did. Only you remember the emptiness and abandon you felt growing up without your father around and know you’d not wish that kind of pain and confusion on anyone. Looking at this little precious one, thinking of the first smile, the first words, birthdays, school days, boyfriend days, sad and happy days to come, you decide right then and there that the cycle of fatherlessness in your family ends with you, no matter how scary and awesome this responsibility is, or how clueless and inept you feel just holding this fragile little life you helped create in your hands. At that moment, your father, his absent father, and all the others in your life who walked away are redeemed and set free.

There are so many damaging cycles in our lives worth breaking, whether they are those passed down or those we’ve created and imposed upon ourselves. The power to change our thinking and behavior is always with us, as long as we recognize the dysfunction and disservice of the cycles we perpetuate. Whether it’s something simple like cutting off the butt of the roast because mama and grandmamma did; being the first in a long line of family members to move out of public or subsidized housing into your own home; saving your money instead of spending every last dime on material possessions; or not leaving the scene (a job, relationship, the church, etc.) when things don’t go your way, but sticking around to make and see change, cycles can be broken so that those who watch us and those who come after us can have a fuller life, and we can move on to something more worthwhile, deserving, and meant exclusively for us.

Pay attention to the cycles in your life and determine whether they need to be alleviated so that you can move forward, instead of spinning the rest of your life like a hamster in a trance.

Sadiqqa © 2007