Parent & Survivor-Led Work & Initiatives

Losing her daughter put Lucy Hone's resilience research to the test. Parental bereavement is considered to be the hardest of all losses to bear , meaning that, when you lose a child, you are swamped with support—some of it helpful, some less so. In the days after the girls died, we were told we should expect to write off the next five years to grief, and handed pamphlets explaining how “grief is as individual as a fingerprint” and outlining Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief .

For mothers who experienced traumatic births, these birthdays are the cruelest of celebrations. We are supposed to smile and shower love on our children, and never admit that on these days we would really love to curl up in a ball and sob. We are not supposed to say that having our children took too high a toll on our physical and mental health. We are not supposed to mention just how badly our medical and social systems failed to support us when we needed it the most.

Four years ago, I decided to start a conversation about the long term impact of childhood abuse. More specifically, about what happens when those abused children grow up and have children of their own. When I had become a parent, I went looking for books on this topic, and I didn’t find anything. But I knew I couldn’t be the only one who was dealing with this. And once I found one other person who was willing to write about this, I said, let’s collect these stories. The stories of these...