Veronica Unfiltered

A Personal Reflection

By Veronica

There are parts of my story that begin before I could speak—before I could even breathe on my own. I’ve spent a long time trying to make sense of those beginnings. Not to judge them. But to understand the soil I sprouted from.

This chapter isn’t just about birth. It’s about legacy. Inheritance. Love wrapped in pain.

Here’s how it began.

A Choice Made in Uniform

It was August in Austin—thick heat pressing against the windows as I entered the world. Just four months earlier, mom had been honorably discharged from the Air Force; she refused to abort me. She traded in her uniform, her salary, and her housing. No marching orders could override her decision. She walked away from the military with a swollen belly and an unshakable conviction: I was worth it.

Home was wherever we landed next, not a place prepared for new beginnings.

But she had made her choice.

She did what she could.

What she knew.

What trauma had taught her.

And when I arrived early—sick, vulnerable, fighting to breathe—I believe she still held on to the hope that love would be enough.

The Early Arrival

I came a month too soon. Not quite ready, but already here.

They say stress does that—sends babies tumbling into the world before the calendar says it’s time. She was under pressure no one should carry alone. She was using drugs. There was chaos in her body and in her life. And I, tiny and unprepared, paid the toll for it.

There was no carefully decorated nursery waiting. No shower gifts or hand-me-down cribs. Just a fragile baby and lungs not yet ready for the world.

My mother said I was sickly. Vulnerable.

But she loved me.

In her own way, shaped by a life that hadn’t offered her many examples of nurturing, she showed up. Not perfectly. Not always gently. But she didn’t leave, not immediately anyway.

Her Trauma, My Inheritance

She had her own wounds—deep ones. Her childhood was a storm she never escaped.

Foster care. Abuse. Silence. Rape.

She was sexually assaulted by the man who was supposed to protect her—her foster father.

Generational trauma wrapped itself around her like a second skin.

By the time I was born, she was already broken in places I would never fully understand.

I lived in the aftermath.

Because the trauma never left her; it just shifted shapes. It made its way into how she accepted her partners, how she coped, and how she parented.

No Diagnosis, Just Damage

Mental illness ran through her unmedicated and unnamed.

No therapy. No diagnosis. No relief.

Only rage, withdrawal, unpredictability.

I didn’t know how to describe it as a child. I only knew that love came with sharp edges.

That safety didn’t live in our home.

And that sometimes, the person who gave you life could also be the one who made it feel unbearable.

Despite my mother’s undiagnosed mental health, trauma, pain, and limitations, she chose to bring me into this world.

Held and Unheld

I imagine her in the hospital, watching me through the plastic walls of an incubator. Wanting to hold me, but scared. Not just scared of hurting me—but maybe scared of failing me. Or of being seen. Or of what it meant to have brought another life into a world. A world that had already failed her so many times.

There’s a tenderness in that imagining.

A grief, too.

Love Complicated by Pain

She loved me. I know that. I’ve never questioned it.

But love mixed with unhealed trauma isn’t always soft.

Sometimes, it’s sharp around the edges.

Sometimes it withdraws.

Sometimes it breaks things before it can build them.

That was my introduction to love.

Real, but complicated.

What Ifs and Echoes

I think about how much lighter our story might have been—hers and mine—if the cycle had been interrupted.

If I had come into the world healthy, without fear.

If survival hadn’t been my first lesson.

I don’t ask these questions to place blame.

I ask them because they live in me—quiet, persistent echoes from the beginning.

Love was there.

But so was pain.

I’m still learning where one ends and the other begins.

✍🏾 If you’ve ever had to unlearn what love looked like…

If you’ve ever been born into pain and spent your life making meaning out of it, I see you.

Feel free to share your story in the comments—or simply sit with mine—in the middle.

There’s no rush.

Healing, after all, has its own timeline.