Strength passes from parent to child, and in our patriarchal society, it passes from mother to daughter like a sacred inheritance, but so does the shadow of trauma. For Armenians, like many other cultures, this legacy is both a blessing and burden carried forward through time. It flows through our blood, whispered in lullabies and shared over coffee cups filled with grounds that tell our fortunes. Each generation of women bear weights heavier than the mountains of our homeland – surviving genocide, fleeing across borders, facing forced marriages…the list is endless.

Some stories are too painful to share, their edges still sharp after generations. The trauma echoes through our bones, shaping how we love, how we fear, how we protect our children. Yet alongside it runs a river of resilience. Tales we polish like precious stones, holding them up to the light to see how they shine. My own ancestral history is no exception. A great-grandmother who survived genocide and was raised by a kind family from an enemy culture. A grandmother who refused an arranged marriage and ran away across borders to elope. Another grandmother who rebuilt her life with her six young children after her husband was brutally murdered, building a life from nothing but determination and hope. A mother with a critically ill husband who carried her children across an ocean to give them chances she never had. Each of these stories carries a burden of trauma, resilience, and overcoming all odds to ensure the survival of the next generation. I’ve focused on my female ancestors here, for my male ancestors have their own burdens and their own stories to tell, too large for this article.

We are the daughters of survivors, of women who turned trauma into triumph, even as they passed down their unspoken wounds. Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who came before, reaching higher because they held us up, learning to heal what they could not. In quiet moments, I feel their presence – all those strong women who wove their courage and their pain into our family’s tapestry, making each generation both stronger and more aware.

Their legacy lives in every choice we make to be brave, in every time we choose to rise instead of break, in every effort to understand and heal the wounds we’ve inherited. Through war and peace, through loss and love, through darkness and light – we endure. We persist. We heal. We thrive.

I choose to memorialize these wounds, these tragedies, these successes, through my storytelling. Within each story I write, there are tiny teardrops, seedlings and signs – a memory, a dream, a vision, a nightmare. You’ll find them interspersed within my novels. Truth and fiction dance together in the pages of Light Weaver, but which pieces are real? That secret stays with me.