She's Come Undone

Content Warning: This section contains descriptions of child sexual abuse, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, suicidal ideation, and self-harm.

Dolores’s life is shaped by the intergenerational trauma that is passed along through her family and by the healing that she undertakes to overcome the pain of not only her own past but of her family’s past, too.

The chain of effect, in Dolores’s knowledge, begins with Grandma, who lost her son when he was 18 and who never recovered from the loss. She reacted by shutting herself off from the world and turning to Catholicism. Bernice experienced the same loss in losing her only brother, compounded by being raised by a woman who sought to control her views and actions. Dolores spends time being raised by both her grandmother and mother, and in both cases, her mental health worsens with their presence and influence. Part of the intergenerational trauma in Dolores’s family relates to motherhood, the strain of this familial role, and the toll that losing a child takes on a mother. Like Grandma, Bernice loses a son, and she never seems to be the same afterward.

Dolores copes with her family’s trauma and her own by eating and isolating herself, reflecting her mother and grandmother’s own responses to pain and continuing a generational pattern.