Roots and Ripples

What We Inherit, What We Carry,

and What We Choose Not to Pass On

By Lisa Franco Alexander

For most of my life, I thought healing required me to decide which version of the story was true. Was my father a loving father, or was he the father whose punishments sometimes left marks on my body and memories that never left me? Was my husband a loving husband, or was he the man who lashed me and caused me serious harm? Were they wounded people shaped by what happened to them, or were they adults responsible for what they did? Was forgiveness compassionate, or did forgiveness allow harmful patterns to continue?

I kept looking for the or. Maybe healing begins when we finally allow ourselves to say:

And.

My father loved me, and he hurt me. My husband loves me, and he has harmed me. They were once frightened, wounded little boys, and they became grown men responsible for their actions. Culture shaped them, and culture does not excuse harm. I can understand and hold accountable.

I can forgive and remember. I can have compassion for the child someone once was and protect myself from what that child learned to become. Perhaps the deepest work of breaking generational patterns begins when we stop demanding that complicated human beings fit neatly on one side of an either/or.

Because families have roots.

And what happens at those roots can create ripples that travel farther than anyone realizes.

The Things Children Learn Before They Have Words for Them

Long before children understand words like trauma, abandonment, addiction, emotional regulation or generational patterns, they are learning. They learn what happens when someone gets angry. They learn whether boys are allowed to cry. They learn whether mistakes bring conversation or punishment. They learn whether love feels safe.

They learn whether home is somewhere they can fall apart or somewhere they must remain constantly alert. They learn what adults do with fear. And sometimes, without anybody consciously deciding to teach them, children learn that pain is something families pass down. My husband and I grew up thousands of miles apart, in different cultures and extraordinarily different families. And yet, when I eventually looked beneath the differences, I discovered something hauntingly familiar.

We both knew what it was like to be children who got hit.

The Little Boy Who Learned to Expect the Lash

My husband grew up in Grenada. His childhood story is complicated, and it belongs to him. I don't want to turn his most painful experiences into a catalogue for strangers. But there are pieces of that history that matter to understanding the man I eventually loved. He experienced instability, separation, rejection and bullying very young.

He moved between caregivers and between islands. He knew what it was like to feel unwanted.

And punishment was physical.

Climb a mango tree when you weren't supposed to?

Lash.

Skip school after being humiliated because you didn't have shoes?

Lash.

Cry?

Lash. In Grenada, “a lash” means one hard strike given as physical punishment. It was language my husband grew up with because it was something he experienced again and again throughout his childhood. Again and again, the message entered a developing nervous system:

When something goes wrong, somebody gets lashed.

Understanding that does not excuse what happened decades later.

I need to say that plainly.

My husband never beat me.

Over fifteen years, there were incidents in which he gave me one lash. Those lashes were wrong. They were physical violence. And because they were to my head from an extraordinarily strong adult man, some caused serious injuries. I will not minimize that. But I will not exaggerate it either.

Saying my husband gave me a lash is true. Saying that he “beat me up,” “beat the hell out of me,” or “beat me almost to death” is not.

I know. I was there.

No childhood story makes those lashes acceptable. No culture makes them acceptable. No addiction makes them acceptable. No amount of love makes them acceptable.

But accuracy matters too.

Understanding the root does not erase the ripple.

But if we are ever going to understand how cycles of violence travel through generations, I believe we have to be willing to ask something beyond:

What did this person do?

We also have to ask:

What happened to this person long before this moment? What had they been taught about anger, fear, punishment and conflict before they were old enough to question any of it?

Those questions do not remove responsibility. They help us find the roots. And if we want to change what continues rippling through generations, perhaps the roots are exactly where we need to begin.

And Then There Was the Little Girl in California

My childhood looked nothing like my husband's from the outside. But violence doesn't require identical geography to teach similar lessons. My father had grown up in Hawaiʻi in a poor family. He told me stories of the physical punishment he experienced as a child. One story has remained with me all my life.

He told me his father once punished him severely for something his sister had done. When the mistake was discovered afterward, there wasn't an apology. The response was essentially: That's for something else you did that I never found out about. Years later, my father would tell me that story after punishing me for something my brother had done.

The ripple had traveled.

I grew up knowing the welts of the strap. The cold, sharp shock that made my skin jump when the buckle landed. The tight, tearing pull of rosebush branches. The unmistakable snap and burning sting of an orange Hot Wheels track against bare skin. Whatever happened to be within reach.

Other children knew too. My best friend lived across the street. She and her brothers could hear it. My cousins witnessed it. Sometimes they cried for me because they knew what was happening.

One of my earliest memories of that fear happened when I was four years old. My brother was in kindergarten. That's how I can still place my age. Some of my cousins were visiting when I did something silly in the front yard, and my mother gave me the sentence I already understood:

“You're gonna get it when your father comes home.”

My older cousin Daryl tried to help me.

“Go get a dinner plate and put it in your pants. Then you won't feel the strap. That's what I do when my dad spanks me.”

Daryl was a child too. She didn't know that the plates in our house weren't plastic. Neither did four-year-old me understand why that mattered. When I heard my father's truck pulling up, I ran into the kitchen and grabbed my favorite dinner plate—the one with the yellow daisies. It was glass.

I put it inside my pants. My father came home. The strap came down. And the plate shattered. I can still remember that moment.

At four years old, I didn't understand that I had been trying to protect myself. All I knew was that I had broken my favorite plate. I had done something else wrong, and I was terrified of what would happen next. Only now do I understand another part of that memory. My eight-year-old cousin Daryl had just taught four-year-old me how she protected herself from the strap.

Two little girls were already sharing strategies for protecting themselves from physical punishment. Neither of us could possibly have understood that our fathers were brothers who had grown up beneath the same family tree. The roots were older than either of us. And the ripples were already reaching another generation. Physical punishment wasn't the only thing I carried forward from childhood.

I learned something else:

Because I was considered capable, more was expected of me. A disappointing grade wasn't merely a disappointing grade. A mistake wasn't merely a mistake. Being loud, social, opinionated—the little girl who eventually earned the nickname Hurricane—could bring consequences too. I became an accomplished swimmer.

I trained before school and after school. I won trophies. My parents never came to a single swim meet. They never came to the annual awards banquets where I received those trophies. I walked home carrying them myself.

Swimming wasn't the only place where being “capable” became an expectation. As a teenager, my father enrolled me in modeling school. I did well there too. I graduated. I participated in photo shoots and eventually a modeling show.

Nobody from my family came to that either. Eventually, I walked away from modeling just as I had walked away from swimming. And once again, I carried the feeling that I had disappointed my father by abandoning something everyone believed I had the ability to become. So I learned several things simultaneously:

Achieve. Don't fail. Be strong. Try harder. Don't waste what you're capable of.

And perhaps somewhere inside all of that:

If something is broken, fix it. If someone is hurting, help them. If someone you love is falling, try harder.

That last lesson would follow me for decades.

The Rosary

There is another memory I have carried since childhood. After my father spanked me, he would gather the family around his bed.

My mother. My siblings. Me.

And we would kneel together and pray the rosary aloud. If I cried too much when it became my turn, I might hear:

“I'll give you something to cry about.”

And sometimes the punishment would begin again. For years, I understood those rosaries primarily as part of the experience surrounding the violence. And then, while putting these memories into words, something occurred to me that had never occurred to me before.

What if my father was praying too?

Not simply making us pray.

What if this deeply Catholic man, who had just repeated something that had been done to him as a child, was reaching for the only language of repentance and forgiveness he knew?

I cannot know that.

My father is gone, and I cannot ask him. And that possibility does not change what happened to the little girl kneeling beside that bed. But I can allow another possibility into the story now. Maybe the man who hurt me also knew that something inside him needed forgiveness.

And then I realized something else.

Something that stopped me cold.

Years Later, Another Rosary

Every time my husband hurt me, afterward he cried.

Every time.

Sometimes he disappeared alone into the forest. When we lived aboard our boat, sometimes he would take the dinghy and disappear onto the open water. He would cry. He would pray. And again and again, he would bring me my rosary and ask me to pray.

Until I began writing this, I had never consciously connected those two things.

My father. My husband. Two men from completely different worlds. Two histories. Two cultures. Two wounded childhoods.

And after causing harm, both reached toward prayer. My husband later wanted to buy beautiful rosaries for my grandchildren. When he was in rehabilitation, he asked me to bring rosaries to him. And now I wonder whether what I was witnessing all those years was something neither man knew how to put into the language I needed:

Please pray for me. Please ask God to forgive me. Maybe even: Please help me become somebody different from what I just became.

I don't know.

But I know this:

Remorse is real. And remorse alone does not break a cycle.

Someone can be profoundly sorry. Someone can cry. Someone can pray. Someone can mean every word of an apology. Someone can love the person they hurt.

And without learning another way to respond when fear, anger, shame, addiction or dysregulation takes over, the pattern can happen again.

Forgiveness and change are not the same thing.

We need both.

The Day the Ripple Reached Me

Then I became a mother.

When my little boy was five years old, I spanked him.

Once.

And I have never forgotten a single second of it.

Even now, I don't simply remember that room. I can still be in it. I can still see that room. The sunlight coming through the window into his colorful bedroom. His bottom bunk bed.

I can hear the sounds around us. And most of all, I can see Mickey. He was five years old. I had gotten the strap, just as my father had done with me, and told my little boy to lie down on his bed because he was going to get a spanking. And he did.

He lay there looking at me with a fear in his eyes that I have never forgotten. Desperate fear. The kind of fear I knew. I had the strap in my hand. And I couldn't do it.

I could not use that strap on my baby. Somewhere between what I had been taught and what I was about to teach my own child, something inside me refused. I put the strap down. But I still believed he needed to be disciplined. So I raised my hand to give him one spank on his bottom.

And in the split second as my hand came down, everything inside me screamed:

STOP.

I tried. But momentum had already taken my hand where I suddenly, desperately did not want it to go. And then it happened.

One spank.

One moment.

And immediately, I was flooded with something I can still feel when I return to that room.

Shame.

Absolute shame.

Dread.

Fear.

Guilt.

I wasn't thinking about whatever my five-year-old had done anymore. I was looking at my little boy and realizing what I had just done. Something that had traveled through generations had reached my hand. And I was horrified. I didn't just cry.

I crumbled. I curled myself into a ball, buried my face and sobbed. And then something happened that I don't believe I could forget if I lived a thousand years. My five-year-old son came to me. He wrapped his little-boy arms around me.

My face was buried, so he kissed the top of my hair. And he said:

“It's okay, Mommy. I'm okay, Mommy.”

My child was comforting me.

I can still feel those little arms. And perhaps that's why I remember the moment with such extraordinary clarity. Because something changed in me there. I knew what it was like to be the frightened child. And now, for one terrible moment, I had seen fear in my own child's eyes.

I could not undo that moment. But I could decide what happened after it.

The ripple had reached me.

And I decided it would not leave me unchanged.

Something had traveled through generations and reached my hand. And I didn't want it traveling any farther.

My little boy actually came to comfort me.

Afterward, we did something very different from what I had known as a child. We sat down together and created another way. We talked about things children sometimes do wrong—lying, ignoring homework, skipping chores, getting into trouble at school. And together we decided what reasonable consequences would be. We wrote them on a poster board and hung it on the wall.

It became our agreement. If this happened, this would be the consequence. No anger deciding the punishment in the heat of the moment. No reaching for whatever was nearby. No child wondering what was coming.

To my surprise, Mickey's suggestions were often harsher than mine. He might suggest a month. I'd say, “How about a week?” But the important thing wasn't the number of days. The important thing was that nobody was going to get hit.

I wasn't a perfect mother. I didn't become magically healed from everything that had happened to me. But something changed.

I had put down the strap.

And then my little boy and I had sat together and figured out what we were going to pick up instead.

The ripple had reached me.

But it would not pass through me unchanged.

Forgiving My Father Didn’t End the Story

When my son was born, something else happened. I forgave my father. Not because my childhood suddenly became acceptable. Not because the memories disappeared. And certainly not because I decided that what had happened to me was something a child deserved.

I had begun to understand that my father had once been someone's little boy too. He had inherited things. He had carried things. And some of those things had reached me. But forgiveness did not mean allowing them to reach my son.

I told my father very clearly:

“If you ever physically punish my child, you will never see him again.”

He never did. But saying only that my father never hurt my son misses almost everything important about what happened next. My father became one of my son's greatest mentors and heroes. My dad had three daughters and one son. My brother had three daughters.

Mickey was his only grandson. And Grandpa Franco poured something entirely different into that little boy. They spent Saturdays watching NCAA football together. My father was a lifelong Notre Dame fan, and somewhere during all those Saturdays beside his grandfather, Mickey developed a dream of attending The Ohio State University. And eventually he did.

He became a student there and played rugby there. More importantly, Mickey became the first of my father's descendants to attend a university and earn a university degree.

The first.

Some of us followed afterward. But Mickey went first. And he didn't inherit only Grandpa's love of football. He inherited his fascination with history. My father could tell stories for hours.

He talked about growing up in Hawaiʻi. He talked about war. He talked about military service. He talked about what service to your country meant to him. Mickey listened.

And listened. And listened. Eventually, my son became a history major. He also grew up with enormous respect for people in uniform. He learned from his grandfather to shake their hands and thank them for their service.

As a teenager, Mickey wanted to enter the military himself. That terrified me, his mother. Ultimately, his own path to service took another direction. He became a firefighter and first responder, eventually working in highly specialized technical and water rescue. The grandson who had listened to Grandpa talk about service grew into a man whose career became rescuing other people.

I don't know that either of them ever thought of those things as ripples. But I do now. And there was one trip that perhaps captures their relationship better than I ever could by simply describing it. When Mickey was seventeen, the new World War II Memorial was opening in Washington, D.C. My father wanted his only grandson beside him.

There was one rather enormous problem. It was Mickey's senior-prom weekend. He had a longtime girlfriend. She had her dress. They had their plans.

And Mickey wanted desperately to do both. So somehow, with flights through Buffalo, countless hours of driving and one very determined mother, he did. Mickey flew to Washington and spent time there with his grandfather. Then I got him back for prom. He changed in the car while I drove, and I arrived at his girlfriend's house with his tuxedo and flowers just before the limousine (they had a bus!) After prom and the after-party, we turned around and did it all again so he could catch an early flight back to Washington.

Grandpa was waiting.

My son went back because attending that memorial with his grandfather mattered that much to him. And years later, I would give my father something else I don't think either of them ever forgot. It was one day that seemed to capture everything about the bond between them. Mickey was playing rugby for The Ohio State University when his team traveled to play Notre Dame—the university my father had loved and cheered for his entire life. For perhaps the only time in his life, my diehard Notre Dame father cheered against Notre Dame.

He cheered for his grandson. Ohio State won. And Mickey had an extraordinary game with his grandfather there watching him. But their day wasn't over. That same day, Ohio State and Notre Dame were also facing each other in football.

This time, they walked into the Notre Dame Stadium together. And my fiercely loyal Ohio State son did something equally extraordinary. He cheered for Notre Dame with his Grandpa. Notre Dame won. Two men with lifelong loyalties to opposite teams had each crossed the line for the other.

Grandpa had cheered against his beloved Notre Dame for Mickey. Mickey had cheered against his beloved Ohio State for Grandpa. Maybe that sounds like a small thing to someone who doesn't understand college sports.

It wasn't.

It was love.

Grandpa and grandson. Notre Dame and Ohio State. Two Francos. Two generations. And an entirely different kind of inheritance.

Mickey's connection to his grandfather became something he literally carried on his body. At fifteen, he tattooed his grandfather's initials onto himself. Later came the Hawaiʻi flag and the words:

“Franco no ka oi.”

Franco is the best.

My father had spent his childhood receiving one kind of inheritance from the generation before him. He passed some of that pain to me. And then he passed something different to my son.

History. Service. Pride in his heritage. Football Saturdays. Stories. Mentorship. Belonging.

Love.

Maybe some of it was penance. Maybe none of it was. I cannot know what lived inside my father's heart. But I know what I witnessed. The man whose physical punishments had frightened his daughter became the grandfather his grandson admired, trusted, listened to and wanted to emulate.

That doesn't rewrite my childhood. And my childhood doesn't erase what my father became to my son.

There is our “and” again.

Two truths that would be much easier to understand if I chose only one. My father hurt me, and my father loved me. I forgave him, and I established a boundary. He carried painful things from his own childhood, and he eventually demonstrated that they did not all have to continue. He could not change what had already reached his daughter.

But something different reached his grandson. And perhaps that is another way a generational cycle begins to change. Not because someone erases the roots. Not because everyone pretends the painful ripples never happened. But because somewhere along the family line, something different finally gets passed forward.

Forgiveness Is Not Permission

Years later, during one of the most painful periods of my life, I encountered Ho'oponopono. I was living through estrangement from my son and grandchildren while also trying desperately to understand my husband's addictions. I studied constantly. Part of me was still trying to rescue him. If I could understand the disease, understand trauma, understand what had happened to the little boy before he became the man I loved—perhaps I could somehow find the thing that would finally help him heal.

But I was also searching in another direction.

Backward.

Toward my own roots. I had always been deeply drawn to my Hawaiian heritage, its history and traditions. So when I discovered Hoʻoponopono, the language was new to me, but something underneath it felt as though it had been waiting for me. Hoʻoponopono is sometimes reduced to four familiar phrases:

I love you.

I'm sorry.

Please forgive me.

Thank you.

But I came to understand that its traditional meaning reaches much deeper. It is about putting things right.

Prayer. Acknowledgment. Repentance. Forgiveness. Restitution. Restoring what can be restored.

Bringing what has become disordered back toward pono—toward what is right.

And I needed that distinction desperately.

Because by then, forgiveness itself had become complicated for me. I wondered whether my willingness to forgive my husband had helped other people see me as weak. I even wondered whether my daughter-in-law judged me for forgiving him—and whether that had contributed in some way to losing my family. I couldn't know what lived in another person's mind. But I knew what lived in mine.

And if I believed forgiveness mattered when someone hurt me, then I had to wrestle with an uncomfortable question: Could I offer forgiveness even to someone I believed had taken something immeasurably precious from me?

I chose to try.

Not because what happened didn't matter. Not because I stopped grieving. Not because forgiveness guaranteed reconciliation. And not because forgiving someone gave them permission to hurt me again. I began to understand forgiveness as something different.

I did not have to carry another person's actions inside me forever in order to prove that those actions had hurt. One day, I attended a yoga class in a park. We introduced ourselves, and people spoke about what had brought them there—what they were carrying, what they were trying to quiet. I spoke about estrangement. Alienation.

My husband's addiction. And when I left that park, with the breeze moving through the trees, something inside me felt certain. I went directly to a tattoo shop. And I had one word tattooed onto my arm:

Ho'oponopono.

I had studied it. I would eventually become certified and practice it. But first, I carried it on my body. And then came a moment I could never have planned. After many months apart, my husband contacted me unexpectedly.

There were a thousand things I could have said.

Questions. Accusations. Anger. Pain.

Instead, the first words that came from me were:

“I love you.

I'm sorry.

Please forgive me.

Thank you.”

And without preparation, without knowing what I was going to say beforehand, he answered:

“I love you too. I'm sorry. Please forgive me too.”

That moment did not cure addiction.

It did not erase what had happened. It did not make everything safe. And it did not magically repair our lives. But it taught me something about the kind of forgiveness I wanted to practice. For me, forgiveness does not mean:

It didn't matter.

It does not mean:

Do it again.

It does not mean:

You don't have to take responsibility.

And it certainly does not mean:

I must continue placing myself where I can be harmed.

I can forgive my father without pretending the strap did not hurt. I can understand my husband's childhood without pretending his lashes did not harm me. I can have compassion for the children they once were while holding the adults they became accountable for what they did. And I can seek forgiveness for my own mistakes without believing that remorse alone makes everything right. Because Hoʻoponopono taught me something larger than forgiveness.

Putting something right requires more than saying you're sorry.

Understanding is not excusing.

Forgiveness is not permission.

Compassion is not the absence of boundaries.

Accountability does not require hatred.

And perhaps most importantly:

Forgiveness does not require reconciliation.

Sometimes making something right means rebuilding a relationship. Sometimes it means changing your own behavior. Sometimes it means making restitution. Sometimes it means establishing a boundary. And sometimes it means loving someone while accepting that you cannot safely walk beside them anymore.

The goal isn't to pretend the ripple never happened.

The goal is to decide what happens when it reaches you.

Roots and Ripples

Families have roots.

Some are beautiful.

Faith. Tradition. Humor. Resilience. Music. Food. Stories.

Community. Love.

And some roots grow through very painful soil.

Poverty. Violence. Abandonment. Addiction. Shame. Fear. Silence.

Children absorb all of it.

Then those children grow up.

They become parents.

Partners. Grandparents.

And unless somebody becomes curious about what is happening beneath the surface, yesterday's survival strategies can become tomorrow's family wounds. That's why I no longer believe healing is about finding the villain in the family tree. Neither is it about absolving everyone who came before us. Maybe healing begins with having enough courage to look backward and say:

I see the roots.

To look around and say:

I see the ripples.

To look inward and say:

I see what reached me.

And then to look toward the generations coming after us and decide:

What reaches me does not have to pass through me unchanged.

Maybe that is how cycles finally begin to break.

Not through hatred. Not through pretending. Not through rewriting history. Through awareness. Accountability. Compassion. Boundaries.

Forgiveness.

And the willingness to learn something our ancestors may never have been taught.

Another way.

Because perhaps healing isn't either/or after all.

Perhaps it is another and.

We can remember and heal. We can forgive and protect ourselves. We can understand and hold accountable.

We can love the people who came before us and refuse to repeat everything they gave us.

We can honor our roots... and change the direction of the ripples. And as I finish writing this, I realize there is one more ripple I hadn't seen until now. My family has been writing its history on our bodies for generations.

Some of the first marks left on mine were not chosen. Welts from the strap. The burning sting of a Hot Wheels track. The cold, sharp shock that made my skin jump when the buckle landed. The tight, stiff skin around the red-beaded punctures.

Those marks eventually disappeared from my skin. But what caused them remained. Then one day, years later, I stood over my own five-year-old child with that same inheritance in my hand. The strap. And I put it down.

I didn't know the word Hoʻoponopono then. I didn't know the language of generational cycles that I know now. I was simply a mother looking into the terrified eyes of her little boy and knowing: This does not get to keep going. Years passed. That little boy grew into a man who chose marks of his own.

At fifteen, Mickey tattooed his grandfather's initials onto his body. Later came the flag of Hawaiʻi and the words: Franco no ka oi. The grandfather who had passed pain into one generation had also passed history, pride, service, belonging, and love into another. And eventually, I chose a mark of my own. After that day beneath the trees, I walked into a tattoo shop and had one Hawaiian word placed permanently on my arm:

Hoʻoponopono.

To make right.

And only now, writing all of this, do I see the connection.

I once carried marks made by what my family had handed down to me. Now I carry a mark I chose for what I want to hand forward.

Maybe that is what healing a family line looks like.

Not erasing our fathers. Not condemning our ancestors. Not pretending the wounds weren't wounds. Not confusing forgiveness with permission. But looking honestly at what reached us and deciding:

This I will carry. This I will forgive. This I will change. And this ends with me.

We cannot choose all of our roots.

But we can choose what grows from them.

Roots are what we receive.

Ripples are what we send forward.

— Lisa Franco Alexander

Founder | Heart's Renewal

Life After Complicated Loss™

Rediscover Peace · Purpose · Wholeness