The greatest song about accepting your struggles as key to making you who you are, while also refusing to pass that generational trauma on to your own children, is Johnny Cash / Shel Silverstein’s “A Boy Named Sue”
*Bonus points for implicitly understanding the trauma of being misgendered.
The song to me feels more to be about how the intergenerational cycle of abuse isn’t a 1-to-1 transfer of trauma rather than being about any refusal to continue the cycle. Sue’s trauma is about chronic mocking/bullying resulting in an insecure need to prove his masculinity via violence. His father’s struggle isn’t specifically elaborated on but it’s clearly present and ultimately comes down to a similar relationship with violence/masculinity. His abandonment and rash naming decision caused his son a lot of struggle in his life and his father’s reasoning for doing that was because of his own life’s trauma.
The conclusion to the song was Sue coming to understand and appreciate his father’s decision even if the trauma Sue experienced prevents him from repeating the decision. Which underscores the way intergenerational trauma and violence often isn’t a straight line. Sue didn’t decide to become a great father who would keep his children free from the need to constantly prove themselves physically. Sue merely decided not to name his son Sue.
