Healing Generational Trauma Through a Doll, a Chair, and a Century of Silence

She was never meant to be mine.

Not really.

Some might say she was taken, stolen. But not for love or for memory.

She was taken as a statement.

My paternal grandmother, Janice, didn’t care about dolls. She cared about being shut out. And in a small town where being “Church of the Brethren”, a pacifist, Protestant tradition that prized humility, simplicity, and service, meant you were born into belonging, she was new in town and never going to belong. Not really. She wasn’t plain enough. Or quiet enough. Or Brethren enough.

My maternal grandmother had the kind of status that came from generations of compliance.

She watched the town from the margins. She watched my maternal side rule it like a social monarchy... stoic, performative, emotionally cruel beneath the surface. My maternal grandmother, Dorothy, had the kind of status that came from generations of compliance. She held court quietly, but she held it nonetheless. And Janice? Janice had a fire in her. She knew it made people uncomfortable. She also knew they were cruel in a way that didn’t leave bruises...just bruised people.

So when the Gruesh sisters died, two single, devout women across the street who had been lifelong members of the Church of the Brethren, Janice crossed that street and helped herself to a doll she knew my mother, Sara, and my grandmother, Dorothy, would want.

And not just because it was a beautiful doll.

The Gruesh sisters were Brethren women. Their belongings held symbolic weight; artifacts of a community that prized and remembered its own.

My maternal side didn’t just want the doll.

They wanted what it represented: a connection to the inner circle, a quiet inheritance, a relic of their belonging.

And Janice knew it.

She didn’t take it out of affection.

She took it out of defiance.

And then she told them exactly why.

“I see who you are behind your religion,” she said.

“You’re cruel. And you’re mean.”

And just like that, the doll became more than an object.

She became a symbol.

Of rebellion.

Of spite.

Of saying the quiet part out loud.

Years later, after my father died, my mother handed me a box. No introduction. No sentimentality. Just a cardboard box shoved in my direction like she was trying to be rid of something that had always made her uneasy. It wasn’t until I opened the lid that I saw it:

The top of a doll’s head.

I felt like the doll, tucked away like an inconvenience

That image is seared into me: a larger doll tucked away like an inconvenience, not positioned, not displayed, just boxed.

And I realized, nothing else in that house was treated that way. Everything sentimental was placed somewhere visible. Honored.

But not this one.

This one had been shoved away. Too heavy, too complicated, too unwanted to sit out in the open.

And I thought: of course.

Of course, this is the one I want.

When I brought her home, I thought I was saving a doll.

But what I was really doing was saving myself.

Reclaiming a part of me that had been boxed up just like her.

She wasn’t just a relic of family spite; she was me.

She was every child who’s been dismissed, every woman who’s been excluded, every soul who’s needed a place in the chair.

She also reminded me of someone I had taken in myself, who had also been boxed and passed over and needed a place to be held.

I held that doll and cried for every version of myself...my child self, my outsider self.

I rocked her like she was mine. Or I was hers.

I rocked her like she was mine. Or like I was hers.

I took her out of the box and named her Janice.

After the woman who took her. After the woman, they boxed out.

After the woman who wasn’t soft enough, stoic enough, or obedient enough to be accepted.

And now? After Janice sits in the center.

Not on a shelf. Not in a box. Not in a closet.

She sits between two other dolls—one given to my grandmother, Dorothy, when she was a little girl in 1915, and the other given to my mother, Sara, in 1942 from London during the war.

But Janice, the “unwanted” one, takes up the most space.

Because she always did.

When my mother visits, she sees her there.

And she doesn’t like it.

She doesn’t like that I named her.

She doesn’t like that I keep her displayed.

And she especially doesn’t like that I treat her with care.

But I do it anyway.

Because Janice, the doll, the woman, the symbol, was never the problem.

For the first time, Janice wasn't outside of the circle. She was included.

She was just too much for a family that prized silence over truth.

I didn’t just place her in that chair. I installed her.

Like a sacred object. Like a declaration.

I placed her in the center—not to be dramatic, but because that was where she belonged.

Between the doll that was given to Dorothy and the one given to Sara, and the toys that were lovingly made for my mother when she was born.

For the first time, Janice wasn’t outside the circle.

She had a community.

And symbolically—finally—Dorothy and Sara had let her in.

Placing Janice in the middle wasn’t just an aesthetic choice but a quiet act of healing generational trauma. For years, the dynamics between my grandmothers and my mother reflected a pattern passed down like furniture: silence, exclusion, emotional control. But this time, I arranged the scene differently. I gave the most discarded figure the center seat. I built a new arrangement where the forgotten are finally seen.

The chair itself sits in the dining room.

A space that has always meant communion...real communion, not the church kind, but the kind where people share meals, pass stories, and bear witness to each other’s lives.

I live here alone now, in this hundred-year-old house, but I know the walls have held celebrations- holidays, reunions, milestones- most of them flowing through the dining room and living room.

And behind Janice, just beyond the rocking chair, sits my great-grandmother Helen’s sewing table...Helen is Dorothy’s mother and the one who once stitched for the family. She is the origin point. Her table lives here now, steady and quiet.

This is no longer a quiet corner.

It’s a lineage reclaimed.

And now, Janice lives among them.

Not just as an object. But as someone was finally invited to the table.

I know people like to imagine that heaven is where things get made right.

But I don’t believe in heaven anymore.

I just wanted to believe a place like that could exist here.

And when it didn’t,

I arranged it myself.

Sometimes, I imagine what Janice would say if she saw herself now.

I think she’d be stunned, not flattered, not sentimental, just genuinely shocked that someone finally believed her.

Because I don’t think she ever believed or understood a day in her life. Not really.

Her pain was dismissed. Her presence was ridiculed. Her hunger for connection is mislabeled as drama.

She wasn’t starved for attention. She was starved for acknowledgment.

And if she could see herself now, sitting in the middle of my dining room like a relic reclaimed, I think she’d laugh.

That rich, raspy, irreverent kind of laugh women have when someone finally says the thing they’ve been choking on for many years.

Because it wasn’t just Sara, my mother, who excluded her.

It was the whole town.

The church.

The culture.

The hush.

And if I did nothing else right, at least I said: I see you now.

There is something holy about placing the discarded in the middle.

The one they wanted to throw away.

The one they tried to pretend never mattered.

The one they couldn’t control.

Janice, my paternal grandmother, circa. 1919, Pryor, Montana-Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation

In my house, she sits like an oracle.

Big, blue-eyed, and unbothered.

She watches from the center, between the past and the performance.

Not asking to be loved.

Just refusing to be forgotten.

Sometimes, healing doesn’t look like forgiveness.

Sometimes, it looks like giving the most controversial woman in your family a throne made of quiet rage and reclaimed space.

That’s what I did.

That’s what I do.

Because in this house?

We don’t throw the truth away.

We put it on a chair in the middle of the room.

If you’ve ever felt boxed up, discarded, or too much for the people who raised you, this post is for you. There’s always space in the middle chair. And you’re not alone.