Changing the Story for the Next Generation
In the recently released movie Red One, there's a scene that still lingers in my mind. The Christmas Witch has a plan to punish all the "naughty" people by trapping them in snow globes, forcing them to face the consequences of their actions. Her first target is a father who has spent years running from responsibility.
He convinced himself that staying out of his son’s life was for the best, thinking he was sparing the boy from the pain of having a criminal for a dad. But his ex-wife never gave up hope, urging him to show up—to attend recitals, be present for milestones, and give their son the father he deserved. Despite her efforts, he always stayed away, leaving their son clinging to the fragile hope she kept alive.
Trapped inside the globe alongside his son, the father was forced to confront not only his own failures but also the pain he had inflicted on the boy. The snow globe became a prison of his own making, a closed world where the harm he had caused was reflected back at him through his son’s suffering. For the first time, he couldn’t escape the consequences of his actions—he had brought his child into his chaos and now they were stuck there together.
As remorse washed over him, he made a desperate promise: if they ever got out of there, he would be the father his son needed. But the movie doesn’t tell us if he follows through. Watching, I felt a mix of anger and sadness. Would he truly turn over a new leaf, or would the promise fade once the crisis was over, and real life made commitment too hard?
That scene hit close to home. My own father made promises, too. After the divorce, he swore he’d visit and call regularly. But months would pass—sometimes a year or more—before I’d hear from him again. The pattern was predictable: he’d reappear, full of apologies and good intentions, only to disappear again when the effort became inconvenient.
I remember the day my stepdad grabbed the phone and told him to stay away for good. My mom overruled him, thinking, “A little is better than nothing.” But at twelve years old, I had finally had enough. I made my own decision: no more. My parents were right: my dad only popped up when he felt the pain of guilt and soothed his soul by reaching out to feel like a good guy. But in gaining his peace, I had to lose mine.
Looking back, my childhood felt like living in a snow globe of broken promises—beautiful from the outside, but cold and isolating within. My father’s occasional visits shook the snow, creating a temporary illusion of magic, but it always settled back into the same still, silent reality of his absence.
After my own divorce, I watched my daughter face the unreliability from her dad. Like me, she gave him chance after chance, holding onto the hope that he’d finally become the dad she deserved. Barely older than I'd been when dealing with my own dad, my daughter wrote him a letter, finally breaking free from his manipulations and broken promises.
Around that same time, I found myself caught in a similar cycle with MacGyver, a man I had met after my divorce. He was charming, kind, and seemed to offer the stability I craved for myself and my children. At the time, I didn’t recognize the patterns or warning signs that might have foreshadowed the struggles to come. Instead, I clung to the belief that we could build something lasting, convinced that his promises were a reflection of his commitment.
As I was trying to end things for good with MacGyver, my ex-husband was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Watching my daughter’s resolve crumble as she let her father back into her life felt like looking into a mirror. Just as she struggled to hold her boundaries with her father, I found myself unable to walk away from MacGyver, despite the growing evidence that he couldn’t offer the stability we needed.
The idea of rejecting a dying man was unbearable to her. She worried he’d leave this world with her rejection as the last chapter of their story. Suddenly, the years they had left—however many there might be—felt fleeting, and she let him back in. I was torn as I watched her battle with longing for the love he never gave her, anger at his mistreatment of her, and guilt at having negative feelings for her poor dad.
The funeral was a swirl of anger and grief. The speakers painted a picture of someone unrecognizable, proving my ex-husband right—no one truly knew him. We felt like outcasts in our own church, our eulogies and slideshow rejected, and condolences reduced to empty platitudes. My kids grappled with a complex grief: mourning both their father’s unresolved wrongs and the life they’d never have with him. They needed me, but I was numb and raw.
There had been a wedding the same day at the hall I co-managed. I’d called MacGyver a week earlier, knowing it was technically his responsibility to cover the event. Even though I hadn’t spoken in months, there was no one else to turn to. He’d agreed eventually, after days of silence, and it felt like one small piece of the mess was under control, and I was able to support my kids by attending the funeral with them.
After the wedding, MacGyver had stayed the night at a nearby hotel since he lived two hours away. But I hadn’t expected to see him standing on my porch the next morning. When I’d opened the front door, he hadn’t said a word. He just shifted awkwardly, hands stuffed in his pockets, his head down like a scolded child. I invited him in and led him upstairs, the kids distracted by the TV, not wanting them to know he was there.
Now he sat across from me on my bed, staring at the bedspread.
“I know I’ve been… distant,” he said, looking up at me. “But I’ve been thinking a lot. About us. About what I’ve done wrong. And I realized—I want to be here for you. For the kids. If you’ll let me.”
The words I’d longed to hear. The words I’d imagined in my loneliest moments. But now, sitting here in front of him, they felt fragile, like snowflakes landing on warm skin—beautiful but destined to melt away.
“Why now?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. “I was trying to get over you!”
He held up the book I’d give him 6 months prior, his hand trembling slightly. “This. What you wrote inside the cover—it hit me. It made me see what I’d been running from. I don’t want to run anymore.”
I stared at him, my emotions a tangle of hope, anger, and disbelief. “Do you have any idea what it’s been like for us?”
“I know,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’m not asking you to take me back. I just want to say I am sorry. I understand if you can’t forgive me.”
For a moment, I let myself believe him. And then I slipped into imagining a future where he stayed.
Where he was the man he promised to be. But deep down, a small voice whispered: Promises are just words until they’re backed by action.
Still, hope and doubt warred within me, and my desire for a future with him was still strong.
“I know I’ve let you down,” he continued. “And I’ve been… trying to figure out why I do the things I do. I was out hiking in the mountains, and I started reading that book you gave me.”
He gestured to the familiar book now sitting on the bed. He laughed, tears leaking from his eyes.
“I know what you’re thinking. I always said I didn’t read books or articles or listen to podcasts…”
I stared at the book, unsure whether to feel hopeful or angry. I’d given it to him without any expectation that it’d make a difference; it had just helped me make sense of why he hurt me. If he read it, great, but if not, I was already resigned to our ending.
“It was like… like something clicked,” he continued, his voice breaking. “I had felt frozen. I wanted to act, to speak, but I was trapped inside this snow globe. I could see everything happening around me, but my voice couldn’t get out. I was banging on the glass wall, but you couldn’t hear me.”
He laughed again, tears streaming down his face, wiping them with his sleeve. “Look! I can’t stop crying! You wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve been writing in a journal. I’m not stuck in my head anymore. I feel everything. So much love and sadness and anger. It comes in waves and don’t know if it will ever stop.”
I’d never seen him cry in the 4 years we’d been together.
“I’m done avoiding everything,” he continued. “I didn’t believe I could be what you needed before, but now I know I can do better. I want to change. I want to be the man you and the kids deserve.”
The words washed over me like déjà vu. I wanted to believe him—but how many times had he made promises only to break them when things got hard?
“I don’t know if I can do this again,” I said finally, my voice steady despite the storm inside me. He leaned forward, desperation in his eyes.
“Please. Just one more chance. I’ll go to counseling. I’ll do whatever it takes. I just… I don’t want to lose you.”
For a moment, I imagined him staying. But the weight of the past was hard to ignore.
“You’ll have to prove it,” I said finally. “Not just to me. The kids… they’ve already lost one dad this year. I can’t let them lose another.”
He nodded, tears spilling over. “I’ll do whatever it takes,” he whispered.
And just like that, he opened the door and called to the kids...
Only a day after their father was buried, MacGyver sat down with them. He apologized, acknowledging the hurt he’d caused, and promised them he’d never leave again. He seemed so genuine, I let myself believe that this time would be different.
But it wasn’t. He withdrew again just six months later, leaving us heartbroken. My kids had lost two fathers in the same year—their birth father and the man who had promised to step into the role of stepdad only to abandon them again. They witnessed my heartbreak firsthand, trying to console me when it should have been my role to protect and support them. Seeing their strength in the face of such loss made me realize how deeply they had internalized the instability they endured.
At the time of MacGyver’s snow globe metaphor, it had struck me as a poignant description of his struggle with shame and avoidance. He described feeling trapped inside the globe, banging on the glass walls, desperate to connect but unable to break through. It felt like a window into his pain, a reflection of the isolation he had carried his whole life.
But as I reflected later, it felt more like an excuse—a way to justify standing on the sidelines while others bore the weight of his silence. He might not have known how to break the curse of generational trauma, but he was choosing not to learn. We all carry baggage, but he refused to face his, and in doing so, he hurt everyone who loved him.
Like the father in Red One, MacGyver made promises in moments of crisis. But promises made in desperation, without action to back them up, are like snow globes themselves—fragile, decorative, and easily shattered.
When MacGyver left for the last time, it felt like the snow globe had finally shattered. But instead of the freedom I thought I’d feel, I was left picking up the jagged pieces of false hope and broken trust. I had spent years trying to preserve something fragile and fractured, convinced that holding it together would somehow create the stability I craved. Instead, it had only left me and my children cut and bleeding.
It was only then I realized that I had been trying to fix what couldn’t be repaired—placing bandaids over cracks in the glass, hoping it wouldn’t shatter again. The act of holding onto that brokenness had kept us trapped, mistaking survival for connection. It became clear that I had to let go—not just of MacGyver but of the patterns that kept me chasing love in all the wrong places.
When he left that last time, my entire body collapsed. I grieved not just our trauma-bonded relationship but the echoes of my parents’ broken connection. My body had carried generational trauma, storing the pain of abandonment and unpredictability as if it were my own. It became clear that it was my job to process, discharge, and reprogram those patterns—for my sake and for my children’s.
Before I turned six, my mom separated and reconciled with my dad multiple times before their eventual divorce. I don’t have conscious memories of that on-again, off-again chaos, but my subconscious clearly did. Without realizing it, I repeated the same pattern in my relationship with MacGyver—breaking up and getting back together in a desperate attempt to make things work. It was as if I was trying to repair something in my present that had been broken long before.
Later, I saw this painful cycle mirrored in the friendships of my own children. Watching history repeat itself in a different form forced me to confront a hard truth: giving endless chances to people who don’t change doesn’t make us generous—it destabilizes us. It teaches others to treat us like options while wreaking havoc on our nervous systems. When there’s no consistency, there’s no safety, and without safety, thriving becomes impossible.
For years, I believed that providing stability for my kids meant finding a partner who would complete our family. But I was wrong. By clinging to fragile relationships and shielding my children from the truth of their father figures’ unreliability, I unintentionally passed down the same abandonment wound I had grown up with. My refusal to confront what I could and couldn’t control—another person’s commitment—kept us all stuck in a cycle of heartbreak and false hope.
Like the mother in Red One—and my own mother before me—I had unknowingly taught my kids that love was conditional, trust should be sparing, and promises were fragile. By trying to protect them from harsh realities, I left them trapped in the same fragile snow globe I had spent my childhood in.
True strength doesn’t come from fragile promises or preserving delicate illusions—it comes from breaking free of the glass walls that keep us trapped. The snow globe wasn’t just MacGyver’s metaphor; it was mine too. It represented the fragile, closed-off world I had tried to live in—beautiful from the outside, but devoid of real connection on the inside. Breaking free meant stepping into the messiness of life, where love isn’t perfect but is real, grounded, and shared without conditions.
The answer didn’t lie in finding someone else to complete our family. It lay in breaking the cycle myself—by teaching my children, through my own actions, what it means to stay, to be reliable, and to love authentically.
Now, my kids and I are practicing a new lesson together: valuing our boundaries and seeking relationships built on trust and reliability. We’re learning that real love isn’t found in tolerating unresolved issues—it’s found in the peace of consistency, mutual respect, and genuine repair. Love grows in a space where conflicts lead to understanding, not just a temporary truce, and where safety comes from knowing that both people are committed to showing up fully.
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