Inherited Wounds: How Childhood Hardship and a Military Marriage Shaped Generational Trauma
How My Parents’ Lives Shaped Our Family’s Generational Trauma—and the Compassion I Now Choose to Carry
Seeing the world through your parents’ eyes
As an adult child of emotionally immature parents, it’s difficult to forgive for the things they failed to provide me. Safety. Protection. Unconditional love. Each of those are necessities in a healthy childhood, but weren’t consistently available to me. My parents checked out on parenthood when I was five. That was the year their daughter, my sister Laura, died after a lifelong battle with brain swelling. In Family Systems Theory, I became a lost child. My parents simply left me to fend for myself emotionally. Over time, I was invisible within the family, learned to self-parent and mostly relied on myself.
Healing from my past, looking meticulously through the ruins of my family for clues of what happened, became a life’s mission during the past 10 years. I was in my late 40s when I first began my healing journey. I just got tired of feeling scared and misunderstood all the time, and the emotional disconnection it caused often left me feeling distant from my own children. I was heading down the same path as my parents. Therapy to ‘make the hurt go away” led to thousands of hours of researching, studying, meditating, and connecting with others seeking their childhood truth. It’s also brough me to spiritual healing I never could have imagined.
Which brings me to this. For as long as I can remember, I was angry at my mom. God love my dad, but during his entire life, he never was able to be the man he could have been. He minimized his needs and willingly took the role of dishonorable caretaker in the deeply codependent relationship with his wife, my mom. Caretaker in the sense that this intelligent man dimmed the light inside himself to please his wife, and dishonorable in the sense that he hid things from my mom that he shouldn’t have kept secret. Today, I’ve not just forgiven them both, I have loving compassion for their experiences growing up and the struggles they endured as parents. May God bless them both.
There is a lovely quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky, "To love someone means to see them as God intended them". Both Virgil “Bud” Owings, Jr. and Barb Wisniewski themselves grew up in tumultuous homes. This disease of dysfunction in my family did not begin with my parents, but I am committed to ending it for my children and future ancestors. As part of that, I present this slightly fictionalized but fact-based story of how they met, what they brought into their relationship and endured together.
A Childhood Fueled by Survival
Barbara grew up on Chicago’s Polish South Side, in a three-flat above a tavern that was perpetually steeped in cigarette smoke and stale beer. Her father worked long, punishing hours in the Chicago Stockyards, of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle infamy —not as a supervisor or foreman, but as a laborer whose world revolved around blood, guts, and the hustle of packinghouses. Each day, he’d trudge home bone-tired, often with little to show for it. With money so tight, Barbara and her family scraped by on whatever scraps they could find. Bacon grease sandwiches were a lunchtime staple, and on good days, her mother might have enough leftover flour to make a second loaf of bread with dinner.
After classes at the local Catholic school—where nuns sternly kept order—Barbara and her friends would walk the streets of the neighborhood, pooling their pennies to buy a single roasted potato from a vendor. They’d pass that steaming potato around like treasure, taking turns nibbling off the skin and flesh to keep hunger at bay. Hunger loomed over them, so the shared bites of potato felt like a feast. This was the place Barbara came from: a world where safety meant a door with two locks, and survival meant grabbing whatever small comfort came your way.
When she turned 18, Barbara already had a lifetime’s worth of worry under her belt. She’d learned there might not be a next meal, or a next chance, or a next anything unless you fought for it. The specter of an abusive home life gave her extra incentive: She had to get out before the city streets or her father’s fury and occasional violence swallowed her whole.
Virgil Jr.: The Boy from Sikeston
Meanwhile, in Sikeston, Missouri, Virgil Owings Jr. was navigating an entirely different set of hardships. He was the oldest boy in a family that included one older sister, one younger brother, and three younger sisters. Their mother had died years earlier, leaving a grief-riddled void that not even a new stepmother could fill. Their dad—Virgil Sr.—was well-known around town as a sawmill foreman with just enough local clout to pull favors. Money was scarce, but the family still had a network of small-town acquaintances that Virgil Sr. could lean on when it really mattered.
Virgil Jr. was bright and curious, but finances forced him to enter adulthood quickly. He had chores from dawn to dusk, and any pocket change he earned got funneled back into the household. The Korean War broke out when he was still young. Draft boards had their eye on anyone fit enough to carry a rifle, and Virgil Sr. was damned if he’d watch two sons get shipped to the front. With a few quiet words and a handshake or two, he steered Virgil Jr. (and his younger brother) into the Air Force. Better to serve in the air than end up in some Korean foxhole.
Language School and Weather Charts
Both young men—Virgil Jr. and his brother—took military aptitude tests and discovered they had an unexpected gift for languages. Virgil Jr. got assigned to learn Russian, while his brother tackled Chinese. Around the same time, in another corner of the Air Force world, Barbara signed up for the Women in the Air Force (WAF). She ended up in the weather service, first stationed near Seattle, then later at a base in Texas. For someone raised on the smell of stockyards and Sunday-morning incense, landing in the fresh salt air near Puget Sound must have felt almost unreal. But military discipline was tough; she had to prove herself in a male-dominated environment, and every day at the weather desk was a test of her resolve.
Crossing Paths in Texas
Eventually, Barbara’s work brought her to a base in Texas around the same time Virgil Jr. wrapped up language school. While I don’t know where and how they met, they were introduced by mutual friends.
Barbara was guarded but curious. She wasn’t used to men who listened when she talked; her father’s weary anger had loomed over her childhood like a permanent storm cloud. Virgil Jr., fresh from Missouri and language school, had a certain respectful politeness that put her at ease. He was still dealing with his own grief and the responsibilities that had piled on him since boyhood, but the uniform made him stand a little straighter, gave him a sense of direction he’d never had before.
They were both young, vulnerable, and hungry—she for safety, he for belonging. What began as awkward small talk (maybe about the Texas heat or the complexities of wind patterns) grew into a deeper connection. Barbara found in Virgil someone gentle enough to help her lower her guard. Virgil found in Barbara a spark of fire and independence that reminded him he was more than just a poor kid from Sikeston.
Painting Rocks in Japan
Before long, the Air Force sent Virgil Jr. out to a base in northern Japan. His Russian skills were in demand if the Soviets jumped into the Korean conflict. But the big confrontation never materialized, so instead of listening in on coded enemy transmissions, he and his fellow language specialists spent their days in limbo.
With a commanding officer determined not to see idle hands, these men were given odd jobs to keep them “busy.” Chief among them: painting massive rocks around the base safety yellow. They’d flip each boulder to its unpainted side, roll up their sleeves, and paint away. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and still, no Soviet incursion ever came. For Virgil, the war became a waiting game—a strange existence of potential danger that never happened, passing the time with a paintbrush in hand.
Meanwhile, Barbara kept monitoring weather patterns in Texas, writing letters home when she could. She’d occasionally send Virgil postcards—short, perfunctory updates about the relentless heat or the new living quarters. But in those scribbled lines, there was often an undercurrent of fear and hope: she’d finally made a life outside Chicago, yet she worried it might all slip away if she let go of the Air Force or of Virgil.
From Survival to Co-Dependence
When Virgil eventually returned stateside, he and Barbara reunited with an intensity that can happen only when two people have pinned their futures on each other. They rushed into marriage, both eager to escape the shadows of where they’d come from. Money was still tight, but a joint military paycheck went further than bacon grease sandwiches ever had, and Barbara thought she might finally be safe—safe from hunger, safe from family trauma, safe from the unknown.
But neither of them had much emotional foundation for a healthy relationship. Barbara’s childhood had taught her that life was a scramble for survival, so she clung hard. Virgil’s upbringing had him used to fixing problems and looking after others, so he became her anchor. They leaned on each other in ways that could be tender but also suffocating.
In the early years, they’d bounce between intense closeness and silent standoffs. Sometimes Barbara would retreat into her own thoughts, replaying her lost childhood and fearing it’s eminent return. Virgil, terrified by any emotional distance, would try to pull her back through arguments or tears. Neither fully understood that these patterns were born from old scars and deep-seated fears of abandonment. They just tried to carry on, day by day.
A Life Built on Shared Resilience
And yet, it wasn’t all bleak. They found moments of real warmth—laughter over a shared memory, an impromptu dance in the kitchen, the sweet relief of paying rent on time. For two people who started their lives in poverty, having even a small measure of security felt like success.
Their marriage was a fusion of tenderness, immaturity, and codependence. They would go on to raise a family, face more challenges than they likely ever anticipated, and continue wrestling with the ghosts of their pasts. At the heart of their story is this simple truth: they were both survivors, shaped by poverty, loss, and an unwavering instinct for self-preservation.
Ultimately, the Air Force was their escape hatch—Barbara’s from a cramped, abusive environment in Chicago, Virgil’s from the very real threat of a Korean War trench and the restlessness of Sikeston. They came together in that narrow slice of time when war, fear, and longing collided. Even if the war itself ended in something as trivial as painting boulders in Japan, for them, it was the stepping-stone to a life they might never have found any other way.
And that’s how two very different people—one toughened by stockyard poverty and the other shaped by small-town hardship—found each other and forged a bond that was equal parts love, survival, and the need to avoid a hurt that haunted each of them.