Meet Amelia Mora Mars.

Where It Started

Three Generations of Women

My grandmother didn't choose her marriage. It was arranged for her, in a time and place where women simply didn't get to choose. From what one cousin has told me, she spent hours at church — perhaps because it was the closest she could come to the life she had once wanted. She had hoped to become a nun. Instead, she became a wife and a mother in a life that wasn't hers to pick, and by that account, she wasn't always present for the children she did have.

Unhealed pain often travels through families. My mother grew up in that absence. Then, at just 26 years old, pregnant with me, she lost her mother altogether — not just the grief of losing her, but the grief of never having had a mother who was truly attentive to her needs in the first place. I carry my grandmother's name because of that loss, a name that's held both her memory and my mother's grief for my whole life.

None of us chose what was handed to us. But I get to choose what I hand down. That's what It Ends With Me actually means — not that the pain never touched this family, but that it doesn't have to keep moving forward unspoken.