Thank you, Cristina Breshears. So powerful,
wise, and true. — Molly
I didn’t set out to write about inheritance. Not at first. When I began researching and writing Inheriting Our Names years ago, I thought I was writing about silence, about grief, about Spain’s Pact of Forgetting, about what a nation chooses not to say in order to survive itself.
I was interested in memory, in erasure, in the stories that slip beneath the surface and settle there, undisturbed — and how that inheritance impacts future generations. But even then, something else was moving underneath. Because silence and exhausted acceptance, too, is a kind of inheritance. Not just what is passed down in words and deeds, but what is carried forward in the absence of our voices and actions.
These past couple of years, I find myself deep in the lives of my great-grandfathers tracing land deeds and laws, migrations and violences, faith and its distortions. I thought I was writing an American history, or perhaps a reckoning. But here, too, the same question keeps surfacing, quiet and insistent: what do we do with what we’ve been given? Because, inheritance is not only material. It isn’t only names or property or bloodlines. It is also ways of seeing. Ways of justifying. And ways of looking away. It is the story you are handed about who you are and who others are in relation to you.
For a long time, I think I treated inheritance as something fixed. Or perhaps passive. Something simply received. But I’m beginning to see a distinction that feels essential. There is what is bequeathed to us, and there is what we choose to inherit. The first arrives without consent. The second requires participation.
Lately, this question has been surfacing not only in the past as I research the great-grandfathers, but also in the present. In the latest news cycle. In the rhythms of daily life. In the quiet, accumulating (and oftentimes unconscious) decisions we make about what we will accept as normal.
Take today … a proposal emerges for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, mobilized quickly in the name of protecting power after a moment of fear. This, after assurances the ballroom would never cost the public a dime. $400 million dollars. At a time when so many are quietly doing devastating math at their kitchen tables: rent or groceries; prescriptions or gas; one more shift or one more bill deferred.
U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham, Katie Britt, and Eric Schmitt today introduced the White House Safety and Security Act of 2026, which provides taxpayer funding for the construction of the presidential ballroom in the East Wing of the White House. The language is familiar: safety, security, necessity. But it is shocking how today the machinery is moving with startling speed while at the same time, children continue to practice lockdown drills, evacuations, duck and cover.
This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. One we have slowly and unevenly come to live alongside. In 2026, there have been at least 32 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 14 deaths and 15 injuries nationally. It hardly makes the news anymore.
I wonder, what does it do to a child to practice hiding? What does it do to a parent to practice letting go? I do not think that what we ask our children (and ourselves) to endure and carry disappears. It becomes part of us. It settles in the body and in our nervous system and in what we call normal. It settles. It shapes. It becomes part of how we move through the world.
I find myself thinking not just about policy, or politics, or priorities, but about formation. What does it mean to grow up inside this? What does it do to a child to learn that safety is conditional? That fear is something to be managed rather than prevented? That the world will not change, even when the threat is known and avoidable? What does it do to a child to learn that law actually can be rewritten or rearranged, but not for them?
We tell ourselves kids are resilient. And they are. But resilience is not the same as being unharmed. They are being harmed. We are being harmed.
This is the thread in my work I’ve been unconsciously teasing but didn’t fully see before. What we tolerate does not remain contained to the moment. It carries forward through memory and habit and through what we come to accept. Inheritance is not only what we receive from the past. It is what we allow to pass through us into the future. And this is where the distinction begins to matter. Because if everything that is bequeathed were automatically inherited, nothing would ever change.
But there is, I think, a narrow and necessary space between the two. A space of attention. A moment, sometimes brief, sometimes hard-won where we can ask: is this mine to carry? Does this fit into the fabric of who I am, who I want to be? Is this mine to perpetuate? What will this do, if I pass it on unchanged? What if I reshape this? What if I lay it down?
I don’t mean this in a grand or abstract way. I mean it in the smallest, most ordinary moments. Like in a reaction that feels inherited. Or a belief that has never been examined. In a silence that echoes something older than ourselves. But yes, also in the larger communal patterns: in what we fund with our tax dollars, in what we accommodate, in what we excuse, in what we call inevitable.
I think there could be a daily practice here. We receive. We notice. We discern. We decide. That is, sometimes we hold. Sometimes we reshape. Sometimes, with effort, we set something down. And then, the next day, we do it again. Not perfectly. Not completely. But with increasing awareness. This belongs in the world I want my children to inherit. This does not.
If my writing work is about uncovering what has been carried through silence, through story, and through blood, this moment today feels like something adjacent, but different. It is about our agency within inheritance. About the possibility that we are not only the recipients of history, but its intermediaries. That what passes through us is not predetermined.
What we endure, we become. Not metaphorically. Not eventually. But in real and measurable ways: psychological, cultural, moral. If we ask ourselves to live with preventable fear, we become a society that knows how to accommodate that fear. If we ask ourselves to adapt to harm, we become a society that confuses adaptation with resolution.
But the inverse is also true. If we refuse certain inheritances — if we interrupt them, refuse them, transform them — we can alter what is available to be passed on. We can shape what comes next.
I don’t know that we do this well, as individuals or as a nation (maybe I should just speak for myself). Momentum is powerful. So is fatigue. So is the quiet apathetic seduction of calling something “just the way things are; the way it’s always been.” But I am beginning to believe that the work is not as distant as I’ve imagined. It begins close with what we notice, with what we question, and with what we refuse to normalize. It begins in that space of discernment between what is given to us and what we accept.
I didn’t set out to write about inheritance, but it seems I have been writing about it all along. Not just what we carry from the past, but what we allow to move through us into the future. And maybe that is the alchemical work, after all. Not to choose what we are given, but to choose, again and again, what we will keep, what we will change, and what we will no longer pass on. Because what we do with what we’ve been given becomes what we give. And what we are shaping now will not end with us.
In the words of Czeslaw Milosz:
"Day draws near
another one
do what you can."
(image: A rendering of the new 650-person ballroom in a new 90,000 sq ft building)
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