Fractured Motherhood: when love, trauma and parenting intertwine

She never thought she could be a mother.

Not after an abusive childhood. Not with a mind fractured by multiple personality disorder. And not with the fear that she might repeat her parents’ mistakes.

But when Maggie Walters and her partner adopted three children from the Philippines, motherhood became both a reckoning and a revelation. Every tantrum, every silence, every ordinary chaos tested her deepest dread: what if I become them?

To break the cycle, Maggie turned back to her own parents’ hidden histories, uncovering the traumas that had shaped—and broken—generations. In learning their story, she began to rewrite her own.

As her children grew up laughing, quarrelling, and living the carefree childhood she never knew, their wholeness became her healing.

Fractured Motherhood is a raw and lyrical memoir of fear and resilience, love and repair—a story of inherited wounds, and of how family can be both the wound and the cure.