The women in my family carried something they could not name. Something that arrived uninvited, generations before them, and stayed. They threw a blanket over it. They built lives over it. They loved over it. They raised children over it. But the part of them that was taken before they could speak of it — that part never quite came home. 

This is what some call generational pain — the harm that arrives uninvited and stays. It moves quietly through families, becoming the silence at the dinner table, the weather of a house, the weight in the chest of a child who doesn't know why. Without healing, it becomes the inheritance we pass forward. With healing, it can stop with us. 

A Tarek So True is a poem about the healing. About a soul that breaks, a soul that returns, and the love that learns to love across the strangest distances. It is what I wanted to leave for my sons — Tarek, whose name means "bright star," and Malek, whose name means "messenger." It is what I wanted to send back to the generation that came before me, in a language they can hear from the other side. 

There's a philosophy I keep coming back to — that inside every adult is a child, and inside every child is a guardian who has been keeping that child safe. Most of what we call our adult life is the guardian doing its job. This book holds the child. It holds the guardian. It holds the part of you that's still asking, and the part of you that has been protecting your right to ask. If it finds you in a season of loss, I hope it sits with you the way I needed it to sit with me. If it finds you in a season of love, I hope it makes the love feel a little wider. 

— Aladdin Ishmael