As my young sons grow, I've become acutely aware of the damaging culture of white suburban parenting and the well-established, problematic norms for raising white boys. The pressure on boys to be aggressive and stoic is in full force. My children, at as young as four-years-old, have been humiliated for gender fluid behavior. Still, “protections” for my children proliferate. Peddled by corporations, disseminated by social media, and enforced by laws, they arise from racial and class privilege, and have turned motherhood into a choice between constant vigilance and abject failure. Increasingly conscious of the inconsistencies that drive my own inner world, I explore my relationship to inherited gender ideologies. In this work, I examine stories of my paternal grandparent’s Italian immigrant community and the generational effects of misogyny, toxic masculinity, and aspirations to middle-class respectability. On my maternal side, I explore an Irish Catholic history, rife with abuse, mental illness, and homophobia. My images break from a posture of motherhood passed down to me. They untangle my attachment to the promise of the good life, a patriarchal state of living that not only promotes and perpetuates systematic injustice but guarantees my children will do the same. By upending the so-called normalcy of family life, I open a schism in the illusion of optimistic attachments through domestic disobedience. Using hyperbolic scenarios, I touch the truth of my past and present in order to decode their interrelationship. Here, an excess of sweaters become a suffocating cocoon, a child’s hair clippings re-gender a mother’s chest, and breasts commune with tomatoes in a desperate attempt to connect with a lost family recipe. Overlaying delight and play with fear and excess, I reflect on the contradictions of domestic life freed from conventional narratives. I hold space for myself and my children so that we might form more meaningful connections with each other and the world.