How to End A Family Curse

On generational trauma and children.

“We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.”
― Camille Paglia

I used to think the only way to end a family curse was to die.

It's easier to believe in a curse than it is to believe in a miracle. You can look up through the clouds and imagine the angels in heaven died and God vacated the premises, but hell always remains full. I look into the mirror and with every passing year, I see my mother's face emerge out of my features, and I know I've inherited her angry disease too.

I don't see her beauty, or intelligence, or how it's taken shape in me. I just see the inevitable pain. I look up into the face of a memory and all that came flooding back was the cave of my hurt. My genetic code became a demon that couldn't be exorcised.

I used to tell people I'd die of suicide with a dreamy smile on my face. I wanted to get my tubes tied and grow my hair over my eyes. I'd sit on the edge of the swamp on the edge of a broken town, and let myself sink down until the top of my head disappeared.

I never even tried to become better. I couldn't imagine a world where that was possible, because sometime in the past the curse embedded itself into my family's DNA. All I could do was carry it. Maybe a witch crawled into my great-great-great-grandmother's bed after she drank the black water at the bottom of a black well. Maybe an old and angry beast came roaring out of a cave and tore into the face of a child who grew up to pour hatred into his wife's womb.

Whatever it was, I carried the curse inside my face and I carried the curse in my slow, slouching steps and I carried the curse in every single one of my 300,000 eggs. I could not reproduce because that black water sloshed inside the water of my uterus.

But things can change.

Here I am at the age of 32, writing a newsletter at 12 weeks pregnant. Once it seemed having a child to me was just another form of death, because there was death inside of me and it poured through the film of my eyes.

When I lived in Seattle I'd walk down to the pier in the morning to get a cup of coffee. When I saw parents playing with their children in the grass it disgusted me. I unfollowed people from social media that posted pictures of their babies. Instead of congratulating my manager when his wife got pregnant, I said with a "joking" sneer that he was contributing to overpopulation.

To this day, I've really only known one other friend who's gotten pregnant. Most of my friends have the same ideas. They don't want children because they value their free time too much. Their careers are too important. Or because they don't want to become their parents.

But one day I woke up, and at the end of my first decade of adulthood - after years of parties, drugs, video-games, sex, sitting alone and writing fiction - I realized I was empty. Fiction had been my entire life, but sitting down to make up stories wasn't as fulfilling as I thought it'd be. I finished a book and I sent it out into the world, then go lay down in bed alone to a desperate quiet.

I couldn't imagine doing 5 or 6 more decades of this. My twenties had already seemed to last forever.

I didn't know what I was missing.

But baby, I was missing you.

I created a home, and turned myself into someone that could love, and then I forgot about you. It was like I lived inside a machine that was turned on every day, and used up electricity, but created nothing.

I told myself that I wouldn't be the kind of person that posted about my pregnancy and my baby, but there's something a little twisted about catering to people who feel disdain at the sight of joy. Many of them are also carrying a family curse. They've already decided they're going to die and try to blot out the sun when they go.

But curses are not ended by death. They just bleed into the air and the water. They seep through the soil of the grave. They spill into the heart of everyone you ever hurt. In sips and sighs, the curse will find a way, to soak into as many bloodstreams and warm bodies as it can.

If you give up, you give in. That's how the curse fools you. You convince yourself you can end it by doing nothing, and so fall further into its grasp. All it ever wanted was to kill you. To kill your children. To kill the possibility of you ever adding something good to the world.

I can't go back and fix what happened to me. And I can't fix those who came before.

But I can help end the curse when I hold you in my arms and give you the love I needed. It won't be perfect and it won't be resolute. But trying to climb toward something better seems a lot better to me than sitting in my office alone for the next 60 years, keeping my shoulders stiff, hoping I don't turn too fast and cause any more damage.

I'm more terrified of hurting you than I can even fully conceptualize, but I'm more terrified of dying without having ever known you.