Breaking The Curse

I’ve been spending even more time than I normally do with the collective ancestors lately. Again, not so much with my own, but it’s all fine. I’ll be talking with them directly soon enough. Instead, I’ve been relaying messages using a new process with a new divination tool, with surprisingly good results. Then late last week, the ancestors of a friend turned up, as they tend to do. My friend didn’t know much about his family past his grandparents and expected that their names might have been lost forever due to war, political unrest, and family trauma. His family wanted to be found however, and between my friend, his sister, and myself, we’ve made a good start ensuring they will be remembered.

Funny enough, I woke up thinking about my elusive great-grandfather on the day I spoke to my friend about his family. He’d told me about his mother’s mental illness and my mother’s family was affected by her father’s undiagnosed problems, which appear to be hereditary. His father, my great grandad, was a jeweler and optician in Manhattan, obviously reaching some level of vocational success. He apparently vanished into thin air sometime around 1900, leaving his family without any means of support. I’ve been looking for him for over 25 years and there are no concrete leads or paper trails. He’s not buried with my great grandmother and their children, who are in the same plot in the Catholic cemetery in Westchester. This could mean he committed suicide, died while as an inmate in an asylum, or was abducted by aliens (if you know me, you understand this is not a joke).

My great-grandmother and her three children lived with her family on-and-off and at one point my grandfather and his younger sister were left in separate orphanages. The family was later reunited, and my great-grandmother lived with her daughter, who never married and became an independent woman with a successful career and owned her own home by the 1940s. Her oldest son became a priest, and my grandfather married my grandmother. Of the three, he is the one who visibly inherited his father’s traits and repeated the pattern of disappearing when he had an ‘episode’, later returning as if he'd never left throughout their marriage. There were rumors he had a second family, and the advent of genealogy DNA tests bears this out. Some years after my grandmother died, he resurfaced and shuffled between my mother and her sisters until he became a danger to himself, and they placed him in a home for his remaining years.

And that’s just my mother’s side of my family.

Generational trauma is a trendy catchphrase now, but it’s most definitely not a new development. I was extremely fortunate. Both of my parents came from volatile home environments, and they understood, at least to some extent, the impact it could have on their own marriage and family. Shortly after their whirlwind courtship and wedding, my parents left both their families in New York City and moved upstate so they wouldn’t, as my father put it, “end up like the rest of them”. For this reason, I grew up not knowing most of my extended family. My father was in the military, which enabled them to travel the world before settling in Texas and they did the best they could to raise my siblings and me in a safe and loving home. Were they perfect? Absolutely not. Did they break the generational trauma pattern from their own families? They did, but they also left their marks on us because it’s impossible to do otherwise. We all survive our parents in one way or another.

On my mother’s side (I don’t really know anyone on my father’s side very well), my cousins and I are a mixed bag of personalities, shaped by our common, and separate, lineage. Most of us have managed to stay in touch with one another. We’ve failed and succeeded in marriages and careers, just like any other family. We sometimes struggle and we’re often triumphant. And there is still the one, pronounced and devastating line of mental illness that runs through each of the three O’Neil sister’s families. We did not escape untouched, but it appears to be less evident in the generation that we’ve raised. Maybe the genetics that caused it is running thin, or maybe the diagnosis and medicine is better and more available now.

As the youngest, I grew up completely unaware of the dark side of my family history. Life was happy and carefree until my teenage years but even with the devastation of my father’s death, my remaining few years at home were stable and secure. Then I met my first husband.

He was driven and capable and one of the nicest people I’d ever met. He was also battle scarred and broken, something I didn’t realize until after we married, and I became part of his family. He was a middle child in a family of seven, the oldest boy and his father’s namesake (and his father, and his father before him, etc.).  His father was abusive and an alcoholic. A career soldier, he struggled to make rank because of his problems with alcohol so the money always ran out before the month did. He married my mother-in-law while stationed in Germany. As a child, she spent over a year in various concentration camps because her stepfather was Jewish. Neither she nor her older sister knew their own fathers, her younger brother died in one of the camps, and her childhood was probably as terrifying and traumatic as they come. As a result, my ex-husband and his siblings grew up in a home filled with fear and uncertainty. Most of them escaped that home life as early as possible through work, the military, and marriage.

I was young, naïve, and totally unprepared to be a wife and mother but like a lot of people, that didn’t stop me. I realized early on that I was going to have to teach the father of my child how I expected us to be parents, since we came from very different experiences in this area. We managed okay for the most part but left our own scars on our daughter. She’s better than the sum of both of us and that’s completely down to who she decided she wanted to be as a person.

Almost every family shares the same story where the central character is trauma. War, illness, alcoholism, abject poverty, domestic abuse. How many are on your family’s bingo card? Don’t bother to mark them, throw out the card. Their issues are not yours to carry. When you remember your ancestors give them some grace. Even if, especially if, they don’t deserve it. They learned from those who came before them and in most cases, did the best they could. Imagine instead, for them, the rare moments of love and tenderness in their lives. Give them the love and care they did not receive from their own parents that is still needed now. Loving them, despite who they were, is how we can heal their wounds for our own descendants. We can break the generational curse.

I’m not saying it will be easy. I’m simply saying it’s possible and this is why I’ve worked so hard for so many years, connecting people to stories and remembering those who were lost. They matter.

If you would like to know more about my ancestral connection work, my Daoist path, or my other offerings such as tarot readings, spiritual guidance and mindset coaching, you can find more detailed information by using the drop-down menu on my website: The Mystic’s Parlour (the-mystics-parlour.ghost.io)

You can also contact me via email at themysticsparlour@gmail.com or on any of my social media channels. Your continued support and encouragement are greatly appreciated.