It Ends With Me
Breaking A Matrilineal Curse
Dark and dangerous witchery runs through my matrilineal line and a very malignant curse has loomed over all of the women in my family for generations.
My mother kept the truth of her family from me and my sister. We were not raised to understand or practice these traditions, but rather, to fear them. My mother’s visceral reaction to anything even remotely related to the occult shrouded it in an electrified mystery.
Despite not knowing this curse existed, I somehow grew up knowing that it did. I also carried the heavy awareness that I was the one who was born to break it.
My great grandmother - Juana - was a very powerful woman. She was known and sought after for her gifts, often hired by the FBI and local law enforcement to find missing persons or communicate with the dead to solve their murders.
But there is a dark and seductive side to power - one she indulged in.
Juana passed on her wisdom and gifts to all of her daughters, and they to theirs. In our family, the greatest potency is held by the oldest daughter of each new generation, and if it works out a certain way, each new generation becomes the exponent of the last. In our family my grandmother, my mother, and I all bore the responsibility of being the eldest. Which is to say, we are each the exponent of the one before us.
I never met Juana. She was dead by the time I was born, but my grandmother and my mother had long since distanced themselves from the web of toxicity that she spun. The curse was never discussed, but it was felt and it was known. Only after my relationship with Matthew did I start to ask questions. And only recently did I learn the full story:
My grandmother was a woman of exceptional beauty, gentleness, and elegance. She was a devout Mexican Roman Catholic who was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, a dangerous bordertown known for poverty and cartel presence. Though she was not educated, she was intelligent, and she became a secretary for the United States Air Force.
My grandfather was Danish, born into high society and proximity to the Royal Family. He was engaged to a woman in proper Danish society when he enlisted in The Royal Danish Air Force, and before they married, he was sent to Laredo, TX for training.
One night, my Mexican grandmother met my Danish grandfather at a mixer, and it was love at first sight. He immediately called off his engagement, and soon after - though there was a language barrier and major cultural and socioeconomic divide between them - they got married and moved to Denmark.
They were blissfully happy. My grandfather would bring my grandmother flowers every week, and their life and future together was beautiful and full of love and promise. Within a few years, my mother was born, and soon after, my grandmother became pregnant with my aunt.
However, my grandfather’s mother despised my grandmother because of her dark skin, her lack of status and education, and her inability to speak Danish. She felt she was a stain on the family, and she was blinded by her desire to destroy her son’s marriage.
So one night, she had a dinner party. My grandmother was not invited. Instead, my grandfather’s former fiance was there. And that was the beginning of the end of my grandparent’s love story.