Whether or not you traffic in the idea that humankind is a fallen entity, I daresay you have been cursed. Think now about the pronouncements of others that have stayed with you; the phrases that come back to you on hard nights; the old sentences that pop up again during present upsets and demand a fresh hearing.
The most destructive of these tend to come from our parents and teachers during our early years, though partners, friends, bosses, and even our children can add a later gloss. These phrases land violently and provoke a physical response as if you’d been hit. The body keeps the score of them. They are a haunting.
I have thought about this a lot, as I carry several such phrases. I heard such a curse in Alice Munro’s response to her daughter telling her that she’d been abused by Alice’s husband.
“She said that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”
In my conversations this week with friends about these revelations about the inside workings of Alice Munro’s family, I heard other remembered curses that fell on them from the mouths of their mothers. Indelible words that remain and torment even when the actual abuse has been therapized as much as possible.
I keep hearing Munro’s words in Andrea’s description of them. It’s too late, says the great genius of time in fiction. It’s a chilling phrase, a bleak erasure of possibility.
Whatever happened to you has nothing to do with me.
The nature of a long-lasting curse is that it reminds us that we are alone in an indifferent universe. As did Munro in much of her work. What curses did she carry around with her? is what I wonder now.
In an interview, Alice Munro confirmed that her father hit her with a belt when she was growing up. She said, "It was very terrifying and destructive. I feel that I was an unworthy person, and that's what it makes you feel." She followed this by saying, "There just wasn't time or money to bring up children in a way that took account of their needs -- why they were behaving a certain way." Alas, even brilliant people are prone to the repetition compulsion, which is itself a kind of curse.
Curses. An apt word, and curses run in families. Another revered Alice, the psychotherapist Alice Miller, wrote a groundbreaking book on parental narcissism and was cursed by it herself, abusing her son for many years before she eventually apologized. Children not allowed to be themselves for fear of disappointing or upsetting a parent are at risk of making the same tragic mistake.