The Stories We Tell

(the curses we undo)

The stories we are told as children give shape to our realities. The mothers in this family are tough and can overcome anything. Your grandmothers knew how to be happy within the confines of their restricted lives. You come from a long line of women defeated by the world. As a wider culture, too, we tell stories about who our mothers are and who they can be. “Why are the women in the children’s tales always monsters or dead?” a young mother once asked me at a talk. Bambi’s mother is murdered. The sleeping beauty Aurora, in order to be safe from her destiny, must be taken from her mother as an infant. Every fairy tale has a witch, a sea monster, or an ogress. Every problem we have can be traced back and back to the problems our ancestral mothers bequeathed to us—starting with Eve eating her apple and Pandora opening her box.