Aunt Jackie, Family Secrets, and the “Generational Curse"

Facebook and the Internet have been instrumental in reuniting people after a ridiculous number of years. I even managed to find Guido, my kindergarten crush from 1961, and found out he had grandchildren!  (As, of course, did I.)  But I don’t think he quite remembered me, even if he did write a letter on standard kindergarten letterhead about marrying me when he was 21.  (Mom thought that was hilarious at the time.)

Similarly, in November of 2019, I was reintroduced to another blast from my past.  In the summer of 1972, a year after my summer vacation with Grandpa Ware, I dated a young airman named Mike Porter, and he was able to look me up last year by finding my high school yearbook picture online.  

We’ve become close friends, one of the kind I mentioned in my last post – the kind the Lord brings into your life to substitute for a missing relative – so I think of him as the brother I never had, my “Real Brother.” 

Mike’s wife Janet is suffering from a rare terminal neurological condition called Huntington's Disease. I encouraged Mike to write a blog to tell their story. In turn, he encouraged me to write a blog and tell mine, as hard as it may be. And if you’ve been reading to this point, you know how hard that has been – with even more yet to come, though maybe not quite as intense.

And then, even more recently, I’ve been in contact with my Cousin Terri, who lives in Los Angeles and is about four years older than I am. Since I was in the process of writing my story, I became very interested in finding out if there were similar stories among other members of the family.  What follows is a result of some pretty intense Facebook chatting.  

I have always thought of Terri fondly because when I was little (8), she was a big kid who was nice to me and let me read her Scholastic Book Club books, like “The Pink Motel.” We would lie in the grass side-by-side and read, and I thought that was amazing!

Mostly, in the Facebook chats, we’ve been talking about riots, COVID-19, and masks, along with the New World Order and the imminent Rapture of the Church. And we’ve talked about the persecution of the church in California and the Beach Revivals at Huntington Beach, where my Aunt Jackie lives. Terri’s been there to experience it – how exciting!

But finally, a few weeks ago, I asked her point blank: “Did Grandpa Ware ever approach you sexually?” I had to know. This was and still is, one of the fears I’ve had concerning my own private family secret. How much other damage was done because I didn’t tell? Terri said no, he had not, but then went on to tell me many other things I never knew. The one thing all the stories had in common is that they had been secrets for a long, long time, to the detriment of multiple generations.  She confirmed some of the things I had heard from my mother, and broke my heart with further details of her side of the family, of which I had, until now, been blissfully ignorant.

Here’s a disclaimer, though. Like COVID-19 policy, some things change over time, not because facts change, but because new information is discovered. If I relate something in my blog that is wrong, I apologize in advance. I’m going with the best information I have at the time of writing, and some of this is impossible to fact check now. 

For example, now I know that the white robe my Grandpa Berto was holding in the picture I published here (Chapter 5) was not a Christian liturgical alb, but a robe my dad brought home from Saudi Arabia. When I showed that picture to my dad, he wondered where I got it, but said that his father had been really excited about the robe.

According to my Cousin Terri, her mother, my Aunt Jackie, was conceived out of wedlock. Jackie’s mother, Grandma Pearl, left her small hometown of Sumner, Missouri, and went away to Lafayette, Indiana to have her baby and to hide the stigma of her pregnancy. And so, Jackie never knew her father. 

According to Terri, it is commonly said (at least among family) that Pearl and Jackie prostituted themselves as a mother-daughter team as she grew older, or at least they did until Pearl married Grandpa Ware.

I don’t know where Grandpa met his new wife, after he was divorced from my grandmother, Audentia. It’s easy to speculate but impossible to prove. It seems the second marriage was no better than the last one. My mother’s story of how Grandma Pearl didn’t love poor Grandpa was almost the same as Terri’s – except that she said that Grandpa didn’t love Grandma

My mother never called Pearl “Mother” and never taught us to say, “Grandma Ware,” but only “Grandma Pearl.” My image of her was as a homewrecker. Because of her, my mom had to live with her drunken mother and step-father, at least that’s what I thought.  Actually, there must have been some better times.  Here’s a picture of Grandma Pearl with my mom, “Margaret Lee” at the big house with the pool.  It appeared in the scrapbook on the same page as the picture of Mom and Dad with Grandma Pearl at the Santa Anita racetrack.

In contrast to what I’d heard, Terri says Grandpa never liked Pearl and treated her very very badly, hardly the blissful home my mother dreamed of living in. They had arguments and slept in separate bedrooms early on. Terri says she never did like Grandpa because he was so mean to Grandma, and that he was bitter and negative.

My mother told me of the history of her step family on occasion. She said Aunt Jackie had been married and divorced three times, so her three children had three different fathers, and that after those bad experiences, Jackie just lived with a fourth man outside of marriage. 

But Terri said she and her older brother were both fathered by the same man – “a Spanish man” – but Jackie never told them who he was. Jackie’s third husband adopted all three kids, but was a “crazy drunk” and a drug addict, who beat and molested Terri’s older sister and her brother, until the oldest daughter ran away, walking ten miles to get to Grandpa’s house and live with him instead. (Was that any better, I wondered?) 

This older daughter prostituted herself, too, like her mother and grandmother, even with Terri’s boyfriends. She left the family 40 years ago and never came back.

My mother told me that Jackie had asked her once how she had done so well – how had she found such a good man? Mom told her that while Jackie had met her lovers in bars, she had met my dad in church.

Hearing that story fed my pride. I considered our side of the family better than their side. From afar, I watched their side deteriorate over the years with early marriages, divorces, remarriages, and more. I saw that Grandpa Ware had been able to obtain legal custody of his step-great-grandson Willie because his mother was not a fit parent, and he put both Willie and his step-great-granddaughter Tammy through Christian school. 

And yet, no matter how good Grandpa Ware was, his step-descendants turned out all wrong. Tammy lived on the streets as a drug-addicted prostitute. Tammy’s sons moved away and “married” men. Everybody hated Grandpa for some reason, but always turned up when they needed cash.

I blamed all that on Southern California. People go bad in Southern California. 

Terri had more to share, though. She says Grandpa had a mistress that she knew about and Grandma knew – not surprising. And she and I speculated about how many other women he may have had.

There is a popular doctrine these days, called the “Generational Curse.” It is talked about in the Old Testament, how sin continues to so many generations – basically, it’s history repeating itself

Here’s God’s proclamation of His Name:  

“And the LORD passed before him and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation." ~Exodus 34:6-7

And in the Ten Commandments:

" You shall not make for yourself a carved image --- any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.” ~Exodus 20:4-6

Looking at the other side of the family, there are a good five generations at least, of sexual sin, much prostitution, and now, homosexuality to add to the mix. It could be argued that it is some kind of curse from God, but it looks like some of it could very well have been perpetuated by the same man who molested me. How much could have been avoided if I had told, or if the first mayor of Hawaiian Gardens had been incarcerated?

And, the same year my Grandpa was exposed, I found out that all those many years ago, he had approached my sister Rennie before I came to California, but she had turned him down and avoided him for two weeks. So because I never blew the whistle on Grandpa as a perverted child molestor, my siblings blamed me for all the terrible things that happened to them their whole life, things like babies born out of wedlock, abortion, nearly fatal drug overdosing, and endless cycles of marriage and divorce.

After the conversation with Terri had progressed for a while, and she said, “I know all kinds of family secrets … ” I had to stop her. I would have gently touched her shoulder, but it was just a chat window.

“Terri,” I typed. “We are set free from all of that.

“Jesus took our guilt and shame to the cross with him. All of that is crucified and CANCELLED. There is therefore now NO condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. Our ancestry and the circumstances of our family life do not matter anymore, because even if it has affected who we are, it does NOT define us.”

And I prayed, “Our dear Father in Heaven, Terri doesn’t know her father nor her grandfather, and my own grandfather betrayed me. But You are our Real Father. Help us to understand that someday we will stand in Heaven before You, along with our very large and diverse Real Family, together forever, where You will wipe away every tear from our eyes ...”

Terri and I are set free. I am healing from the effects of incest. I know the Father, and this is what I think of “generational curses”:

“Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree")”

 ~Galatians 3:13

Because Jesus hung on a cross (the tree) and died, we as Christians have been set free from any and all curses, including the infamous “generational curse.” History does not have to repeat itself. We are free. Indeed, now the second part of that verse in Exodus applies:

… but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.”  ~Exodus 4:6

That’s the other side of the coin: Mercy. It is a bit debatable whether this should be translated as “thousands of people” or “thousands of generations.”  One sounds understated and the other sounds overstated.  But nonetheless, living in God’s mercy is the happy state of the Believer in Christ.  

It is my hope and prayer that whoever reads this blog will also see the need for a Real Father, who truly loves us and protects us, and who wants us to be saved from our sin, to be rescued from any curses, and to live with Him forever.

And that is the best “Happy Ending” I can think of.