Generational Curses

Deneisha had been dancing for almost two years and hadn't laid eyes on her twin sons in all that time. She would call sporadically and talk to them on the phone but it was pointless. She didn't know them and they certainly didn't know her. They were three years old and in daycare. The only person she spoke to with any regularity was her mother Rena and that was more of an addiction than it was a relationship. Rena Young was the only person whose approval she always craved and never received. During her brief marriage to Fletcher, the father of her children, he had often told her to be whole she needed to get past her mother but she had been unable to, she had never really wanted to. For the past three weeks, she had been meeting with Prophetess Genevieve who told her she was suffering from being cursed generationally. Genevieve had been a child of the streets and suffered abuse that would have killed many but at forty she was in full recovery and ministering to the young women on the strip. She stood outside of strip clubs, massage parlors and whore houses trying to reach and teach the young girls who were where she once was. It had taken her until age thirty to break the cycle and for ten years it had been her mission to help other girls. She knew from watching her friends that not every young woman, in fact most young women would never overcome but she was there for those who were willing. She had to be. She had lost her own daughter to the same curse, when she was twenty-nine and her daughter was twelve. The curse didn't have to end with death. Rena Young raged inside. She hadn't seen her daughter in two years, though she heard from her frequently. There was part of her that wanted Deneisha near so she could wring her neck. The other part never wanted to see her again. Deneisha was that finger pointing in her face making her look at herself and not liking what she saw. Her young life had been filthy and in trying to control what happened with her daughters she tried to insure theirs would not be. But on every count, in some way she had failed. Because while Deneisha's failure was clear and apparent, her sisters who on the outside seemed more successful were being crushed under the same curse, in different ways.