A Letter From the Beast

Beauty and the Beast is a classic French fairytale, and for years I thought I understood who the beast was.

When I became a mother, I was a vibrant size 6. I loved building, gardening, writing, and spending time with my children. I taught each of them to read before kindergarten. We went to the park, the library, and the zoo. I wasn't a perfect parent, but I was present. The woman my children knew in those early years was recognizably me. Then I began to change.

After my third pregnancy, I developed chronic anemia. After my fourth child was born, I noticed I struggled to comprehend what I read. As an English major who had always understood what I read deeply, I dismissed it as exhaustion. I had four children under six years old - of course I was tired!

With my fifth pregnancy, I could feel that something was wrong with my body. I chalked it up to general physical depletion from having so many children and decided to stop at number five. I was stuck at a size 12 and starting to feel distressed about my moods. I struggled to get out of bed before 11 am. I had stopped making snacks for my children. I was irritable. I remember stepping out of church one day and thinking: What just happened? That wasn’t me talking. Usually when religious people say that, they are refering the Spirit talking through them. That day, I had been enraged for no good reason. Those people were my loved friends. I didn't know what was going on.

At age 40, blood work showed I was still anemic and low in vitamin D. Within two weeks of taking supplements I felt an positive emotional shift. As much as that helped, the metaphorical fur was still growing across my beastly body, and my teeth and nails were getting larger and sharper. My brain was continuing to morph from the brain of a poet to the brain of a beast. Did you think I was going to be Beauty in this story? 

Two years later I had child number six. I can barely remember the first year of his life. By the time he turned one, I was wandering around the house three days out of the week not knowing how to do what I’d set out to do. I was in a daze and almost constantly emotionally dysregulated. COVID hit. I let other people take the experimental vaccine first so I’d know what the side-effects were. Word came out that some people were experiencing heart problems. I was already experiencing tachycardia in addition to my chronic fatigue and irritability. Who wasn’t tired and irritable during COVID?

I decided to go and have a full physical before getting vaccinated. When I explained my symptoms to my doctor, she wanted to run a full battery of labs. I tested deficient in several areas: Vitamin D, iron, B12, and my CDC was abnormal. One of the tests that came back positive was significant: IFBA. This was the name of the curse, and my doctor didn’t even register it. Thankfully, I was reading my own lab results and doing research. Intrinsic Factor Blocking Antibodies, Pernicious Anemia, prevents the body from absorbing vitamin B12. The result is a chronic state of anemia because the body cannot form blood cells to bind oxygen without vitamin B12. Other symptoms (I won’t go into all of them) are tachycardia and dementia, which has its own set of symptoms, including brain fog and emotional dysregulation. 

In all, I’d felt the effects of this curse for 11 years. It was another two years before I looked in the mirror and saw myself as mostly human again. I had shed most of the fur, and my nails and teeth no longer looked lethal. I didn’t realize I was looking in a magic mirror that distorted my image, showing me a future view of myself. In everyday life, my children still saw the beast.

In 2022 I had finally regained enough of my physical health that it was time to work on mental health. I could now see that my children were emotionally devastated. My two oldest children had taken on a tremendous burden over the past 13 years. The more I slipped away, the more they stepped up and became parents before they were emotionally ready or capable. My third child had almost completely withdrawn. My fourth child was lashing out and emotionally reactive. My fifth and six children were more reliant on their older siblings as parent figures than on me. Everywhere I looked there was devastation from the beast.

We started a long road of therapy. Most of my family members were reluctant to start; there were a lot of emotional wounds that needed to be uncovered, cleansed and healed. Not everyone was ready for that. Not everyone trusted that there was still a human being behind the curse, and not just the beast. 

I decided to enter a Masters program in counseling, a choice that has paid for itself in spades. I saw my family in the textbooks I read, the suffering of my children, and I slowly began to piece together ways of restructuring our roles to undo the harm my curse had caused. Yes, it took a Masters degree to do it.

The more I looked into the magic mirror, the more I felt human, the more I told my children about the horrible curse I had been under, the more I sought their trust. If they expressed fear or hurt from the past, I would say, “I was sick. I’m not doing that now.”

Nothing was truly resolved by my declarations as they looked at my outstretched hand with its dark, three inch, razor sharp claws. “I know.” They would respond, and the conversation would end. They would walk away from the beast.

One day, as we were going through these same cyclical conversations, an older child said to me, “Mom. I know you were sick, but every time you say it, it’s like I’m not allowed to have any of the feelings I had.” 

I thought about that for a year and finally realized I was trying to protect the beast and what the beast did because I couldn’t face my own guilt and shame. The curse had nothing to do with it. I was trying to protect myself by reminding them that I was a victim of nature, of circumstance, of my own ignorance. 

This is where the paradox is thick. My insistence that it wasn’t me was trapping my children in an emotional limbo. Everytime I said, “But I was cursed. I’m not like that,” it was sending the message that no reasonable, loving person could blame me or hate me for what happened, because I was suffering too; I was cursed. 

I kept dismissing their feelings and refusing to take responsibility for my actions or inactions. That isn’t what a hero does. Loving parents must take responsibility for their actions, cursed or not. My children needed someone to free them from limbo. The curse itself didn’t care. 

So, I had to be their villain if they were going to move forward. I had to love them enough to hide how much it tortured me every time I saw scars left by the beast. I had to love them enough to set my own pain aside and say I am the beast who cut you. I see the scars I left behind. Please tell me about your fear, your feelings of betrayal, all of it. I will listen and accept it all. 

You can’t bring the cure into it, my dear cursed parents. Every time you do, you tell the people you love that they are wrong for feeling hurt or angry. They aren’t wrong. They aren’t responsible. You have to be. This was the hardest part of my recovery. To really have compassion for them, I had to see myself through their eyes, and not fixate on the image in the magic mirror.

When I was able to do this, something miraculous began to happen. The image in the mirror started to become the image my children saw in our day to day lives. Accepting that I was the beast turned me human again.

It took time for me to be emotionally ready to accept that I was the beast. Before that day came, I spent years repairing and building emotional safety in my relationship with my children. Emotional safety isn’t just for the children, it’s for us too. I needed a sliver of hope that they could forgive me before I was able to own everything that had happened. Now, my children can name the curse on their own, and I don’t have to. 

If you are the child of a cursed parent, your pain matters too. You do not have to choose between compassion and honesty; both must exist in the same story. You don't have to absolve. You don't have to condemn. You can simply tell the truth and begin to heal.