My home life was somewhat dysfunctional, although I never fully realized
until lately just how much that dysfunction has affected me. The
picture here is somewhat one-sided; it focuses on those things that God
has brought forward as being wounded areas where lies have become
attached that He wishes to heal. To balance the negative, I generally
have always felt that my parents loved me, and that my home was pretty
average. I don’t know how accurate that is (about my home being
average), but that is how I have felt. My home life certainly was
better than some of my friends’ lives, and there were a lot of things
that were positive and that bring good memories to mind.
However. My mother was 38 when I was born, and often would tell the
story that when she found out she was pregnant with me, she told the
doctor, “I need another kid like I need another hole in the head”. I
know that my mom loved me, but words have power, and these words were
spoken into my life very early on, and were foundational. Mom was on
medication for depression for years, and was a pretty heavy drinker.
Both my parents drank regularly, but with mom, when they were
socializing she would most often drink to excess. I saw her
falling-down drunk a number of times; once was at a housewarming party,
and she fell backwards down some stairs and split her head open, needing
some stitches. I remember my dad standing there afterward nonchalantly
chatting with a neighbour, with mom’s blood all over the knees of his
pants. Mom’s frequent drunkenness was a significant issue between my
parents.
Mom didn’t cope very well with us kids, and would
routinely threaten, “One day you’re going to wake up and I’m going to be
gone.” Well, one day I woke up and both vehicles were gone, and both
mom and dad were gone. I went crying to my sister that they’d finally
left us. However, she soon figured out that dad was at work, and mom
was too, as she was the school secretary and even though school was out
for me just the day before, mom still had a few days of work before she
was done for the summer. My brothers used to tease me mercilessly, to
the point where one time I threatened to kill myself, and mom's reply
was, “Oh, don't be so stupid.” No “What’s wrong?” No “Tell me why you
feel that way?” No attempts to console or sympathize, I was just
dismissed. Regarding my brothers’ teasing (more like tormenting), both
my parents seemed either unwilling or unable to do much to stop it.
My
father was very distant emotionally. I recall once when I was seven or
eight years old, I helped him strip the sheets off their bed for
washing and he called me a good girl. I don't think that something like
that should be so rare or significant that you remember it. I used to
follow him around ALL the time; I was his little shadow. I was craving
his attention, and even though we spent a lot of time together, it was
mostly parallel; we were not engaged in conversation, I was just
‘there’. The first time I ever recall my father saying “I love you” to
me, I was around 30 years old, already married and living 1000 km away.
I said it first to him over the phone and he almost swallowed his
teeth. I realize that a lot of my dad's emotional constipation is
because of the generation that my parents were, and also because of his
upbringing, which I suspect was physically if not sexually abusive – but
that doesn’t mitigate its effect on me.
On top of Dad's
emotional distance was his wicked temper. He was a very angry person,
often in fits of rage. He never hit any of us in anger, but he would
have complete melt-down hissy-fits. I saw him completely destroy a pair
of headphones once with his bare hands and hurl them into the garbage
because they kept shorting out on him. He would very often come unglued
while he was driving, and there were many - countless - times when we
kids would be so completely terrified, because he was driving so fast
and dangerously. One time, not long at all before I moved out, he was
again driving like a madman, passing on blind corners, all because Mom
and I had taken too long to get ready to go to town shopping for the
day. He stopped at a hardware store along the way and I got out. I
started walking to a place where I could call a friend to come get me,
but Mom pleaded for me to get back in the car. We headed back home, our
shopping trip cancelled, and my dad started yelling at me, “Who do you
think you are, a f$%^&@g princess?” I told him that I was sorry,
but that I was scared. The trip home was only marginally slower than
the one out had been.
In addition to all this, I grew up in a
highly sexualized environment; pornography was prevalent and not secret,
crude jokes abounded, and I knew things at a very young age that I
should not have known. There was a complete lack of conversation with
any of us about sexual matters along with this 'anything goes'
atmosphere. My mother had the 1970’s equivalent to emailing dirty
jokes; she had a drawer that was full of all these jokes typed out, and
she would make copies for their friends. Every year for Christmas my
uncle would send my dad some sex gag gift of some description... all of
them crude and none of them kept hidden from us kids.
There
seemed to be very few boundaries, in a house of six people and
essentially one bathroom. You were often in the bathroom with a
sibling, one brushing their teeth while the other used the toilet.
There were often pictures taken of others in their underwear, and they
would remain in with the rest of the pictures after developing, and
become part of the slideshow of our lives, along with pictures of a
vacation or a pretty sunset.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Next: #2 Spiritual Development
Oh, how your chaotic growing-up life mirrors my own-- and thousands of others, I'm sure. Thus the friends who had it worse than you did growing up. I experienced immense shame seeing my parents drunk and making fools of themselves. And the 'emotional neglect' was surely a part of their own baggage. As an adult a friend and I swapped tales of our youth and she commented, "Oh, you had such a lonely childhood." I thought of myself as an introvert, and am, but the idea of being 'lonely' really hit me hard. Perhaps like I, you did some form of "Inner Child" work with a therapist. Writing about it is certainly helpful. Good work!
ReplyDeleteI am so sorry that I never saw this comment at the time you posted it! I saw one of them and replied, but not this one or the others. I'm not sure how that happened... Thank you for your words. I think that most families are dysfunctional to a degree and then there are those that are extreme. Thankfully there is much more awareness of it now. None of the work I did was specifically 'inner child' work but it was healing none the less.
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