#1: The Beginning

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.

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Next: #2 Spiritual Development