My Awful Parents

Well, they weren't really that awful.  I think they did their very best if you factor in a few details:

1. My father was an alcoholic.
2. My mother was already five months gone with my older brother when they tied the knot.  This was in 1952 when abortion was not that available.  On the other hand, I learned after her death from an aunt of mine that Mom had an abortion I think in 1950 or so and it might not be the only one.
3. They were both really young for marriage, Dad was twenty-four and Mom was twenty-one.
They were not well-educated.  Dad dropped out at grade nine, Mom at grade eleven.
4. My mother had an incredibly short fuse.  My father was passive aggressive.  Made for each other.

My parents met in May, 1952, I think in a beer parlour and before they knew it Mom was pregnant with my brother and five months later they were married.  I wondered as a child why there were no photos on display in the house of my parents' wedding, and why my maternal grandparents didn't come out from Saskatchewan to attend.  It turns out the official excuse was, being farmers, and the fact that my parents were married September 17, they would have been in the middle of the wheat harvest.  Of course.  There was no wedding in white.  My mother did where a dress suit for the day, "off-white" as she called it and the one photo I saw featured both my parents standing on a stage with supportive siblings at their side.  I never once heard of their celebrating or even acknowledging their anniversary.  This was simply an aberration we had learned about on TV shows.

Until I was about eight years old we all seemed rather happy.  My father was an auto mechanic and my mother was a home maker, though she also worked part time in stores and supermarkets as a product demonstrator.

We lived for seven years in a two bedroom bungalow on an acre of land.  My brother and I shared a bedroom.  I was nine when we moved to a larger, split-level house on a small corner lot in a spanking new subdivision.  We had three bedrooms and my brother and I each had our own room.  My brother was approaching puberty and became frequently and very violent towards me.  My mother had always hit us both, often, and her punishments were often whirlwinds of fury.  She was truly frightening.  My father wasn't often one to hit, except occasionally across the face.  Twice he severely beat my brother, once for chopping down the young pear tree belonging to our neighbours and once for stealing.  My father also was in the habit of sometimes molesting me, usually in the mornings while I was getting dressed.  Their marriage was tanking.  He was being unfaithful.  He gave my mother crabs.

Knowing what we know now I think even then the child welfare authorities would have apprehended me had the full story come out of the way they were mistreating me.  I accepted it as normal if very upsetting.  I remember following one beating I shut myself in my bedroom and cried for two hours.  Not even my father's threats to give me something to really cry about were enough to silence me.  He didn't touch me.

My family made me ill.  It was on their account that I suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, such symptoms as were manifesting even when I was a kid but became only properly diagnosed when I was in my forties.

In the early nineties I got hold of Susan Forward's book "Toxic Parents."  Reading this helped me make sence of the emotional abuse, especially of how my mother tried to transform me into a small adult to look after her emotional needs after my father left when I was thirteen.

Both my parents are long dead.  I have memories of both that I love and hold dear but I will never forget the abuse.  My body and soul together forbid this, though to the best of my ability I know I have forgiven them.  I only wish I could say that I miss them.  I do not.  For the first time in my life I feel truly safe.