Maybe it’s grim and horrible. Maybe it’s light and smurfy. Either way, this is the thread to talk about it.
I’m not sure whether this counts as GH or LS, but I strongly believe I was forced to go from leftie to rightie early in elementary school. I write dexter, but tend to do everything else left-handed, without consciously deciding to. My handwriting is laughably bad, and my athletic skills are non-existent, but I’m reasonably adroit in anything I’ve always been free to choose which hand to do it with. I don’t have any MEMORY of being forced to change, but still I wonder.
I’ve always suspected that my mom had an abortion when I was about 16. I couldn’t blame her, she was in her early 40’s and had three kids almost grown. It was never said or spoken about, and I don’t even know why I suspect it, but I do.
I suspect (in hindsight) that the battery of tests I took at elementary school in the little room in the basement next to the boiler room was only secondarily to see whether I was smart, and more to see if I was, instead, somehow retarded or had some strange learning disability (I was a weird kid and it might have been hard to tell one from the other, perhaps). I think my weekly ‘speech therapy’ was meant more as ‘therapy therapy’. I also suspect that my parents assumed I was gay and my ‘coming out’ straight in the long run surprised them.
I don’t think they actually took our German Shepherd, Blue, to live on a farm. I realized this while reading a thread a while back about “How your parents lied to you about what happened to your pet.”
I was reading along, thinking, “Man, these people’s parents are awful! All lying to their kids about the family pet! Why, when we had to get rid of Blue, my parents found a farmer outside of town and took him oh my god…”
It took my Mum 30 odd years to confess that Penny (the dog) never really ran away from home after all. Nope. She was in fact killed for nipping at the neighbour.
I suspect my father had an affair when I was about 16. I can’t prove it, but I have my suspicions.
I have the vague suspicion that my father had an affair too, when I was about thirteen. I can’t really blame him, logically: he had seen my mother hardly at all in about a year. All I know is he racked up a lot of money on a credit card; admittedly, he could have done that all by himself, but he never has been the random spender type.
I also suspect that I was molested by my best-friend-at-the-time’s older brother. Since I know she was abused by him and I, in turn, was abused by her. I don’t remember much, but I remember… things. I try not to think about it.
Me, I know the tests I took going into kindergarten were to see if I was below-scale or not. I tested really poorly starting out, but that’s partly because those tests were frankly bunk and partly because I’ve never been very physically adroit and I was an undiagnosed myopic. I got my glasses in first grade when the teacher finally realized WHY I seemed to understand everything until she tried to put it on the board.
Our lovely old dog, Paddy Paws, had gotten very old and tired. We sent him to “a farmer in Wicklow”, because “he’d be happier down there”.
My suspicion is that Paddy had gotten some terminal illness, and was put down.
Another suspicion is that my father knew my mother was dying of breast cancer for a long time, and never told her or us.
My final one is that my mother was buried in a cemetery in Howth, North Dublin. We have no family connections to Howth, it’s about 30 miles from the family home, there were 7 cemeteries closer to us. Why Howth ? My dad decided it,he’s dead and I never asked him. Looking back, when we visited her grave together, he often left with a funny smile on his face. I suspect something happened in their courtship around that graveyard.
I have an abuse suspicion with regards to a friend of my biological father’s. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest something once happened to me while I was staying with my father, and every time I see this guy, I immediately feel ashamed and like I have to get the hell away from him. Actually, thinking about him sort of makes me want to throw up. I have no logical reason for feeling this way, so I wonder if it was him.
Part of the problem is that shortly after my mother called social services because of what she suspected happened at my bio father’s house, my stepfather admitted he had been abusing me, and he went to prison for it. So even though we have this total seemingly open-and-shut case, I still have this lingering feeling about the other dude that cannot be proven one way or the other.
But I can’t really tell my Dad, ‘‘I never want to see that guy again, because I have this hunch…’’ That’s kind of lame and not very rational.
On an aside (because I don’t have anything to add to the OP) – the reason I was given state-funded IQ testing (my mother had already tested all her kids and knew our IQs) was that my third-grade teacher convinced herself and then my fourth-grade teacher that I was, in fact, retarded. I loathed both of those women so much that I simply refused to do any work that was not going to count towards my actual grade in the class. I passed all the tests, yet did no “busy work” whatsoever. I refused to speak to them, as I considered them beneath me and basically probably did come across as a high-functioning autistic, at best. My fourth-grade teacher insisted that I be tested so that I would be placed in the “special” class. I laughed in her face the day she had to tell my mother that I was to be put in “extra-curricular classes for genius-level children.” Yeh, she was that stupid that I was in the meeting – and had not read the file before she sat down with my mother. I still laugh about it.
I had a similar realization about my grandparent’s dog, who I was told was taken to live on a farm when I was about 8. I had the whole “oh my god” moment and all.
Then I called my Mom and asked her. She laughed and said “No, he really was taken to live on a farm.”
Well, some day my kids will figure out that our first cat did not die of the injuries suffered when hit by a car (although that did happen), we had the cat put down…
As for me, I was either messed with as a child or messed with by someone who was messed with. I mean sexually. I have no clear memories, no person in mind, although I do remember what Robin (a neighborhood friend-female) tried to do to me one day. That fact that I let her bothers me still. We were about 7.
Also, I think I may have been physically abused at some point in my childhood. We had a lot of verbal abuse going on, but I think I may have been smacked down quite young (like 2 or 3). My persistent memory of childhood is one of shame and fear. I also cried if you looked at me hard. Something was going on, anyway. No idea what.
And I think my Dad tried to get my Mom committed at some point prior to their divorce. I do remember him telling me that my mother was crazy and sick in the head…
I have a sneaking suspicion my grandmother secretly resented me.
See, Parents Wedding + My Birthday does NOT equal nine months. It took me a bit of time to noodle out I wasn’t two months premature, but my grandmother never got along with my father, and I think she secretly blamed me, because if it hadn’t been for me, my parents might not have gotten married. Certainly my grandmother was verbally and emotionally abusive toward me, running the gamut of playing head games to actually telling me to my face that I was a fucking bitch when I was about 13. I never saw or heard of her acting this way to my younger sister.
The grandparents are dead, I no longer have a relationship with my mother, so my suspicions will never be proven. But I’m pretty sure I’m right.
My mother has been an addicted smoker since WWII, and I’m sure smoked while pregnant with me and my brothers. I often wonder what effect that had on us.
I think my mom was either having an affair with her chiropractor, or wanted to be having an affair. I think she did have an affair with another person she worked with, who I never met. My dad once made a off-hand comment once, when my parents were separated, that he “wouldn’t live like a monk” and “your mother certainly doesn’t.”
I have a blue and white blanket from my paternal grandparents, and a vague memory of receiving it when I was about a year and a half/two-ish. I also think I remember the shirt I was wearing at the time and a lot of people being around in the house.
Piecing things together now as an adult, I’ve come to the conclusion that the people were from my sister’s funeral, and that the blanket (BLUE, remember) came from my asshole grandparents’ assumption that my mom would do the “right” thing and produce a boy for the second kid, since she fell down on the job with the first one. They were sexist that way. I was the “bad” grandkid for eternity for being the first on that side of the family and not being a boy. The “logic” involved escapes me, but that’s how they were.
But it’s not something I really want to ask about.
I found a 1940’s era porn pamphlet when I was snooping around in mom’s cedar chest. I don’t know what I was looking for. I was around 10 and just curious, I guess.
Anyway, a nekkid woman in one of the photos looked like my mom. I wondered about it for years, but now when I look at photos of women in the 1940’s, they all look alike.
I’ve always wondered about my stepdad, who was born in England. When he came to the US after WWII, he changed his name from Benjamin to William. He changed his middle name too. And his last name on his birth certificate is different from his mother’s last name. I don’t think he was adopted – his sisters looked just like him.
I know for a fact that my mother smoked while pregnant with me, and with my brothers and sisters. In my case, I know becase she never denied it. Back then, I don’t think people worried about it that much (I was born near the end of the Eisenhower administration). In the case of my youngest siblings, I remember my mother smoking while pregnant. It doesn’t seem to have done any harm to any of us.
What I did suspect for a long time, and now know for sure, is that my mom was absolutely insane. Her behaviour ranged from seriously depressed to delusional. I mean that literally. I am not engaging in hyperbole. She was delusional at times, and somehow her children got worked into her delusions. I feel terribly guilty for saying this in public, probably because she’s been dead for a long and can’t defend herself, but it’s true nonetheless. She wasn’t a bad woman, and did the best she could for her children, but she was absolutely clinically crazy, and I wish she could have gotten some help.
Unlike the smoking, the insanity probably did do some harm.
I stand 9 inches taller than my mother and 6 inches taller than my sisters. I am of a markedly different body type than anyone in my family, with darker, curly hair. I look nothing like my father or any member of his family that I have ever seen. I used to pore over family albums, looking for physical similarities to anyone. My dad tells me I am the image of his mother at my age but I’ve yet to see the photograph that confirms this. My husband wonders aloud what the mailman looked like.
My maternal grandmother hated men. All men, all the time. She was widowed at 33 and never dated or remarried. As she got older, she wouldn’t go to the dentist or doctor or let my dad clean her gutters or the lawn guy do the yard. She even forbade her grandsons and infant great-grandsons from visiting and she wouldn’t visit anyone who had men lor boys living with them. What was up with that?
I’m amazed to see that other children were tested in school to see if they were “retarded.” My mother made me start school a year late and was forever telling the teachers I was stupid. I was given a standard IQ test and scored 148! My mother’s response? “Lucky guesses.”
I had a horrible speech problem, but was good with written work.
I have always wondered why my mother hated me so much.
Great, now you got me thinking. I had Speech Therapy once a week in grade school. The weird thing is that I don’t really recall doing anything speech involved. I was kind of a problem kid in class - mostly problems with organization and doing my homework - but I am now wondering what the point of that therapy was.
I guess if they did think I was LD or needed special attention, it would be cruel to say I had a retard class. Maybe “Speech Therapy” was just a cover up.
