I’ve been ruminating a lot about how I grew up lately, which is not the best thing to do, especially now that both my parents are dead. Maybe I couldn’t bring myself to think about this stuff in depth before.
When I think about the bad things my parents did, the one that I’m about to list here isn’t really the worst. But I think it’s a mistake unique to religious fundamentalist families that I don’t see talked about a lot.
My family were Jehovah’s Witnesses. You know, the folks who have been waiting for the end of the world since 1914?
Anyway, when I was growing up, anytime I would talk about some hopeful goal I was thinking about, what I would do in high school, say, or what job I would like to get upon reaching adulthood, here was what they would tell me:
“Ahh, Armageddon will be here before any of that.”
And they meant it. Anyway my mom did. My Dad mostly just grunted. Or laughed.
Nothing quite kills ambition more than a vengeful god.
I’m a good writer, but I never pursued it. I never really pursued anything that needed more than a year or two or had any risk at all. I’m not saying fear of Armageddon is the main reason for that. But it didn’t help.
The weird part is, I think my parents thought they were offering helpful advice. Why think about difficult things when god’s going to fix it all? Just wait and see.
Anyway, thoughts? Any other tales of trouble from parental screw-ups?
Staying married. When we were single digits years old, Mom starting saying if it wasn’t for us kids, she’d have left my father. Might have been a better choice for all concerned.
The hare brain schemes. Similar to the people who fall for MLMs then have a garage full of unsold product, our basement was packed with boxes of stuff my dad designed that proved inferior to what was already on the market.
So the basement was jammed with junk, the ground floor was a battle zone as a result, my older brothers mastered the timing of not hanging around and catching a whipping but not staying out so late that a whipping would be inflicted upon return, and I hid upstairs in our bedroom teaching myself to transfer my escapist thoughts onto paper. Luckily I had a steady supply of stationery from a series of defunct companies for the purpose.
My parents never bought a house: rented during all the time I was growing up.
(Though cheaply because the farmer who owned the house we lived in was probably happy to just have it inhabited to prevent it falling in to disrepair).
Apparently my paternal grandfather lost a lot of money on property and other investments in the 1929 crash, and this made an indelible impression on my father.
My mother was verbally and emotionally abusive to everyone in the house. My father knew it made everyone miserable, but his devotion to religion was more important to him than his or our emotional well being.
Ah, I had a very nice JW friend in high school who fell in love with me and wrote me a lengthy confession letter asking me to abandon my faith and convert so we could be together.
Awkward.
I’m blurring this somewhat triggering contribution so it doesn’t ruin anyone’s day. It’s about child abuse.
I think when I tried to tell my Mom at the age of thirteen that her husband was molesting me and she responded by trying to get me alone with him so she could “catch them in the act” - her words, and tried to listen through doors but couldn’t hear anything so decided to spend the next four years not only not doing anything about it, but directing her jealousy and rage toward me as if I were complicit rather than a victim, that was a pretty big mistake.
But the thing that really drove the knife in is, when I told the truth, she tried to convince everyone I was crazy.
The more pedestrian mistake she made was blaming me for the symptoms caused by my ADHD. There were no real resources for high masking girls at the time so it was probably hopeless, but she could have at least chosen to take me seriously when I told her I wasn’t doing it on purpose. Instead she drilled into my head that I was lazy, incompetent, and selfish, and I wrestle with that self-concept every day of my life.
To hear my brother tell it, the worst thing was raising us in NYC. For some reason he bears a great deal of resentment that we didn’t have a suburban upbringing, with the picket fence and lawns and cars and whatever. Personally I appreciate and value what being a native Manhattanite brought to me, and thank my parents for doing what they did.
My parents were exceptionally solid, all things considered.
Mom was unpleasant when she drank alcohol, but stopped drinking altogether when I was fairly young.
Dad spent too much money on his hobbies, but we weren’t impoverished by it.
I was the 4th child, and they didn’t (to my young mind) take much of an interest in my schooling. Maybe they did and it was really behind the scenes, but I look back and could have used some adult direction and ass kicking as a teen.
My dad lost thousands of dollars on the sale of the family home because he didn’t take a property line dispute seriously, and his neighbor put up a big sign that scared off a prospective buyer. The really dumb part was that our neighbors survey actually lined up with everyone’s existing understanding of the property line, and he likely could have just agreed to it instead of dicking around with his own survey that impinged on both homeowners structures.
I think the worst mistake my parents made was to smoke. So I smoked for a dozen years until the day, at age 27, that I suffered a heart attack. Haven’t touched a cigarette since that day.
But generally, they did a pretty good job of parenting.
My mom married an abusive guy when my brother and I were eleven and twelve, or thereabouts. My brother caught the brunt of the physical abuse, but it was a shitstorm for all of us. After a few years, my brother and I managed to move in to other households, and Mom divorced that person, but damage had been done. Here’s the kicker: a few years went by, and Mom married that guy again. He hadn’t changed. She divorced him the second time when she learned of the family he was maintaining in another state. I know Mom had a lot of problems in her life, and we all do dumb things, but when I think of the part where she married him twice, it just kills me. I can’t wrap my head around it.
Heh. My Mom has been married five times and her recent fifth marriage was to a guy she had a serious relationship with when I was seven. My Mom as long as I knew her was fundamentally incapable of being without a man. Didn’t matter the quality of the man. Just this default assumption that any man was better than no man.
I think I’ve made clear in a few threads that overall, I think my parents did a pretty fine job by way of myself and my brothers. I think that my mother and step-mother did themselves a disservice by marrying my father though. He’s charming, but pretty darn self-absorbed, controlling, and while not emotionally distant he can be emotionally manipulative though not (IMHO, and my wife would draw the line differently!) abusive. I’m probably too close to evaluate him dispassionately, so she may well be more accurate.
(And don’t get me started on my step-father, though thankfully he and my mother are separated).
My parents did the right thing (IMHO) and got divorced when I was around 8, and while it wasn’t particularly smooth, they both avoided my brother and I being directly involved. But there was a noticeable amount of games getting played that I didn’t realize until I was more mature.
My parents did a good job overall, but growing up on a farm far from kids my age was difficult. It probably contributed to us being socially awkward. I have a brother who never went on a date as far as I know, and another who had a couple of bad marriages My sister dated but never married. I’m the outlier; Ms. P and I have been married close to 30 years.
My parents were children of the depression, so they worked very hard, saved assiduously, and also gave us good role models for a successful marriage. What they didn’t do they were pretty much incapable of doing – showing physical affection to us kids (my sister and me), and talking to us about sex. Never a word about sex was spoken in that house, and the combination of the need for physical affection, lack of understanding of the emotional impact of sex, and the inherent pleasure of sex messed up both my sister and me in different ways. I can’t really blame them, it was probably completely beyond them.
They did fine, for the most part. My parents weren’t huggy types, as they grew to adulthood during the Great Depression and knew how hard life could get. As a result, I was pretty insecure, as they didn’t intercede when they should have.
The guy I felt sorry for was a friend whose parents were Christian Scientists and didn’t believe in doctors. As a result, he and his sister suffered needlessly and had to seek medical help in secret.
