Tag: intergenerational trauma

The Power of Two

My son – my eldest child – got married yesterday. To a beautiful, elegant, intelligent bride. I was not there. None of his family was. That was by choice and not an antagonistic one.

The couple deliberately sought and got the privacy and simplicity they wanted as they exchanged their vows. Family watched the live-streamed event at Ottawa City Hall from a great distance on our computers. Technology, eh?

Our society creates so many false expectations and financial demands around weddings. So much so that it didn’t surprise me when I read many divorces take place because the couple seems to forget that a wedding is followed by an actual marriage. Which is way different.

For years, I pooh-poohed the importance of having an intimate, loving relationship in my own life. If I’m honest, fear held me back in single, celibate check. I figured if you can’t skate yourself and everyone in your family is a really bad skater, don’t head to an ice rink and make a fool of yourself.

My parents made a complete cockup of their marriage. They both brought a bag full of unprocessed issues and dysfunction to the table. Within that marriage’s walls, three daughters were dutifully born one after the other.

I was number one. A precarious perch to hold in any family dynamic. That place in the siblings’ birth order is loaded with expectations and often imposes a sense of excessive responsibility on that child. Perhaps even moreso in the specific circumstances of my birth once my origins became clear to me.

Unearthed in counseling, the wise woman listened patiently to my seemingly endless tales of maternal betrayal. In one pivotal session, she stopped short, looked up from her notepad and piercingly asked: “Is there any chance your parents had to get married?” My world flipped. The immediate sense of potential truth I had shook me to my core.

That night, I called my father and uncomfortably asked him the question. His response was sheepish, but honest. “We were going to get married anyway.” It was a sweet phone call tinged with sadness.

Then I called my mother asking the same question. I might just as well asked her if she routinely drove pins into small helpless animals for sport. She shrieked at me and called me down and accused me of all manner of foul things that I even DARED to ask such a question. “How could you!?” Her response was my answer.

I married my children’s father under a Sword of Damocles. My mother was clearly upset leading up to and at the event itself. Still she didn’t say a single negative word. Instead, she smiled too much and too broadly, paced about the room and looked decidedly drawn and anxious at the little wedding ceremony we managed to have.

That marriage was not a great romantic story. I believed the guy I married was the ”boy next door.” Plucked carelessly from the available pool surrounding me at the time. Safe and harmless, I reasoned. We would have one of those loveless marriages of convenience. We’d raise good kids. He would be the chief cook, bottle washer and cheering section to support my rising star.

Since I was not in love with him, I believed he could not hurt me. That delusion was emphatically ripped away after my son was born. In spite of two university degrees, it turned out my real education was only just beginning.

My mother’s abundantly and publicly supported my son’s father. And I, like a hapless beast who finds itself being sucked into quicksand or a tarpit, faced the dawning realization my mother was my mother in name only.

The flimsy bonds of attachment I had had to her already unravelled in an instant. Never marry or have children to give your parents grand babies. The ensuing years were difficult and traumatizing.

Such is the unwelcome gift children inherit from unhealed, immature parents. “Growing up” isn’t easy under the best of circumstances. In our family’s convoluted and dysfunctional dynamic, the damage and scarring continued well into adulthood.

My greatest regret was the trauma and deprivation foisted upon my children. They were born into circumstances they had no control over and didn’t deserve. What child does?

So my son and his bride’s decision to marry yesterday after his own faltering first attempt was and is – as all important ventures are – a victory of hope over experience.

I feel the same about my own marriage. Truly a “whodda thunkit” situation. After years on my own, I was blessed in my dotage to find someone I can love and laugh with. I love and appreciate my husband beyond my own understanding. We treasure each moment we have together and all the more because we know our time together is limited.

There is a simple happy moral to the story at this point. The bonds of intergenerational trauma in my little family – while far from being fully healed – have at least been confronted and challenged.

My two children and me – and their father too, to be fair – have committed to and follow our own healing path. Admitting there is a problem, they say, is the first step to overcoming it.

For Cameron and Shaar, I wish them every imaginable positive experience and joyous occasion their formal union now opens to them. They have had a pretty phenomenal run as partners.

I wish them the strength and wisdom they will need to face and overcome inevitable challenges and disappointments that will come into their lives.

I support their growth, their love, and their boundaries. It is their life and their show. I am happy to be invited to watch that show occasionally and take part in the assigned parts I am given as I can.

From where I sit, the vows Cameron and Shaar took today exhibit a maturity and commitment that will serve them both as they evolve in their married life.

In ideal relationships, we believe love will give us the security and support to help us heal and grow. I wish that for both of them.

Let the future unfold as it will in the spirit that abounded at yesterday’s lovely and intimate ceremony.

Much love and good wishes on your forward path, you two. God bless and Namaste.

Dad’s 110th

Had he lived, my father would be 110 years old today. He didn’t have much of a life. Not what you’d call a “good life.” Not from my point of view anyway.

But Dad was survivor. I inherited that from him. From both parents, if I’m honest.

Dad was a severely abused child. Physically and emotionally. The worst tormenter in his young life was his mother. By all accounts, she was a selfish and heartless woman. She was known to be unsatisfied with her lot in life. I doubt that is the reason why she abused her children. If she were alive today, I am sure she would be diagnosed with some degree of sociopathy.

Dad blamed his mother for most of his emotional ills and difficult, fragmented life path. Dad also blamed his father because he didn’t step up to intervene in her assaults.

Possibly the worst story I heard was that of the kerosene barrel. Back in the days of the early twentieth century, kerosene was a necessary household staple. It kept kerosene lamps alight. It fueled kerosene heaters for necessary warmth in the piercing mid-winter cold of provincial East Coast Canada.

Dad was a curious child. A trait he carried forward into late adulthood. His interests seemed boundless. That curiosity led him to the woodshed one evening where the kerosene barrel was kept. Ominously, he had brought a box of matches with him.

When he lit a match, the uncovered kerosene barrel flared up and burned all of my father’s face. At the tender age of only 7 or 8 years old, my father would have been nose-to-nose with the barrel. He screamed piteously and his mother came running out of the house from the kitchen, just inside.

In rapid succession, she saw the kerosene barrel after the flareup extinguished itself, the matches and my father. In a rage, she slapped her hand across my father’s red and peeling face. The details of what happened after are mostly left to speculation.

Dad recalled that the skin of his face hung down on the sides. The damage was so extensive, he was never able to grow a beard. Hearing the story later as a young adult, I was horrified and stupefied.

A normal mother and normal parents might have bundled up their injured child and rushed him to a hospital. That did not happen. In the classic response of an abused child, my father exonerated my grandmother: “She stayed up all night putting egg whites on my face.”

It took years of healing myself to understand the enigma that my father was. He was a handsome, well-built, strapping man. Yet until the day he died on December 24, 2005, a large part of him remained that fearful and abused child.

Dad described himself as suffering from an “inferiority complex.” I would describe it now as post-traumatic stress disorder. He never really recovered.

Bear in mind this horror story is only the tip of an emotionally abusive iceberg. I can only imagine the small and consistent episodes of abuse and general lack of love in that household that my father and his two older brothers endured.

I admired Dad because he never stopped searching for a cure to his inner anguish and turmoil. He took several Dale Carnegie courses. Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” had a prominent place on the bookshelf beside Dad’s law books. Dad won awards for public speaking at these meetings.

He attended “Men’s Retreats” put on – I assume – by some church group. Catholic, no doubt, as that was the predominant religion and power broker in the province of Newfoundland at the time.

Dad tried and repeatedly failed to quit booze for good. He got all the way up to one year of sobriety once. But on his 92nd birthday – just two months before his death – he was drunk as a lord and emotionally effusive as he would always be when loaded. I had begun to not care. His deficits created many of my own and I was in the middle of sorting through them and trying to heal.

It would be fair to say my Dad was an atypical father. He didn’t seem to have the protective instincts of other fathers I encountered among my friendship group. Support from him was erratic and situation specific. He was feeling good about life and himself, I was often the beneficiary. When I really needed something and asked for it, I would be denied if he didn’t feel generous.

Dad knew he was afflicted. He used to say: “I am doing my inadequate best.” High marks for self-awareness.

Of course, Dad would not have lived to 110. I am not sure I would have wished him to. HIs passing for me was tinged with equal measures of grief and relief. He left an emotional morass and three badly damaged daughters in his wake.

I don’t know if I will be be able to leave a cleaner slate when I die. I certainly followed in his footsteps in many ways. The difference is that I was able to seek and find relief and healing from my abuse. To be fair, I grew into a time where that was more acceptable and easier to access in society.

Still today, in particular, I think of him and the influence he had on me and my life. I’d like to tell him I survived him. I might phrase that differently if I were face-to-face with him. He was my Dad and I loved him. I would say he loved me and my sisters in his way.

I would also say, that just like him, in the realms of parenting and marriage, I am doing my inadequate best. I have worked my whole life to break the ties of intergenerational trauma. I hope my children and grandchildren will eventually benefit from that. Time will tell.

RIP Dad. I hardly knew you but I send my love to you today. Wherever you are.

Broken Birds

It is commonly believed – somewhere – that a fertile young woman inclined to get herself in the family way will seek out the strongest, healthiest mate she can find as a father to her children.

The reasons are two-fold. A strong healthy male might be expected to produce the strongest and healthiest babies. A strong healthy male might also be expected to be a good provider.

I’m the first to admit that these are wildly, out-of-fashion assumptions, and options in the baby-making realm these days are just as wildly variant. Many young women plan to not only have but raise and take care of their babies all by themselves, thank you very much.

But abused children as adults do not necessarily seek out what is good for them. Quite the opposite, in fact. I saw this manifest in my mother operating as an adult from her own abusive background (though she would rather eat nails than admit that it was.)

My mother was repeatedly drawn to the birds with broken wings. She invariably sought out others as abused and oblivious to its impact upon them as she had been. Our childhood was filled with an assortment of ne’er-do-wells and problem drinkers and people “not quite right” whom she could and would take under her wing.

She aspired and identified with the local “intelligentsia,” who willingly came to her countless parties and drank copious quantities of free booze. The professors. The lawyers and judges. Occasionally doctors, but her conversational boundaries with them were reached pretty quickly. Doctors were usually much too starchy and grounded in reality for her liking. She much preferred philosophers.

Mom married a bird with very broken wings indeed. His childhood of physical and emotional abuse showed up in adulthood as sex and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, and an inferiority complex the size of Greenland.

In retrospect, she would say about her attraction to him, “I was going to love him so much he would heal and get better.” And of course, he never did. Not with her. What she didn’t say is that water seeks its own level.

People change themselves if they are going to change at all. They may be motivated by someone else but the work of “changing” is theirs and theirs alone. And the “savior complex” my mother had was never completely altruistic.

There was something reminiscent of trying to remove a splinter in someone else’s eye while ignoring the log in their own. Mom came to see – after years of enduring my father’s abuse and her unceasing pain – that her assumptions about her marriage were painfully naive.

But she never really fully let it go and moved on. She liked having been married to a lawyer. It meant a lot to a small-town country-raised girl. I used to say that their divorce was only on paper.

And after the parents’ divorce, Mom continued attracting broken birds to her circle. The “recovering” alcoholics. The “between real jobs” handymen. The sketchy English professor who was “down on his financial luck.” She was inordinately proud of helping them. If they could be helped.

To me, they seemed like a rogue’s gallery of lesser men of even less fortune who were happy to prey upon my mother’s vanities and vulnerabilities. Children often see things differently than their parents.

So, in kind, I picked a broken bird. Our shared history of parental alcoholism was a bonding issue. But dysfunctional backstories do not set a firm foundation for a lasting marriage. My own views were so crippled and skewed that on our wedding day – carrying our first child – I blithely mused: “If it doesn’t work out, we can always get a divorce.”

Life and the children I would bring into this world drove the message of my own naivete home in waves of dull pain for all of the following years to date. I still have to carefully bridge conversations where my daughter bemoans the “fine line” she has had to walk her whole life between her father’s world and mine. “Mom screwed up,” is all I can muster by way of comfort.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course. But in choosing a father for my children, I did what I had been taught to do. “Pick a broken bird and make him better.” Poppycock, of course. I can only say that my children were the catalyst for my own embarkation on a healing path.

As my children wrestle with their own issues emergent from a dysfunctional background, I hope that owning up to my own mistakes will give them better emotional grounding and source material than I had to work with.

One of the greatest lessons I have learned about life is that hope springs eternal. Indeed it is often said of “second marriages” that they are a triumph of hope over experience.

With the all too human “compulsion to repeat” from those of us who emerged from dysfunctional families, it is one of those quiet blessings for which I often express thanks and gratitude.