Sunday, October 20, 2013

My Entire Life was Choreographed…

 

My Entire Life was Choreographed…
(and that just sucks that I was never free...)

Truism: People will reenact -- from a position of power -- whatever drama, or trauma, they suffered as a child…


My mother's childhood:

Fact: 

My grandfather (my mother’s father) isolated my mother (and her four siblings) from people who might have helped her.  Then, he beat and terrorized her (and her siblings).   He wasn’t a good provider.

Her mother (my grandmother), stood by and didn’t protect her, or her siblings.  Instead, my grandmother disappeared into the Bible, and the supernatural. 

So, this was my mother’s childhood, in a nutshell.

She was a young adult in the 1950s.  She had a decision to make; the choice to  take one  -- of two -- routes, in life. 

Door number one: She could go to a psychiatrist who could help her process her abusive childhood by repeating, “I…was…innocentI didn’t deserve that treatment, and I will not visit it upon my children!”

(Instead, she took...) door number two:   In order to relieve her unresolved anxiety over her abusive childhood, she spent years (decades) planning how to reenact it, on us.

My mother was attractive, and college educated (at a time when women only went to college to get their MRS degree.) She could have married anybody.She had her pick of the litter.

Instead, she married a man (my father) who abused her before marriage, got her pregnant (yes, she had consensual sex; I know), and  helped her get a back-alley abortion. She became infected, and very, very ill.
When she recovered, she married my father…and had five children by him.

Here’s the reenactment: 
  • He beat and choked her, 
  • He beat and terrorized us, 
  • She didn’t protect us,
  • He wasn’t  a good provider.
This served three purposes:

#1.  He beat and terrorized us, which relieved her unresolved anxiety over her own childhood.  She knew we were innocent, so this was proof that she must have been innocent.

#2.  It gave her a kind of cheap nobility.  By the mere act of standing next to him, she looked innocent (she wasn't: she was the puppet-master).  But she could appear pure as the driven snow, when in fact, it was...

#3. ...abuse-by-proxy.  He did her dirty work.

Now here's the proof that she wasn't so pure:  If she was the innocent party in all of this, then -- if by chance -- one of her children escaped the abuse and rose above it, achieving a good, decent life, she would be overjoyed, wishing this child the greatest of success and happiness.

Um, that's not what happened.

I (out of my four siblings) am the only one of her five children who escaped her event horizon, and married a good man and live a good life.

She hates my guts, and is constantly -- unceasingly -- scheming to suck me back into the evil that is her life.  To set my feet onto the desolation that was to be my chosen path (chosen by her).




No comments:

Post a Comment