Stuff I have Never Been Sorry For

Sometimes, when I cannot sleep right away and the clock is ticking on, the moon comes shining through the blinds and my David breathes with the rhythm of a baby sleeping, I pick out some old terrible memory and try to construct it in my brain just as it really was. Not the way my child mind colored it, but the way every thing looked, who said exactly what words, the look in the eye .....

It takes some sorting out. How I felt. What ....

I do this to try to understand what happened.

I must serve dinner.

Continued....

Love,
Betty

It was a cold morning with snow on the ground. I had chopped wood and brought it into the house for the stove.
She (my mother) said, "Take this pee pot out to the out house and dump it."

I said, " I ain't a goin' to do it!"

She looked at me with those awful green eyes and said, " You little bitch!'

I knew before I said it, it was a death sentence. . .

"I guess you know what that makes you." I said it with all the defiance I could muster.


I saw the her swing back and saw the knuckles on the back of her hand. I ran for my life before she could back hand me.

I reached a shed down by the creek, climbed the tree and sat on the tin roof heaving and puffing. I cried for every hurt that had ever been done me. I vowed I would live up there and eat mulberries forever.

Close to dark, I had bawled myself out. I leaped off the roof and landed full foot on a board with a rusty nail sticking up. It went through my shoe and all the way through my foot.

I wailed all the way to the screen door.

She came out and snatched that board, nail and all right through my shoe.

" I hope you see what you get for sassin' your mamma!"

She put my foot in a bucket of water and poured in lots of salt.


That was the last she ever looked at that foot.

It swelled up and got red all over. I walked on my heel for most of the rest of the year and puss came out the top hole when I stood on it.


I have never been sorry for those words. I do not think I ever will be.

I do not cry much anymore, either.

Love,
Betty

Betty,

My memories are different, but the emotion is the same. One thing I have learned is how important it is to have those experiences validated. I believe that your memory is accurate.Some of mine have the same feeling-tones.

Right now, I am working very hard to forgive my mother and other family members. It is not about or for them, it is about me, and my need to move on, but I don't think we can move on without validation of the reality of what happened. You can trust your memories. Children do not have control over such situations. There was nothing you could or should have done differently. Sometimes modern psychology, in its intent to help us see that we do not have to be stuck in those past situations, has a tendency to blame the victim. That is so wrong. Because of it, some of us carry guilt and shame around for years.

The words blame and responsibility can get so confused. when I was a child, my father was constantly telling me to "accept responsibility." What he didn't get was that he was asking me to accept the blame for my mother's rages. If I had been a better daughter, she would not have been so angry. If I had not, when I was five years old, splashed water from the tub onto the bathroom floor, she would not have grabbed my head by my hair and slammed it under the faucet so hard that my head hit the tub wall, and she would not have continued holding my head, by my hair, under the faucet, with water running into my eyes, nose and mouth until I was choking.

I later learned that much of her anger came from similar treatment she received at the hands of her own grandmother. It was not about me. I just happened to be the closest person at hand.

I see something similar in your relationship with your mother. I would say to you the same things I have been learning about my own situation. Your mother's anger and abuse was not about you. You were an innocent bystander. It was about her and her inability to deal with her own pain from her own past.

These patterns can go on for generations. The thing that you and I can both say is that we broke the pattern. Our children do not know what it is to experience such pain, anguish, and unwarranted shame.

Dear Ann,
The breaking of the pattern. It is why we remember in silence in the night these old hurts that we will not pass on.

Love,
Betty

10/11/2009

Betty...

Your story has touched my heart..
And yet you became a better human being
with great love to others and especially all
living creatures...

Love Joe

I was forty years old and my mother was spending the weekend. We were sitting at the kitchen table reminiscing on old times.

I had just said, "You know, it took me all these years to realize that
all that respect I had for dad (10 years dead) was actually FEAR."

Mom didn't bat an eye. She looked me square in the eyes and said, "You
know your dad didn't like you very much when you were little."

In my heart I had always known that, but to hear the words spoken - by
someone who KNEW them to be true was shattering. I had spent most of my
life seeking his approval.

There were several occassions that are as vivid now as they were when they happened...

Once, when I was about 12, he was yelling at me, accusing me of
something I had not done and I was trying to explain to him what had
really happened. It only made him angrier and he told me to shut the
**** up and listen. My hands were at my side but I balled my
fists up - not to strike, but in my own anger.

"Don't ball your fists up at me boy!" and hit me full in the face, knocking me to the ground.

I stood back up. He was immediately all apologetic, but blamed it on me
for making him so mad. After that, when threatened by guys my own age
and size, I wasn't afraid of them... I knew I could take a punch by a
grown man and get up. What could they do?

There were many times like that... he would explode in anger, then regret his actions afterwards.

I think it was as simple as this: I was his firstborn and he gave me
his name (as a junior). I was nothing like him. I was severely
nearsighted (he was 20-20) and nightblind. I was a bookworm nerd and he
was "a man's man". I did sissy stuff like writing songs and poetry. He
read the US News and World Report. And the biggest one of all, my
maternal grandfather loved me and protected me from him and I made it
obvious that my granddad was my idol.

He still is.

10/12/2009

Phil...

That was a beautiful story..


Cheers..Joe

Deleted by author

My mother and father were the most loving people I've ever known, for each other, family, God. My father dropped out of school when my mother got pregnant with me. He greatly valued education and the only thing I wanted to do after graduating from high school was to go to college and he supported me, making me promise not to go one or two years but to graduate.

I fell in love my first year in college. Many girls went to college in those days to find a husband. I went to get a degree and found a husband. I had no intention of breaking my promise to my father, however. The only problem was my husband and I were different religions and because of rules of his religion and his beliefs, we had to get married in his church. My husband was very devout in his religion and part of why I loved him.

My husband-to-be and I decided to get married when he was on leave, at Christmas time in 1959, a month before I would get my college degree fulfilling my promise to my father. However, my father said if I married this man he would not come to my wedding. Others in my family expressed similar views.

So we decided to get married on our own in the church in our college town. As the time drew near, my family said they would come if I got married near my home. I did so. My father's heart was broken and even the other day my cousin told me she would never forget his sad face as he walked me down the aisle in another church. Other friends and relatives did not come because they did not think I was doing the right thing, for my family, for me.

My father came to love my husband. My husband gained great respect for my father's religion. When my father died, the memorial service was in my father's church. Friends came from the other religion and just sat and did not participate in singing or going to the altar to honor this man. This hurt my husband, because he said the service was to honor this good man, and we all needed to participate.

Many who did not come to my wedding have apologized, although it was not necessary. Family members have said I really did know what I was doing and had made the right choice. My best friend cried one day that she had not been there.

The last time I was with my friend I invited her to our 50th wedding anniversary the day after Christmas. She said she would definitely be there.

I have never been sorry for this decision.

Carol

Betty,

How you avoided lockjaw is a mystery to me. Ann, your mother left a lot to be desired.

Brew, Sorry about your dad.

I had a mother too. She tried, but it wasn't easy for her. She didn't like me. It is easy to see why. She was intelligent and college educated. After I was born she had postpartum depression, it deepened to postpartum psychosis. She underwent a transorbital labotomy.

Not my fault or hers--just the way it was. I don't blame her or myself.

My dad adored me.

I say I had no childhood--I am having it now.

BETTY...It's okay to not like your mother. We don't like other bad people. It's okay to say "Damn you."

No one should take responsibility for their parents lousy parenting either.

Which of us decided to be born?

I didn't--yet my mother would say over and over again how wondeful her life had been until I came along.

I didn't just come along.

Interesting stories. Carol's again made me question the thinking of organized religions. With minor differences they all believe the same thing but are so spiteful over those minor differences.

Carol,

I don't find your parents to be loving--threatening to not attend your wedding is control freakism in the extreme.

I think you are the loving one

Just my opinion.

Betty,

When you cant' sleep, does remembering some horrbile thing help?

I am going to try to focus on something happy. I did have some happy times as a child--never even occurred to me Mom didn't like me until I grew up.

As i said she tried and really fooled me quite well.

Dear Alice,
I am happy by nature.

The reason I try to recall some of these old hurts in detail is for healing...even these many years later.

I used to have anxiety attacks where I would have to put my head in a paper bag to breathe.

One of these attacks seemed to come on whenever I entered one of the old time drug stores that had a bar and stools where they served soda and ice cream, coffee, pie and sandwiches.


When I was small, before I was in school, I was sent into the "beer Joint" to tell my father to come out to the car where we, his family, had sat for four or five hours. The memory of that is now clear in my brain.

I had trouble opening the door to step inside that dark, rancid place.
Stool after stool of men turned around and looked at me. I fled and ran back to the car. He staggered out after me mad and began cursing.

When I remembered that incident in all it's details, the anxiety attacks ceased.

I do not know why my feeble brain connected the stools at the bar with the stools of the drug store. But, I find that remembering some those times helps me to let them go and they no longer come back to haunt me in my dreams or anxieties.

Most of my nights are spent in peace.

Love,
Betty

Betty I am so glad you have come through all that and have learned how to deal with it.
My poor dear wife is still unravelling her past with the flashbacks and panic attacks. Abuse by any person in authority who ever they are is inexcusable. The scars it leaves behind are deep and painful and take a lifetime of healing. No one has the right to steal someones life like that.

Betty,


You amaze me. You are a true survivor.

David,

You have undoubtedly been your wife's salvation. She probably has a laugh a minute with you.

Child abuse is terrible and negative memories are stronger than good ones.

Betty,

I know this is not too much of a consolation, but you are not alone. When I worked as a counselor, I found my people who spent their childhoods waiting in cars until their parents came out of the bar. One young man even said he had to drive home most of the time, and he was only twelve at the time.

My mother used to say the past was the past, it was over, good or bad. I realized that wasn't so. Now that I am older, I realize that inside every old person is the child, the young person they were, the middle aged person. They are all there.

You are a survivor. I admire you.

Carol

Betty,

Did your mother or dad ever do anything even remotely kind or decent to you?

Were they drunk and abusive every moment of every day? I am trying to figure out their motivation here.


I understand my mother's difficulties--she was brain damaged. Ann's mother had a bad temper and so did Brew's dad.


Your mother must carry a ton of guilt.


Very curious.

Dear Alice,
I have thought about your question today.

One good thing my mother did was cook vats of pinto beans in a large pressure cooker. She also made bread. I cannot remember her doing anything else. Well, she did make quilts out of old clothes that people from the churches donated to us. She had an old treadle machine and I think she quite enjoyed the creativity of it all. She made me a dress, once. And one time, after people came and complained that my sisters and I were doing summersault in the little park without underwear, she made me some underwear out of a flour sack.

Our Carol located some of my relations. I have emails with my sister Nettie.

Nettie was treated in the same fashion that I was, sexually and every other way.

My sister Nettie lives in Oregon. My mother lives in Seattle and had done for a lot of years living off the welfare of that state.

A year or so ago, my mother or 94 was discovered by her friend in a close to death state on the floor of her trailer. She was rescued to the hospital and a perforated bowel was her malady. My sister said she secretely believed it was because of "all those enemas she gave herself." In my childhood, she was an enema giver. I never knew why and still do not.

The short story is that my mother could no long take care of herself. Nettie took care of her affairs and she was housed in adult foster care.

In the state of Washington, if you have collected welfare, when you cannot take care of yourself, your stuff is sold and the state gets the money for all the money they paid out while you were on assistance.

My mother whined and cried that she had been ill done by her daughter until the state sent in invesitation. Nettie went to confront my mother at the foster care facility with the state invesigators.

My mother, had many talks with Nettie before the foster care, did not recognize her even though she stood right beside.

My mother stood there with my sister right beside her and told the investigators that Nettie had stolen her belongings and that if she could get a hold on her, she would slit her throat.

You know, Alice, I do not think she carrys any guilt at all.

Love,
Betty

Of course she carries no guilt, Betty. She blames all her troubles on her children.

Ann

Betty,


I am so sorry. She is in my state. I feel bad for you and her and your siblings. She must be sadly deficient.

Dear Alice,
If you wanted to, you could find her. Talk to her your own self.

If I had more love in my heart, I would try to understand her better. I am lacking.
I think she is just a mean one. I think she and my dad were mean one's together.

When I think how sad that they had so many children who suffered so much, I have to think that here I am, close to 70 and life is good. I hope that is true for the rest of my siblings, as well.

Life is the gift. Sometimes no one even cares that they have given it to you, or cares if you live or die, but there it is....wonderful life.

I would not give it back. It was the best present I ever got.

Love,
Betty

The good part of your mother is she had you and Nettie. Out of chaos you became loving people.

I am glad you are in touch with Nettie.

Carol

Yes, at least she did not abort you. That is little good to say about her though.

I wish she would at least be sorry she was so mean.