I recently returned from a family wedding, my grandson’s. In watching the interaction between the members of our large family (more like a small village – we number 38) I was fascinated to see the various groups that hung out together. Our teen granddaughters were a threesome (one granddaughter is away at college), the Best Man at the wedding was a first cousin and best friend of the groom, the men were busy discussing “guy stuff” and the females were doing the cooking, the dishes and discussing babies and the latest family gossip. On the floor we had little ones crawling and toddlers toddling and later on dancing. It was fun to watch. My son had made the comment at our last family gathering, “Mom, just think, if you had never been born none of us would be here today.” It was an interesting thought.
All of it put me in mind of my own nuclear family, a severely dysfunctional one. John Bradshaw, author and guru of child sexual abuse recovery once said, “All families are dysfunctional in one way or another.” Even as I looked fondly at my huge bunch, I feared this to be true. I thought of John Bradshaw’s illustration of how family members can be separated from each other for many years, even decades, and then when brought together, all will slip unobtrusively into their original dynamics to each other.
According to Dr. David Allen in Psychology Today, “We are all emotionally attached to our families of origin whether we like it or not—or whether we like them or not. This is easiest to see with children, who will often cling to abusive parents, if given half a chance, rather than to a loving foster family. With adults, whether they admit it or not, members of dysfunctional families long for the loving mother or father they never had.”
I thought of my husband, an only child. He was different than someone raised with siblings. In addition, he’d never had a child of his own. When we were married I was 57 and he was 50. He officially took on four children and ten grandchildren as his own. Today, the family has grown substantially and he loves each and every one as if they were his own blood kin. He would cheerfully take a bullet for any of them. But he had to learn and grow first. An only child has never learned to share, has no idea about remembering a multitude of birthdays nor does he care, is used to doing what he wants, when he wants and if he wants. Boy was he surprised. He missed all that high drama of dysfunctional family. Today, I count on his wisdom to put a leash on me when I tend to over-react to something that has been directed at me. He is a blessing.
My nuclear family consisted of two older brothers and two younger sisters. The first four of us had been born in four years so were relatively close in age, the girls often dressed as twins and the same for the boys. The youngest was born when I was nine. My mother, tired of raising four kids, turned her over to me. Until Jeanne was almost an adult she thought I was her mother for I got up in the middle of the night to feed her, changed her diapers, rocked and sang her back to sleep and did all my household chores with her on my hip. My father delivered me in the middle of the winter, during a blizzard in International Falls, MN, a town that records consistently the lowest temperature in the nation. As a result, a bond was created between father and daughter, never to be broken. When he died at the age of 71 I felt the shock as if an earthquake had just happened and became incoherent with grief. This was the man who had raped me when I was 13 and sleeping innocently in my bottom bunk. This was the man who continued his incestuous relationship with me until I ran away from home at the age of 18. This was the man who beat me to unconsciousness more than once, at my mother’s insistence. The last beating almost killed me.
I was the oldest daughter, my role was to be the youngest mother, the housekeeper (my desire for hard work was almost obsessive starting at the age of eight) and at the age of thirteen my father’s mistress, an adulterous sin on my head in the eyes of my mother. My younger sister, sleeping on the top bunk, who had witnessed the original carnage of my almost emaciated body was forever changed. She lived from that moment sullen and fearful, angry at me for being the favorite, fearful that the next victim would be her. She had my father on a pedestal and we all know what happens then; we put on the blinders. Today, whenever my sister and I meet (and it has now been many years since I’ve seen her), she is fearful and sullen, alternately arrogant and insecure. She once tried to assault me while I drove the two of us on a curving mountain road screaming that I was Dad and she was terrified of Dad. It left me shaken and uncomprehending.
My oldest brother, my mother’s favorite, was also a hard worker, a “good kid” as my other brother describes him. He was cursed with the inherited genes of my maternal grandmother’s alcoholic brothers. He also spent fourteen years in the Navy as a Medical Corpsman, most of those years in Vietnam. For the last few decades of his life (he died recently of COPD) he was a broken man, who rambled incessantly, couldn’t remember for sure if he had children or not or even how many times he’d been married. He needed a hero in his life. My father was his hero until he found out about the incest. A murderous rage ensued where he wanted to dig up our father’s grave and kill him all over again. Alcohol sustained him. He found a new hero, John Wayne. When he died I inherited his enormous collection of John Wayne memorabilia. He had never grown up. It wasn’t allowed in our family.
The brother I’m closest to is a deeply spiritual Catholic. He would happily give away his last shirt in a freezing rain to a homeless person. He was blessed with a beautiful baritone voice which he says is a gift from God. He thinks codependency is a noble virtue and that I should write only of God. He has strong opinions and judgments but then, as he puts it, God wants him to set people straight. Neither of my brothers remembers much about our childhood; both said they don’t want to.
My baby sister, who slept in a crib next to my bunk bed was three years old when my father entered that room in the middle of the night. For the next seven years she wet the bed constantly and spoke in a baby prattle that only I understood. She was killed in a car accident when she was 25. Another woman ran a stop sign and plowed into the front of Jeanne’s Volkswagen. She had predicted her own death, both in a letter she wrote me a few months before she was killed and a few days before the accident happened, telling me over the phone that her time was near and she wanted to let me know how to plan her funeral.
My mother, severely codependent, whose motto regarding my father was, even when he’s wrong, he’s right, and my father, an autocratic patriarch who knew there were only two roads in life, the wrong way and his way, brought into this world five children. Between the two of them they managed to take five souls with special gifts they might have given to the world, and twisted them into a mangled mass of neurosis, alcoholism, promiscuity, terror-ridden and confusion-oppressed human beings. One of the last times the four of us remaining children were together was at my father’s funeral. My oldest brother was drunk, my second older brother prayed the rosary continuously, my younger sister was digging through my father’s belongings looking for God knows what. And what was I doing? I was taking care of my step-mother, paralyzed by a stroke, glaring at me with a hatred she had sustained for 25 years, ever since my father had told her about his incestuous relationship with me. When she died, a year later, and we gathered for the last time to divide my father’s belongings and read his will where he left everything to the four of us, my oldest brother, holding a bottle of whiskey, said with a look of shock in his withered face, “You mean he loved us after all?”
Oh, the sadness of it all.
