Parental Chain Reaction

I'm not a parent, so there may be a few parents who'll have that knee-jerk reaction in their head (after reading the title and the first four words) telling me I shouldn't be writing this, even though as they read, it's clearly already been written. The thing is, this isn't a parental perspective. It's the truth of a parental chain reaction, that has spanned three generations, to inspire me to be the person I am today; a child of their relationships and the domino effect of those interactions. This is my linage, my blood, my curse and my blessing.

I'm almost thirty now, and a world away from the person I was as a child and youth, to the point I don't even carry the same name. I was violent, borderline psychopathic, manipulative, and inconsiderate back then. I vocalized plots as to the order I would kill my own family. I maimed myself--carved Latin into my forearm, branded myself with a copper coil and a candle, branded with a fork and stove, strategic scars with a razor blade, and sand paper on plywood as a punching block. I lied and cultivated evidence to support it. I manipulated people, their emotions and actions. I stole just to see if I could, to pass time, and then just to get by.

Until the day I started wondering "why?"

At first it was, "Why did my parents do that? Why can't they see? Why don't I matter?" It was in those questions I found a string of answers I wasn't really ready for. It took me years to process it all and come to this line of conclusions:

My Father didn't really know how to be a father because his Dad shot himself in the head before he even hit puberty, and the men in his mother's life after that... weren't exactly "Fathers" themselves. It was also these experiences in my Father's life which cultivated the heart and will to be different from them, different from his own father, despite the challenges of battling his own emotions. My Father is still alive, and there for his children in his own way, so I'd say he succeeded; and is interestingly enough, where I inherited my compassion and the (his) temper that comes with it.

My Mother, unfortunately, is where I inhered most of that darkness. Not because she's a dark woman herself, but it's in her blood. Norwegian blood going back to Viking, Minnesota, by way of Ellis Island. Her Grandfather, according to official reports, killed his wife and then himself-- while rumors in the family say that her Uncle killed them both. Her Father molested and raped her "so she wouldn't be frigid like her mother" and "because she was already having sex with others" so he thought he'd "get in line." Her Mother knew about it, and so did the other two Wives he had after her, yet none of them said anything, or did anything about it. My mother learned their silence, and didn't quite know how to be a mother herself because of all of it.

In the end, I respect my parents more now than I ever did before, because I know more about what they went through. I know I felt uncared for because neither of my parents knew how to show love the way you'd imagine a "good family" would. I know I was fighting the wiring of my brain and my limited understanding of the world and my own emotions, with parents who'd never fully recovered from their own parental tragedies.

I was born with the ability and understanding of the darker natures of humanity, yet also the compassion not to become what my elders where. As my Mother says, she and my Father were meant to be for the time they where so they could produce "four for the good side." I'm one of those four, and I wouldn't be who I am if not for who they where and who they are, any more then they where and are influenced by their own parents, and they before them.

The "moral" if you will, of this story, is that you may not want to know what skeletons lay in your family closet, but knowing may provide a greater understanding to your family's individual perspectives. I did, and I'm a better person for it. To them, to others, and to myself.

|| another_proser ||