My parents had buried daughters 2 years prior to my birth, there were no resources for them, no counseling, no honoring of their nightmare.
My earliest memory of grief what from the age of 3. My parents were in a horrific car accident and my mother was thrown from the vehicle over a cliff landing 100 feet below the road they were on.
This event changed her, I lost what was left of my mother that day.
She lost all remnants of connection to life, to emotions, to her children, to her husband that she may have had, outside of her own grief, her own trauma, VANISHED!
Personally knowing grief from the many experiences in my life, I see my mother differently now. I can not be certain but I feel that she was utterly broken before the accident, a grieving mother for most of her adult life and living in constant fear. Fear of the heart ache re-surfacing. No one understood her, I was just a child, I knew no different. The accident made everything worse.
So “What is it like to be raised by a mother who had lost so much? Then to lose memories and common sense via the accident!”
HORRIBLE!!!!
Filled with daily reminders of all she lost, and being constant reminders of what she could still lose, each one of her children were effected by what our mother and father lost.
The accident had erased any humanness that was left in this woman.
At the age of 4, I suffered a severe brain injury, broken collar bone and was in a coma briefly, I had to be retaught simple things and remember the doctors telling my parents I would be brain damaged for the balance of my life. I remember thinking “I am not Stupid!”
By 4, I had lost any connection to the flesh that was all that remained of my mother, my ability to walk, talk and function. With no mother to care compassionately during my recovery the trauma piled up.
By 13 I was running from my grief stricken world, I didn’t understand my mother and believed I never would.
Where did I run to?
My grief stricken Fathers, and his grief stricken wife’s home. A few years prior to my moving in, his wife had to bury her youngest daughter.
Hurt people, Hurt people!
The grief in my father and his wife motivated their need to control me and betray me. To judge and condemn me to a marriage with a man I did not know, at the age of 16. Who was himself: " a walking, talking train wreck of grief!" His grief was expressed in violence and a desperate need to hold me in his clutch, constantly fearing the loss of me drove him to the point of almost killing me 2 times and running off with my children.
I was a hot mess!
All the vices one uses to mask grief, alcohol, drugs and prescription meds I had experienced by the age of 20, yet my eyes were just opening to the greatest masking of grief I would ever know.
The greatest oppressors I have come across in my life is RELIGION.
The older my father became, the more words from the Bible were used to persecute me, gladly my husband and my step mother joined in this song and dance, pulling in my siblings over the years. Leaving me alone in this world to survive this “Grief” and struggle to not inflict it on my children.
The many cruel ways RELIGION was used to traumatize me could easily be languaged as the need for discipline by a parent for an unruly child. Yet those using this form of torment, do not see me as an adult and mother, only someone they wanted to control.
The words and energy used to hold me prisoner were harder for me to escape than the violence and daily rapes inflicted on me by my husband. The man ran off with my children with my father’s help, so I didn’t drag them to HELL with me!
It took me until I was 22 years old to get out from under these two men, the battle was harder as an adult for me, than as a child running from my mother’s horror.
The trauma of being alone in this nightmare put me before a medical review board to be examined.
At 22 years old I was a grief stricken single mother of 3 struggling to find life.
The board pronounced that I was suffering from PTSD and did not think I would recover, wrote what seemed to me to be a lifetime prescription of Valium and told me that I would be placed on Medical Disability for the balance of my life.
They told me to go home and only worry about feeding, clothing and caring for the children so that they may have a better chance at life than you do.
By 22 I had been labeled as;
- A child of divorce
- A welfare child
- A runaway
- A teenage slut
- A teenage mom
- A battered wife
- A divorced woman
- A single mother
- A welfare mom, product of being a welfare child
- A mental case
- A sinner
- A child of satin
- A Disgrace to my father
And now a burden on society.
With only the hope of the future that I would not cause my children to become part of the “Generational Welfare trapped burdens on society!”
Even people I had gone to high school made similar comments to me.
I wanted to kill them all, I could not believe that in my 22 years of life I had no one! No one who believed in me, no one who cared enough to assist me into a slightly better future than the one I had just been handed.
The world had basically given up on me, as I struggled to not give up with it.
Rage was my saving grace, I was driven by it, fuel by it to give my children something more. What that was, or looked like I had no clue. Rage pushed me to prove to the world that it was wrong about me. Hatred of my father’s crutch and his need to save me from certain hell fueled the rage.
The unspeakable happened "his wife told my 7 & 8-year-old daughters that, their mother was going to HELL, that the DEVIL was in charge of her and if they didn’t escape me, they were going to HELL TOO!”
What “Christian” tells a child things like this?
It was then that I saw that grief had its hands on my children too, when they were taken from me they had been told I was dead, now they were told that I had a demon inside driving me to certain HELL and they were coming along for the ride.
Rage drove me further away from my Family and their RELIGION called “CHRISTAIN-NESS!’
The world around me told me to; either take a valium and deal or get over it and deal. Yet the world around me offered no clues on moving myself out of this grief.
I had made some terrible mistakes and the consequences were controlling my world. I had bought into the belief I was powerless and married a man I did not know because my father told me to. I had tried to run away from this man over 30 times.
Where did I run? Back to my father who believed in the RELIGIOUS sanctions of a submissive wife. I had never spoken to them about the violence and rapes because I had bought into the “Secrets Beliefs” So when I finally got away those around me believed I was crazy because they never knew what went on behind closed doors.
Those were my mistakes.
Years spent in therapy and support groups taught me to own my mistakes and drove me to learn. So I learned that my parent’s behavior is a direct result of unresolved grief, fear and their own personal traumas. Not a result of who I was or who I am.
So this Blog is not to cast blame on my parents or the many others caught in what I see and a fear biased existence masked by a bible that a man wrote.
It is to acknowledge that GRIEF can and has destroyed families and nations.
Blame has no place in this vicious cycle.
Grief is a human condition and until it is treated as such, talked openly about the damage will continue.
And now I live as a grieving mother....
Mj
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