Child Abuse Story of Healing and Recovery From Name Undisclosed64

by Name Undisclosed
(Location Undisclosed)

A little different story: 
My father was a binge-drinking alcoholic who might go for weeks or months without a drink and then disappear for a week with his Friday pay envelope. We might get a call that he was in jail and needed bail money, or he might show up two, three, or four days later when his money ran out. He was a union construction worker who made good money when he worked, but his drinking and sometimes long periods without work kept us in poverty.

My mother always worked very hard to try to make ends meet, but it was a losing battle. Her frustration and anger led to bouts of uncontrollable rage. When my father returned home after drinking, he and my mother would have screaming fights for hours, late into the night. I remember lying in bed praying to God that He would let one of them kill the other so that the screaming would end, and I could live somewhere else. I never considered where else I might live, but it seemed that anywhere would have to be better than home.

As the oldest male, I was a surrogate target for my mother's rage when Dad was not at home. The fights between my mother and father were rarely physically violent, but it was common for my mother to beat me for minor infractions when my father was drinking. I never knew what would set her off. When I was quite small, perhaps five-years-old, I was watching Saturday morning cartoons in the living room. Dad hadn't come home from work the night before. My mother apparently had called something to me from another room, and I, zoned out on the TV as kids can be, did not hear her. What I remember is that she stormed into the room, picked me up out of the chair, and threw me on the floor. She then kicked me until I passed out. I have many similar stories. I had a deep and consuming hatred for my mother through all that I can remember of my childhood and into early adulthood.

My father was pretty much absent from the family, or only a peripheral member of it. His father had been an alcoholic, and Dad grew up in foster homes after his mother died of cancer when he was nine-years-old. This was during the Depesssion, when many people who took in foster kids did so to try to make ends meet with the state-supplied money, never intending to give the foster kids any love or much in the way of food or clothing. As a child, I think I felt that my father was as much a victim of my mother as I, and I loved him. As I grew older, I realized that his problems began long before he met my mother. Thinking back on his life, I believe that he never had an opportunity to learn what it means to be a father or to have a family.

I have struggled with depression all my life. I can not remember a time when I did not have suicidal thoughts as a child or an adult, until I finally began taking antidepressants at the age of 50. I was a very good student in high school and won a National Merit Scholarship to one of the top colleges in the country. For years, I had lived for the day when I could leave home and escape the unhappiness, but when I left for college, the unhappiness followed me. I nearly threw away that college opportunity by getting heavily involved in drugs. It was the late 60s, and psychedelics and marijuana were popular and readily available. I was very much into self-medication: as long as I was high, I could avoid focusing on how shitty life seemed to be.

A year after college, I cut my wrist in an unsuccessful -- and probably half-hearted -- suicide attempt. I was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, where I first realized that just because my parents were miserable, that didn't mean that I had to be. I learned that children of alcoholic families grow up believing that they are responsible for their parents' unhappiness, and that if the parents are not happy, the children have no right to be happy.

I decided that I did have a right to be happy and that I would no longer carry my parents' problems on my own shoulders. Deciding to do that, and making it happen are two different things, and the road to my own life and my own joy was neither easy nor short. It required a lot of work, a lot of support, and eventually some effective (and legally prescribed) anti-depressant drugs. I went to grad school, met and married a wonderful woman who taught me what it means to love and to be part of a loving family, and had a daughter with her.

Our daughter knows my history and those of her grandfather and grandmother, and I wonder if our openness about that played any part in her career choice: She is a child psychiatrist.

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