My mother has had a really hard life. She grew up in a large family and was the second to the last child born among four girls and two boys. Her mother favored the youngest daughter and pushed my mother to do more chores with less reward than her siblings.
She felt she was the black sheep of the family and that her mother saw her as a disappointment compared to her sisters and brothers. Perhaps in reaction to her mother’s disapproval and feeling unloved and unappreciated, my mother married at 17, against the wishes of her mother, but with the legal consent of her father.
My father dropped out of school in ninth grade and had been drinking and smoking since his early teens, if not earlier. His grandmother raised him. She favored his sister and beat him regularly.
As one might imagine, a marriage between two people who grew up feeling largely unloved and rejected by their parents did not result in a healthy and loving relationship. It didn’t help that my father was injured on the job several times in his early thirties and pronounced not only to be disabled, but also to have a limited amount of time to live.
While it was fortunate the event that could have killed him at any time over the past 30 or so years has not yet occurred, the psychological impact has been devastating. He became an alcoholic with nothing to do but sit around the house watching television or tinkering with cars in the garage waiting for a random boom to drop and strike him dead.
I witnessed a lot of turmoil in my parents’ marriage during my childhood. My father would go out drinking at various bars in our small rural town, which had more than its share of drinking spots and few of its share of decent jobs. My mother would hustle my sister and I into the back of the car and go tearing from bar to bar trying to find him. When she tracked him down, depending on her mood, she’d either join him and leave my sister and I in the car or take us into the bar and placate our boredom with snacks and soda or have a nasty fight with my father that left her in a bad mood.
There were also plenty of screaming fights at home, especially over money. My father’s disability payments weren’t much to live on and my mother had always expected to be a housewife supported by her husband and not to have to take one demeaning low-paying job after another to augment the family income. As a child, hearing my parents tear at each other with arguments over money and my mother threatening divorce at every turn, I just wished they’d break up and all the suffering would end.
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