That's me and my dad. I was born when my dad was forty-two, so not really young anymore. Between my sisters and me, there are five dead babies. My sisters were born in '47 and I was born in '62. The last counselor that I saw asked me about my family and when I told her the story, she surprised me and said, your parents must have been so happy to have you. I never thought of it like that and certainly growing up I never felt that my family was happy to have me. I always felt like the odd one out. But when I'm looking at old photos, there are a lot of photos of me and my dad and maybe they were happy when I was born, alive and healthy.
Right now I'm reading a book called "It Didn't Start With You" by Mark Wolynn. The books is about inherited trauma and epigenetics, and how those things can affect us today. As science progresses, we're finding out that there is more to DNA than we first thought, and that our environment and experiences can affect our DNA; our DNA doesn't change but the genes expressed in our DNA can change due to methylation and demethylation. These changes can also be passed along to our children and grandchildren. The book includes various ways of dealing with traumas, but I'm not that far into the book yet.
My father was an angry, depressed, scared man. He grew up with an alcoholic mother, in extreme poverty. He went to war in 1939, as a young man and came home with PTSD, I'm guessing. One of my sisters almost died when she was twelve years old, hit by a truck. He was angry for as long as I knew him, thirty-seven years. He pushed everybody but mum away from him. There was no tenderness left in him for his children. As far as he was concerned, the world was a dangerous place and it was his job to keep his children safe. Sadly, his idea of safe was total control. I'm sure he thought that if he could just control everything, nothing else bad would happen. You can imagine how well that worked.
When my dad died, my mum told me that I was favorite, which was a shock to me. I felt like I was his greatest disappointment. I have much more compassion for my father now, twenty-three years after his death. I know now that my father loved me, as best he could. For the last couple of nights I have been visualizing my father holding me as a small baby, keeping me safe. I repeat, my father loved me, over and over. I cry, but it also feels good. My father loved me. I never knew. I wish I could talk to him now, but it does bring me comfort to say these words to myself.
I look around at my broken, hurting family and I see the same things over and over. Alcoholism, disappointment, depression, anxiety and anger. It breaks my heart to think that Jack and even his children, will be affected by the things that I have done, long before he was even born. I see my own son struggle and that breaks my heart too. My son is part indigenous and his grandmother was forced to attend a residential school, so much trauma and on both sides of the family. My son's biological father is a sociopath and an alcoholic, and his father before him was an abusive alcoholic. And then I expand my thinking to include the world and all of the awful things we do as humans, to each other; the wars, the racism, the poverty, the hatred and the inequities in this world, all of these things will affect not only the people already born, but future generations as well. And I wonder, when will it end? Can we ever make it better?
It all seems too much. But if I can make a difference in myself, for Jack, maybe that will help. I hope so.
The flip side of that same coin, though, is all the good that happens to us and the love and kindness that can spread through our genes to future generations. If it can work one way, it must work the other.
ReplyDeleteI do like what sparklingmerlot said.
ReplyDeleteIntergenerational trauma is real, whether due to genetic changes (I don't know about that) or the re-traumatizing effects of bad behavioural modelling and taking out pain on others (more likely, in my view). I think virtually everyone in the world suffers intergenerational trauma in some way or another. That's one of the reasons (among many others) that human pain and suffering never seem to end. You might just as well say it's "the human condition."
ReplyDeleteI believe that we can affect change. I believe it with my whole heart. Even if it is just a little.
ReplyDeleteWe can only hope to heal ourselves and spread as much love as we can. There is so much that we can't change. Your father was damaged to a degree that he couldn't show his love the way he wanted or that you deserved. One of my brothers was like that; he struggled and ended up a suicide. It took me a long time to forgive him for the pain he put my family through. Then I realized that he put himself through even more pain than he did us, an amount that he could no longer bear; these were my first steps to forgiveness.
ReplyDeleteI think particularly for our parents' generation, trauma was probably everywhere. Poverty and war can bring a good man (or woman) to his knees. Your dad loved you as well as he was able to, and probably much more than you will ever know. And by golly do you ever look like him!
ReplyDeleteYou highlight a phenomenon that I have often contemplated - the sense that life is like a chain and we inherit the effects of what went before us. Of course I despise child abusers but I wonder what made them child abusers in the first place? What were the seeds of that apparent wickedness?
ReplyDeleteWith regard to your own father - who really knows what he witnessed in wartime? It may have been a heavy load to carry - especially in secret. Though locked away, it would have manifested itself in other ways - such as over-protectiveness.
My parent's had WWII, bombed out cities, lack of food and heating during winters and the eternal shame of the holocaust as burning through them, although they were in their late teens when the war was over. But while it was rarely mentioned, it was and continues to be everywhere, a deep dark shadow. I know that we carry it too.
ReplyDeleteWhen I inherited the letters my grandmother wrote during the war, I read one to my father where she had written to her sister that my grandfather, her husband and my father's father, could not stop crying while looking at a photograph of his youngest son, my father, a schoolboy who had been sent away to dig trenches for the troops. And my father, an old man by then, was so shocked to hear that his father actually cried, he kept on asking me to read it to him again and again. I think this was the first and last time he had any sign of his father being overcome by emotions.
Despite what some people feel about intelligent design, I beg to differ.
ReplyDeleteSigh.
Our purpose here on earth, at the very alpha and omega, is to make more of us. Mother Nature does not care a bit how fucked up we may be, how unhappy, how cruel, how desperate for love- none of that. Just reproduce, as every living thing is supposed to while at the same time, we have these brains that cause all these emotions and it's just ridiculously hard, isn't it?
No. It certainly did not start with us.
I also like what sparklingmerlot wrote. You have much to give, it's evident by how you write. How you express what you feel.
ReplyDeleteNature and Nurture are so intertwined, aren't they? Society does influence us as a collective and different Cultures experience Life differently. Generational things do tend to be passed along, much of it isn't within our actual Control, just a Hand dealt. I feel you do your very best, that's all any of us can do, imperfect people attempting to navigate life and circumstances. Sometimes we get it right, but, not always. Some Families have a much harder row to hoe than others. I do wonder sometimes if things will improve in the Future, or worsen, but, one thing for sure, in 100 Years, all New People. So... we start over every Century really.
ReplyDelete37paddington: your post reminds me of something a Buddhist monk once said to me, that to change the world, I have only to change myself. It is all we can do really. Start where we are. I think you are doing that, finally letting the realization of how much your father loved you and, who knows, is loving you still, whispering of your worthiness. The world is hard and we are sad. The world is bright and we have known love.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like an interesting book. I can see how experienced traumas could conceivably alter body chemistry and DNA. But I wonder if we're really any more traumatized than humanity was, oh, 500 or 1000 years ago, or even more. Brutality and abuse have been around forever.
ReplyDeleteCheck out that book I'm reading by Rutger Bregman: Humankind. I think it will speak to you. -Kate
ReplyDelete