I was raised by a mother and father who were still a bit too emotionally immature to be raising children at the time. They argued and fought a lot, and at an early age I learned what Passive Aggression was... and how to spot the signs that someone was saying something that they didn't mean the same way. My folks split up before I started school, and my mother started seeing a number of different guys... and her taste in men was pretty terrible: there was the Death Metal guy who was covered in tatoos, who let huge constrictor snakes roam around his apartment... and there was this creepy guitar-playing volleyball player with a farting cat, who attempted to molest my sister and attacked my mother. There were more, but I only met a few that I can remember, as I was really young... and I think she learned to stop bringing guys home, unless she had gotten to know them well.
I don't remember if it was instilled by someone else, or something I decided to focus on by myself, but I spent a lot of my time focused on learning. My mother loved taking us to the library, and most of my free time was spent reading old Sci Fi and Fantasy books... A Wrinkle in Time, Lord of the Rings, Dune (still need to finish it), and a lot of other more obscure ones. I came to idealize the Trickster heroes of some stories, who used their wits and skills rather than strength of force to triumph over wrongdoers, and that might have been where I got some of my personal ideals from.
During the school year, I used to sit in while my older sister did her coursework, and I actually learned how to do multiplication with negative numbers before my grade had even gotten to subtraction... and was reading a chemistry text before I really had the background to understand that Alchemy and the Classical Elements weren't still considered valid science. I can at least partly blame the little Magical Almanacs and crap I found on my Mom's bookshelves for that, too. I'm actually thankful that we didn't have enough money for Cable TV or Computers early on... since that encouraged my siblings and I to provide our own entertainment. We played storytelling games based on books or movies we'd seen, and built forts out of discarded junk and old furniture, by a small, forested swamp near our trailer park.
As I grew older, I recall a lot of physical fights between my mother and older sister. I remember one in particular where a ketchup bottle was broken over someone's head. I really couldn't stand to see two of the people I cared about most hurting one another, and it was at that point that I decided to intervene. I was too small to really do anything, and was pushed aside, but I like to think I gave them pause for long enough to stop, since my sister left after that. Since then, I'd never really held much patience for bullies.
I learned to keep a level head in most situations, because I'd seen what anger made people do. In fact, I worked so hard to repress Anger, that I had to relearn healthy ways of processing anger, since I was letting people take advantage of me, and anger by it's nature it isn't a bad emotion. One thing that could reliably get me angry enough to stand up to someone was when someone was picking on or hurting someone else. Bullies teasing their peers until they cried, older kids stealing younger kids things, or even parents shouting obscenities at their children (picture a 12 year old trying to tell an angry mother that yelling at their kid doesn't stop what's making them angry, and you can imagine how that went). I don't remember ever seeking to hurt someone else in a fight, but I stood up to people when they couldn't be avoided, and defended myself long enough for someone to intervene. Sometimes, blocking a hit and not hitting back, with whatever sort of resolute stare could be mustered, was enough to defuse a bully... it lets the anger cool, and logic kicks back in... and a few insults later, they're on their way.
I tended to try and reach out to social outcasts at school or around my trailer park, and that soon became the circle of friends I came to know, which introduced me to a lot of different interests; wrestling and boxing, comics, instrumental music, boardgames, cooking, lawn care, and D&D (back when Elf and Dwarf were character classes). Due to the home environment, and the lack of a parent there most days, I spent a lot of time at other people's houses. I think I might have worried some of my friend's parents, since I would sometimes hang out with them instead, if their kids weren't home from a school event yet, just to stay out of my own house. I actually used to help one of my friend's parents (another single mother) with some of her in-home work, and enjoyed doing it, in exchange for a few pickles and/or an ice cube to eat (having an ice-maker built into the fridge was a wonder to me, at that point). I spent a lot of meals with other families too, and it was from my friends and their parents that I learned how to cook eggs, pasta, and so on.
Eventually, my mother brought home a new guy; he was a bit authoritarian, but he was a genuinely good person. They would go on to marry, but he lived with us for many years before that. He wasn't used to the lack of structure my siblings and I had in our lives, and tried to institute it as best he could... and both my sister and I were at an age that we fought hard against it. He was a level-headed guy up to a point, but on several occasions he let his anger get the best of him, and there were more arguments and fights to be had. This continued after they married, and we moved to a new house and school district... he continued to push us toward personal discipline, and parental respect (I'd lost my innate respect of adults long before that, and it had to be earned), and my siblings continued to butt heads with him.
Fights with him were usually a lot more verbal than physical, and he was a keenly perceptive and intelligent guy who could use his ability to read people to dig into their head, find their sore spots and frailties, and hit them. I'm certain he meant to do well by it... help us toward self-improvement and getting our lives organized, but at the time I'd made him my enemy. What I learned later was that my mother was probably the thing driving him to anger, but we were the nearest thing he could focus that anger on in a constructive way. The problem is, it only stayed constructive up until he became angry, after which point physical violence happened. After my oldest sister left, he started to focus most of that on me... and I reacted to him the same way I had with the bullies of my childhood- stoic expression, never fighting back physically, and stubbornly holding my ground- but in the meantime I'd learned to be petty, and where and how to poke back at him to make him angry. The little ass that I was, I enjoyed making him loose his cool... and I admit that I took a certain pride in that, when he shoved or hit me, I never hit him back. I stood back up and looked him in the eyes, with as much bitter pity as I could muster. I was a very spiteful teen, in my non-violence.
As the years wound on, I don't know what effect this might have had on him, since we've never since addressed those things. After I was done with high school, there was one night where he shoved me down two or three times, and ripped my shirt yanking me up... and I said I felt terribly sorry for him. I'd called my friend earlier, and we were going to go out that evening right before the fight broke out. When he showed up we left... I fully intended to file a Police Report about it, especially he chased us in his truck... though I have no idea what he was hoping to accomplish, or what he intended. We managed to dodge him at light, ducked into a parking lot, and lost him, and at that point I decided that I was never going home again. I stayed at my sister's efficiency apartment for a few weeks, found a roommate, and moved into an apartment of my own, and I've been taking care of myself since then.
We've since patched a lot of things up. I love my parents, and appreciate what they did for me... and given space and a number of years can better understand what they were doing, and understand them as people.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9455006 times)