Me in Pieces, Part 2

There is a difference between a dysfunctional family and an abusive family.   The difference is intent. Dysfunctional families don't intend to do harm to the children they love.  But that doesn't mean that harm is not done.  Further, there is also a spectrum of dysfunction, not all dysfunction is equal.  I hope that no one gets caught up in the label, "dysfunction."  Perhaps I should just say that some parents harm their children on purpose, and some harm them through mistakes.

My family was really sort of two different families.  When my parents were young, they had two sons.  Then there was seven years before my sister was born.  A couple of years after her birth, they moved from the city to the suburbs, where first I was born, and then my younger brother.  When my older brothers were being raised, my father was healthy, my parents were new to parenting, they were living close to their families, and it was a different time.  It was the 1940's and 1950's.  When my sister, younger brother and I were being raised, my father was going through cancer treatments and surgeries which lasted for fifteen years until his death.  My mother had already finished raising a couple of kids, and life was changing, as it was now the 1960's and 1970's. There is actually eighteen years between my oldest brother and my youngest brother.  When my youngest brother was a baby, my oldest brother left to join the air force.  A couple of years later, my second brother left to join the navy.  Then my sister, little brother, and I were alone.  All of these things led to different perspectives of what our family life was like.  In some ways, we were raised by different parents.  My sister straddles both families, being the true "middle" child, so I'm sure that her perspective is probably a mixture of the two.

Hitting a child, even when it is the discipline that you were raised on, and you know no other way to discipline, does not teach a child to be obedient.  It teaches them to be smarter about the way they lie. It teaches them to never let anyone ever have control over them again.  It teaches them to, in turn, be aggressive to weaker family members.

When parents make mistakes, their children pay for those mistakes.  I think that the most difficult thing for me to express to you is that I truly loved my father.  I have many happy memories with him and I miss him very much.  It is confusing to have such strong opposing feelings.  But as I have learned more about his life, and about how he was raised by his own parents and how difficult it was to survive as immigrants during the Great Depression, I have gained an understanding that I did not have as a child.  He loved us and sacrificed for us.  He gave us what he never had, stability.  He never intended to harm us, but still, he did.  In the end, he realized this.  I am jumping ahead in my story, but it is right to say this now.  Because while he was in the hospital, and near the end of his life, he gave me the greatest gift he could ever have given me.  He said, "I know I made mistakes with you kids, but at the time, I thought it was the right thing to do."  

Children naturally want the love of their parents.  But I always felt that we had to vie for our parents' affections and attentions.  I think this turned us into adversaries.  I am not proud of this, but I was aggressive to my own little brother because he was the only one in the house that was smaller than me.  I loved him and still love him, immensely.  But I was taught to show that love with aggression and control over someone else.  I will always be ashamed that I treated him that way, and I am very grateful that when he got bigger than me, he did not retaliate . . . because he could have.