A Terminal Life: Chapter 11 My Dad Took My Secrets To His Grave
My Mom, Her Mom and Me
This was at the re-dedication of my marriage to my fist husband way back in the early 1980's.
Source: Debra Allen
All About Frostburg, Maryland
Experience Brought To Surface
I have so many things to write about in my life and what has happened so far. I was thinking of this a while ago and then it kind of went to the back burner while other things bubble up to the surface after my father’s death on May 27, 2014. It was when this Answer or really Question popped up on my HubPages News Feed that brought some other things and the thought before back to the surface of my mind. Here is that Question:http://gmwilliams.hubpages.com/_35sahxpt0lubf/question/241825/were-you-an-unwanted-andor-unplanned-childif-so--were-you-begrudingly-accepted--barely-tolerated-
Frostburg, Maryalnd
Read About All Religions and Beliefs
Mom's History
Let me start off with my mom’s life as she has expressed it was like to me many times. Her parents, my grandmother and grandfather, were both serious alcoholics and smokers. My grandfather became a recluse later in his life. I mean a real recluse or some might call him a hermit. He lived in a shack on the side of a mountain. I mean a real shack, just four walls put together. I really have no idea how he survived the cold winters and the snow. You see he lived up on the mountain above the town that my parents and all my family were born in. It has a name that fits it well, Frostburg. I call it “little Alaska”. They always get snow and much of it starting in October right through March and sometime April too. Well he lived on that mountain. I remember one visit to him in the spring and he gave both my sister and I a bowl of freshly picked blackberries with milk and sugar on them. They were delicious.
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Well here I am happy as can be and alone again in my garage, just me and my beer. This is where I spent a lot of time doing the drinking thing. I was alone because no one could bare to be around me when I drank.
Alcohol and Angels
My mom told me some stories that I never thought that my family could or should endure. I hear and read other’s experiences with alcoholism. You never really understand it from their point of view until it hits home. Well my mother wasn’t exactly the poster child of being an angel growing up. That should not have brought the treatment that she got from her parent’s disease though. Not in my opinion anyways. She would go out and down the street and be playing with her friends and when she got home she would be beaten. I think that it got so bad that her sister took her in. Mom is the baby of the family and the only surviving child now and she is 76 years old. Her sister was something like 10 years older than her and she was the oldest in her family, two brothers followed her before my mom was born. They are gone too. One died of Cirrhosis of the Liver. He also had TB at one time too because I can remember riding up with my mom so that she could visit him.
RIP Aunt Laverne
Source: Debra Allen
Services For My Aunt
Ok let me get back on track again. So my mom lived with her oldest sister throughout her teen years. Well according to my mom she was treated badly there as well and did so hold a grudge against her …. still… and her sister is dead. Mom did not go to her service. My Aunt was cremated. Mom used the excuse that she was sick. Mom was very jealous of my aunt. She didn’t like how my aunt’s family treated her sister like a queen. I think that is pathetic. I, and my husband, were the only ones that showed our respects from the family. I kept getting asked how my mom was and why she was not there. Oh it was so awkward to be put in that position. Seemed to me, at the time, that mom never even called them to tell them she was not going to be there. I just told them that I didn’t know if she was coming or not but that she wasn’t feeling good.
Welsh Memorial Baptist Church
Welsh Memorial Baptist Church, Frostburg, Maryland, The one that my grandfather dug out and built the foundation for.
Source: Debra Allen
Merging Religious Ancestry
Like I said earlier mom wasn’t not a great poster child for anything. She told me all about how many times that she skipped school and got caught by the truant officer each and every time. She barely graduated because of all the days that she missed. She showed me where she always went when she didn’t go to school. It was a restaurant or local hangout for the teens at that time. I am talking about in the early 1950’s here. It was called The Princess and the truant officer always knew where she was. She was what I would call a “Wild Child”, or a “Free Spirit”.
She was raised Catholic because my grandmother’s maternal side was. My dad was Welsh Baptist. I do not know how that all worked out but she went with my dad to the Welsh Baptist Church all the time and we were raised there. Oh they were big into that and up until they started getting sick and their mobility went downhill they went every single Sunday. Mom’s father excavated and built the foundation to the Welsh Baptist Church in Frostburg. They had no machinery then like they do now and he dug out that dirt by hand, with shovels, with some help from other men. I grew up in that church until we moved in the mid-sixties. It is truly a beautiful church, small but so beautiful. When I visit back there once in a great while I can feel the love and the hard work put into building it. You know I can, somehow, feel a piece of my grandfather’s presence there.
My Father's Mother
This is my grandmother on my dad's side.
Source: Debra Allen
Clashes between In-Laws
Mom and dad got married right out of high school. Dad’s first job was working at a local Sunoco gas station. I don’t think that he made much money there. Mom told me that they lived in the basement on one side of the house where my father’s mother lived. In another chapter I mention that his mom and my mom didn’t really get along all that much. As I hear the emotions behind the words of my mother when she told me these things it seems that my father’s mother was kind of strict. That would be the degree of separation between my mother’s “Free Spirit” and my dad’s mother’s stricter household rules she had to follow.
Here I Am - oops
Then I was born. I am going out on a limb here, but I am thinking that I was not expected. I think, if I could right, that I was conceived about 3 months after they got married. Dad didn’t have much money and they were living with his mom in an apartment within my dad’s parent’s house. I am not completely sure if this is all correct in the timing of these events or not, but it would explain a lot of things about my own life and that of my sister’s too. Mom was/is a jealous person and very controlling. It would seem that she loved my dad so much and she just wanted to get out of her sister’s house that she married him. When I came along it must have been a shock as she would not be the only one that would need attention, especially from my dad. I was going to be terminal, as in terminated. It only makes sense that she would treat me this way that I have been brought up with. She is jealous of me. I was a “daddy’s girl”. He loved me so much and I think that green eyed monster, deep within my mom’s psyche, just would not go away. My mom craved for some real love, the kind that did not involve hurting back.
Do you know if you were planned or not
See results without votingIn Retrospect
Looking back at all this I remember writing a letter to her, because I cannot talk to her right out or I will get berated and verbally abused, telling her that I understand all that she went through and that she should forgive her sister. Well that went over like a lead balloon. I got berated and verbally abused and my father sat there and said and did nothing. Just now, thinking about what I just said, it appears that maybe, just maybe, he was being verbally abused too and he just let her go like that. Sad, so sad, and so painful to go through it and not know what is going on. Looking back 20/20 and doing this writing about it makes things come out and then it is making some sense too. This is very healing, as others have told me on the other chapters in my comment. I am beginning to feel liberated from the dark feelings and to really get a handle on the things that I was forced to accept that now I know that it was not about ME. I was always feeling like the scapegoat in everything and that it was always my fault. Now it is becoming clearer that I was just the one that she could lash out at and it is all about HER. I did not cause my father’s first heart attack or anything else that she may have accused me of all my growing up years.
Unconditional Love?
My life might have been unsuccessfully terminated. I can rightly and believe that with all my being because she told me something about my sister too. She told me that she did try to abort my sister when she got pregnant. She told me that she would sit in a bath with the hottest water that she could stand so that her body would abort my sister. This is what brought about me to thinking that I was also an unsuccessful abortion. She had to deal with me and then she had to deal with my sister. Oh there was love, but it wasn’t the kind that you have for yourself. She had to give love to someone else and not get it all for herself.
A Long Duration of a Terminal Life
The saving grace of all this is……I am still here. My life was not terminated from the start, but I still have a terminal life that is long and still more to go. I am writing my story. My sister is still here and living her life. We are survivors from the early age before birth. Neither of us have substance abuse issues. It is said that it runs in families but my sister and I overcame that and neither of us have ever gone that far.
I once was asked why I smile after going through what he called “hell on earth”. I simply told him that I will not put my pain and troubles onto another person. It isn’t fair to them or to me.
Who asked me that and why is yet another chapter.
© Debra K. Allen
a.k.a Lady Guinevere
I researched
and wrote this article. Please do not copy and paste any part of this article,
picture included for your own use. I will find you and report you for stealing.
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