I suppose I will begin at the beginning. I was born to two alcoholic parents. My father came from a very poor family. His mother gave birth to him when she was sixteen years old. She was married to his father who was about forty years old (Pedophilia much?), but apparently, they split soon after his birth. My paternal grandmother was a hoochie coochie dancer in a traveling Irish circus. (A hoochie coochie dancer is like an old-fashioned stripper.) The circus was owned by her father, and she met my paternal grandfather in the course of their travels. The family had immigrated from County Cork, Ireland. I’m not sure what year that happened, though. Probably sometime in the early 1900s. I know virtually nothing about my paternal grandfather. I know his name and that he died soon after he split with my father's mother.
My mother’s parents came from very poor families as well. I have a vivid memory of being in my maternal grandmother’s pantry and being astonished at how much food she had stored in there. Her pantry was the size of a small bedroom. I can remember her telling me that she lived through the Great Depression and how often she went hungry during that time. So, when she could afford it, she stocked up on years of canned food. I don’t know much about my mother’s parents except their families came to the United States so long ago that I regularly get invitations to the groups The Daughters of the American Revolution and The Daughters of the Confederacy, both of which I decline every year. I know that my paternal grandmother’s family is Irish and that my maternal grandfather’s family is Scottish. I know that my maternal grandmother was abused in every kind of way by her parents. She was another in the generational cycle of familial violence and incest. I don’t know much about my maternal grandfather’s background. I know he was a WWII vet. I know that he and another man were stranded on a deserted island in the Pacific for months after some kind of accident in the water or above the water. My mother told me that he nearly died and lost a good amount of his teeth as well.
Alcoholism and drug use runs rampant in both sides of my family. Both sets of my grandparents were hard drinkers. My mother’s parents added a side of physical violence to that lovely addiction. My mother told me so many stories about them beating on each other.
Her father was a salesman for a company which sold granite and other kinds of stones for large construction projects. So, he was on the road for most of the time during which he would be mostly drunk. He would come home, and it would be sweet for a while, but after a couple of weeks it would start to go downhill. My grandmother would accuse him of cheating, and he would accuse her of cheating and then they would beat on each other.
My mother related one story to me that happened when she was about nine or ten years old in which they were both completely drunk and had gone a few rounds with each other, Then, my grandmother got a knife and cut one of my grandfather’s fingers off. It was then that my mother had to drive them to the hospital. She said that was one of the scariest nights of her life.
My mother had two sisters. She was the eldest. When she and her first sister were children, she told me that they were so afraid of their parents that they would sleep nightly underneath their bed so that they would not get beaten or molested by one or both of them. Apparently, the youngest sister was an “accident” and happened many years after their childhood and after my grandfather had made his fortune (He became very wealthy.) so she didn’t get as much or the same kind of abuse as the first two sisters did.
The majority of the abuse that happened to me was inflicted by my mother and her parents. My father was abusive, for sure, but he was completely different. I’m not making excuses for him, but I believe that his physical and mental abuse of me was mostly because he did not know how to deal with me being the product of systematic and traumatic abuse inflicted on me by my mother and family. The abuse from my mother and maternal grandparents was by far worse, began in toddlerhood and lasted for most of my young life.
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