Mom's childhood

My mother had a rough childhood I think, and as much as she was cared for and given rules and boundaries, I don't believe she ever felt a sense of stability in her life.

When she was two, her parents had already divorced and her father was remarried. Her mother, Elaine, gave her and her brother away to her father, Jerry, and stepmother, Donna. My grandmother's reasons have never been made clear to me, so I hold no grudge for it, but I think it was the beginning of my mother's abandonment issues, whether those going in and out of her life meant well or not.

My mother, as I am told, was an unruly child. Especially in her teen years. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was only 13. I'm not sure my mother ever felt love from her father, if she did, she never told me about it. The only things I remember her telling me about him were his demand for respect (as was the common role of a father in those days) and getting whipped with a switch if she ever disobeyed him.

After that, she ran away a lot, mostly to her grandmother's on Donna's side. She loved Granny. And I think she respected Granny in a way she's never loved or respected anyone else before. So I assume Donna, who now had three more boys of her own to care for, didn't mind much when my mother chose to stay with Granny.

I know for a couple years, at least my mother tells me, she lived with her Aunt Naomi, her father's sister. Aunt Naomi is still alive to this day and we see her at Christmas time for a family reunion, but often my mother, as you will find out throughout this blog, chooses not to go. She claims to adore Aunt Naomi, but I have to question that emotion, as I do with every emotion my mother has.

I think her constant change of scenery, a habit she has developed that has become part of her disorder, caused a lot of issues that se never wanted to face. Now, she can't go a month without moving furniture around in the house, and I mean ALL the furniture. She used to wait for me to leave the house for a day and move my room around, only to find I had moved it back the following day.

Many issues she has stem from her childhood. I don't, however, believe that any blame lay on her family. I believe she was constantly escaping her problems rather than facing them, as she still does today. I also believe her marraige at the age of 17 was what seemed to freeze her in time at that young age, preventing her from becoming a mature adult.