Raising Yourself in a Dysfunctional Family

We all have memories of our childhoods and how our parents played their roles and carried out their responsibilities as a parent. The memories of our childhoods and teen years can be a mixed bag of happy and sad, the good and the bad. Some of us were lucky enough to have had two parents to raise us. Some had extended parents or families; grandparents, aunts or uncles. In most of those cases it was because marriages ended in divorce. The divorced parent would find that it was better financially to move back home to a parents home to raise the children, especially if the divorced parent had a mother or father who was a widow or a widower. In most cases this did work well. Not in my case.

My mother came from what I call the transition era. She was born in the 40's. When she came of age the low growl of women could be heard in the wind. They were gathered in living rooms or kitchens talking about women in the work world. They were making plans to move the men aside and take over the board rooms. My mother was married in 1959. Even though she heard the call of the women warriors, she chose to be a homemaker. She believed in women's rights and equality and supported her women friends that had decided to go back to school for degrees or back to work to wend their ways to the board rooms, but she didn't see herself as one of them. She still had the Ozzie and Harriet mentality.

She was totally happy in being a wife and later a mother. She gave birth to three beautiful children. She had a husband that was a hard worker and believed in the same traditions and values that she did. He got a long well with the in-laws. We all lived with my mother's parents, my grandparents, until my parents had saved up enough money to buy their first home. Just as they were looking for their first home and two weeks after their second child had been born, my brother, my mother's father died suddenly in his sleep. My parents plans were put on hold until my grandmother could grieve for her husband and my mother could come to terms with the fact that her beloved father had died. She took it hard, more hard than I could have ever realized at the tender age of 4 years old.

My parents were going through their own life's detours and it was my mother that wasn't able to take the shock to herself. Her marriage was beginning to fall apart. After 12 years of marriage and the birth of her 3rd child, my sister, my mother found out that my father had been cheating on her. They went through all the marriage counselor things, both secular and spiritual, but things weren't working out. They later separated and I think that my mother was hoping to still work things out. She was praying for a reconciliation. It never happened.

She was going through all this in the 70's. It was a time when the medical profession and the pharmaceutical company's were the best of friends. The drug culture, both legal and illegal was becoming a serious problem in the United States. It was reaching into the homes. It found my mother. Her drug of choice was prescriptions from the family doctor for her nerves. I remember her on her way to the divorce lawyers one day. She was shaking and she turned around to show her mother how bad her hands were shaking. My grandmother suggested that she see Dr. Volmer. He had been our family Dr. for years. The next week she went to an appointment at his office and came back with her first bottle of Valium. From there it was down hill. With every new prescription she got it seemed that she was depending more and more on her oldest daughter to take care of her brother and sister. I did, unquestionably. I was the oldest child and I was told that my brother and sister were counting on me. I had to set the example. I had no idea just what the example was, but I thought that it meant to just do what I was told. My father and grandfather had been around enough in my life to instill a few of the basic rules. They were simple. Do as your elders say, never disrespect them and never question what you are told. They both unwittingly were setting me up to become my mother's life raft, but she jumped ship and left me to fend for myself and my brother and sister. She never left us in body, but in mind, she just wasn't there.

I know now that she was suffering from depression due to her failed marriage, losing her father just years before and then her husband. Harriet had left the building. In my mother's mind, somehow she equated being a wife and mother as one and the same. There is a fine line, but a women can be one without being the other. One does not count themselves out because of the other part of their life not working out. In her mind she had signed away her motherhood when she signed the divorce papers even though she had full custody of all 3 of her children. She was not signing away both being a wife and a mother. My grandmother tried to step in and help her daughter out, but their relationship had always been tentative, from what my mother told me later about her relationship with her mother, and the death of my mother's father had broken any relationship they may have had. My mother had her first nervous break down when she was in her early 30's and my responsibilities to my siblings stepped up a notch.

It was then that I realized that my grandmother was an alcoholic. I knew she liked to sip her sherry every now and then or a glass of wine with dinner and at times a hot toddy before bed, but I was 10 or 11 when I realized just how long this had been going on and it may have explained why her relationship with her daughter was not what it should have been. I had an uncle, my mother's brother, but he had his own agenda and it didn't include his mother or sister. My aunt, my uncle's wife would try to step in and give me a break, but my uncle didn't see that as anything that was necessary.

Over the years I was the sole parent to my brother and sister. I took them to school, washed their clothes, helped them with their homework, was present when they had to go to the hospital or the Dr's office. I was the one that the teacher's called out of the classroom when one of them were acting up or was sent to the office. I fixed their suppers and planned their Easter and Christmas holidays, and their summer vacations. The two adults that were there in the home were there in body only. I went to them to explain what was going on with the children, what they needed, why they needed it, what school papers had to be signed and what assembly was coming up in school and it would be nice to be there for them. My grandmother came to some school events, but if my mother wasn't at home, she was in the psychiatric unit in a hospital and couldn't be there for them, but I was.

As I got older and was moving on in my teen years, I got rebellious. I wanted my own life and my own things to do. My brother and sister were old enough to take care of themselves and I felt that it was about time that the adults stop depending on me and do what responsible adults were supposed to do. I didn't stay out over night. I didn't run the roads, I didn't do drugs or drink. I'm not saying that I didn't try those things. We all try those things as teens, but I found no fun in any of it. I found out that I had been too tailored to the life that I had been leading since I was 10 years old. I was a 15 year old with the mind of a 30 year old. I was always more mature for my age and I guess my mother saw that in me and knew that she could depend on me. I had other ideas.

I put myself in the foster care system. I called Child Protective Services and told them what they could do for me and how we were going to do it. I think back on that now and I have to admit, that was a pretty bold move on my part, but I was in my own transition stage in my life and I needed stability and the right to live at least a part of my teen years as a teen was supposed to live it.. There had been a neighbor couple that I knew and I called them to tell them what I was going to do and to expect a call from Social Services asking them if they were willing to be temporary foster parents. They both knew my story and knew me. They both respected me enough and trusted in my level of maturity to know that I meant business. I was very lucky to have Social Services and the Emersons to agree with me and do it my way. I also knew that the foster parents had to be respected individuals. Mrs. Emerson was an elementary school teacher and Mr. Emerson was a computer programmer for Goddard Space Flight Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. Where could I go wrong? For the both of them I will be ever grateful to have had them in my life.

After I went to the Emersons, I had pangs of guilt the size of Texas! I worried about whether or not I was doing the right thing. I worried if my brother and sister were being cared for. I worried if the routine that I had tried to instill in the both of them were being followed by my mother and grandmother. I worried that I wasn't being trashed to them. Even though I was assured that CPS was monitoring the situation, I just couldn't find that peace in my self that I thought that I would find. Mrs. Emerson, a foster child herself when she was a child, knew what I was going through and if it wasn't for her being there I think that I would have called it quits and gone back home to take care of my brother and sister. My mother was having a fit. She told me that I was betraying her. My brother and sister missed me and needed me. My grandmother was getting worse with her drinking, all the things that I was told to expect from the social worker and Mrs. Emerson. My mother had pulled out the big guns of emotional guilt and manipulation and tried to get me to give in.

I lived with the Emersons for about two years. I turned 17 and my mother still wanted me back home. She was beginning to cause enough stress and tension that Social Services decided that I was to be removed from the Emersons care, but it wasn't to go back home to my mother or to be placed with another foster family, but to be placed with my father. I had contact with him off and on over the years, but because of my mother's way of causing trouble in his life after their divorce, he had stepped back. That may have been wrong, but no one wanted my mother to throw mental rocks through their windows. Believe it or not I understood. I left the Emersons and went to live with my father, his wife and my step-brothers. I was there for about 6 months before I decided to go to Job Corp to study to be a medical file clerk. I was weeks away from my 18th birthday. I was living farther from my mother and I was older and more mature even then.

From then I was able to look back on my life and know that there was many more things that I had to do. I had finally come to terms with leaving my brother and sister in the lurch. Social Services had decided that they could stay in the home with their mother and grandmother, provided that they go to family counseling. I was writing to them every month and telling them to stay strong and realizing that they would get through with the grace of God. I'm not a solid Christian, but I have faith in the fact that things could be worse.

I'm now 47 years old. All of her children had been a victim of her manipulation, but I think that at least my brother took my lead and realized like I did, that our mother was just a mother by blood. We could have had a worse mother, but she was the one that we had. After her mother passed, 16 years ago, we all stepped back in our mother's life to try to help her get off the drugs. Times had changed and prescriptions, narcotic prescriptions, were being monitored more strictly. I had more contact with her Dr's and expressed my concerns about what she was taking. That may have been a uphill battle, but we did get all her Dr's to take notice of all the drugs that she was taking. She had been in therapy for years, but had become so tuned to the system that she had them snowed. After years of inactivity and drug abuse, it took it's toll. When she was in her 50's she developed a weak heart. She later had a triple bypass, but she had no plans to change her life even then. My brother had enough of her. My sister and I stepped in and tried to take care of her. She had lived with me and my family, my sister and her family, but the one thing that she wanted from us we could never do for her and that was to bring back her father. She obsessed over this for years and used the drugs to replace something that she had lost. Both my marriage and my sister's marriage suffered and taking care of our mother had taken its toll. We both lost our marriages. I'm separated from my husband and my sister divorced her husband.

She never saw the hope in the future when she was given grandchildren. Two granddaughters and two grandsons. I know that I had on-the-job experience raising my brother and sister and I see that they must have remembered how I took care of them because they have done well with raising their children, my niece and nephew. The only way that I knew that I could get on in my life was to put my mother, or concept of what a mother was, to rest. My concept of mother died for me years ago. I went through my period of grieving for the mother that I had lost when she divorced my father. I decided that I could try to come to some sort of terms with the woman that I knew and sometimes I think that was harder to do.

My mother passed recently. She had lived in a nursing home for the last 7 years. It was her choice. I would like to think that it was her way of calling the game quits. I know she realized that if after all those years nothing could be changed, then she had nothing left to do but release us. We still visited her, still took her home for the holidays when her health allowed it and still went to the hospital when she had another crisis with her heart. When I got the call from the nursing home that she had passed, I called the family. I couldn't reach my brother or sister. I called my children and my husband. We all went down to say good-by. I let the others go in first. My husband left me alone with my mother. She looked so peaceful. It was the peace that I knew she was looking for. She was finally with her father. I told her that I knew that she was happier now and I was sorry that I couldn't bring her father back to her, but she had been asking me to do something that was just impossible. I did do what she had told me to do all my life. Her other son and daughter would understand now. I would keep the memory of the mother that I had until I was 10 years old alive. I would tell them of the good times that I can remember of her when she played and sang to us. I would tell them of the vacations that we all took when we were a family. I told her that I would always be there for them and not to worry because I would always be their sister.

Every family has a story and there is not a family in the world that meets the textbook version that we all try to live. We may have had a dysfunctional family and we still may have a dysfunctional family, but show me the perfect family. Every child in a family travels a separate path. They are guided through that path. That path is unique to themselves. The path as a family is a path that is taken as a whole, but it is the path of the child, the individual, that forms the adult. It's what the child takes with them from their childhood that is their choice. I was an old soul when I was born which is why I was able to take on the responsibilities that I did. I was a mature child, wise beyond my years, which was why I was able to make adult decisions when I needed to. I think that my father and grandfather both knew that if anyone could shoulder the responsibilities of the future of the family, it would be me. I am grateful for the time that I had as a member of a whole family, my parents and my grandparents. I am grateful for the time that I was able to be just a sister to my brother and sister. I am grateful for the time that I had one-on-one with my mother before she left the path of a mother. She had her own path to follow and she tried and did her best.