I Thought I Was The Only One

[miamia]

Hi everyone, FAIR WARNING, MY THOUGHTS TEND TO BE EXTREMELY SCATTERED and to compound that issue I have little to no editorial experience. This will probably end up being long winded, bitchy, whiny, and poorly written (I never finished school) I apologize in advance.I just need to get it out. This is my story, a lot of it is probably going to be about my parents, I'm still young and those mommy/daddy issues are still pretty fresh in my mind and they sting like hell. Also I think that what I know about my parents' weird and wacky past namely my mother's, has brought me a lot of clarity regarding the situation so I figure it may be worth sharing with people who may understand what I have gone through. I'm glad to have found all of you. So, here we go. 

 

 

My grandmother was found in a drawer, abandoned in the Irish part of Boston I guess. A man and a woman took the baby girl in and raised her catholic. Later as a young woman, my grandmother

 had twins born out of wedlock,and was shunned by her catholic community. one of those twins was my mother. My grandmother had to work constantly to feed them, and didn't get to raise them 

herself. This was done by the man and woman who took my grandmother in, who my mom came to know as her grandparents. She has a lot of good memories with her grandfather in particular. She says he was the only person who cared about her as a child. He set her up to start school and taught her everything he could possibly teach her with her mom being pretty much absent. Then, when my mom was seven, her grandfather was watching her and her twin overnight. He went upstairs to change and never came back down. My mom went looking for him and found him dead and naked on his bed upstairs. She told her twin he had gone to bed and they both went to sleep that night. The next day she told her mom when she came home what had happened. After that my mom and her sister ran wild. My mother started smoking and drinking heavily at a very young age because she was left alone in a bad area. she was in and out of school, and as a teen tried pretty much everything she could get her hands on. She was a terrible alcoholic and mainlined meth for a few years apparently.  During her formative years her brain was saturated with these mind altering substances. She saw a few of her friends and one cousin die in front of her from drug and/or alcohol abuse before she decided to get help. Then as a young adult she found religion. And it replaced every addiction she ever had. She often talks about how she was so amazed the first time she realized what it meant to have a heavenly father who cared so much about her. She clung to the idea very tightly. It is still the only reality to her. No moment of her life has ever been separate from conscious belief since. One day she saw a man in a band who she walked up to at a christian coffee house. She said to him that god told her that he was the person she was supposed to marry. My dad was shocked. At the time my mom was incredibly, incredibly beautiful. Also worth noting she was like 24? and my dad was like, 18. Yeah. So anyway, they eventually got hitched.

             They were both from religious backgrounds, but I would consider my mom to be fundamentalist, while my dad is more soft core christian. First they had my older sister, then 13 years later when my mom was 38 she had me, and at 40 she had my little sister. We were home-schooled because my mom didn't want us to be influenced by "that big bad scary world out there" literally how she put it. So most of our learning was religious curriculum. We did not associate with non religious children. We went to church every Sunday,  and would often stay for 2 services. My mom held bible study for all the kids in the neighborhood a couple times a week. She would involve us in religious plays in whatever church we were attending at the time, since she loved the theater. She loved the theater so much in fact that she would take it to the streets in the town we lived in. She would dress us all up in strange costumes, me,my little sister and herself , my dad and or my older sister were often there as well. She would paint us in full white-face mime/stage makeup. She would make us perform these nonsensical religious "skits" to terrible pop music that she somehow found religious meaning in. We would rehearse them over, and over, and over before performing downtown.  One song I remember her using all the time was total eclipse of the heart. Her character was always this "lost" person, and the other participants of the skit would offer her symbolic things to "tempt" her to do wrong. These objects or props, were just whatever totally random objects she had brought with us from the house, stuffed animals, pretty things, and she would (as the character) seem to show interest in said objects, then dramatically reject them, finally the skit would end with a "god" character offering her a wooden box which she would, with a shocked look on her face, accept, and open to find *gasp* a red construction paper heart, which "god" would then tape to her chest.  She would then "mime" extreme contentment, joy,and happiness, and afterward we would all pass out tracts. She told us to say "jesus loves you" and "have you heard about god" and things of that nature. This went on a lot when I was between 4 and 7. I remember a few strangers making complaints at these displays, saying that she was crazy and that she shouldn't be making her kids pass out tracts. She would always say that the devil was leading them astray, or that they were deceived etc. I remember as a small child I kept chasing someone at one of these events because they wouldn't accept the tract. I kept saying "please take it! just take it! I don't want you to go to hell !" they finally accepted it, probably out of pity and shock. 

           My sisters never rocked the boat. They mostly complied with all of my mother's wishes. Not so with me. According to my mother I was argumentative, hyperactive, rebellious, disobedient, wicked,  the list goes on. I would protest unfair punishments, usually with the result of me being punished more harshly, because in my moms house it was as great a sin not to agree with what she said as it was to physically do something I was told not to do. EVERYTHING was a sin. I was always "sinning" My older sister and my dad were almost never home, So most of my mother's insane behavior was not witnessed by other adults. They knew she spanked me for disobeying, they didn't know that when she was anxious and frustrated, which was her perpetual state of mind, disobeying could be something as small as peeling the paper off of a crayon, or not immediately jumping to my feet when she gave me a command to do a chore, saying something she didn't agree with, or refusing to do schoolwork. If I disobeyed, or said something with the wrong tone, she would ask me if I "wanted to be punished" and if I argued, which I invariably did because I couldn't freaking help it, she would grab the largest wooden spoon in the kitchen and tell me to follow her upstairs and tell me how many times I was going to be spanked. When I refused, she would start counting, and for every time she counted, that was another time I was going to be spanked. By this time she would be hysterically laughing and sobbing at the same time. Then she would stop counting, chase me down and drag me upstairs where she would tell me that I needed to take my punishment like a good little soldier of god which is something she often called my little sister and I. She would pull my pants down and whale on me unmercifully until my rear end was covered in welts and bruises. Afterward she would make me hug her, her still sobbing, me in a tearful state of suppressed rage, and she would tell me that she didn't want to spank me,and that she hated it, but in her words, " how are you ever going to obey god if you can't even obey me?" or " The bible says obey your parents and you will live a long and happy life." Then we would pray that I would behave better, which didn't work. This, and many other similar things went on nearly every day for years. After these incidents she would act as if nothing had happened. I never thought to tell anyone. I became angrier and angrier, and angrier. I became so angry and "rebellious" that the people at our new baptist church noticed. They insisted that something needed to be done about my terrible behavior. The culture at this church leaned very heavily on faith healing, speaking in tongues, empowerment of the church members over the devil, (often singing songs about treading said devil underfoot), and laying on of hands, in rituals that closely resembled exorcism. A woman at this church managed to convince my mother that I was possessed by a demon.

                 This was a "huge revelation" for my mother. She told my father and he went along with it, though he has since expressed his regrets about the whole situation. They had a bunch of people from the church over to pray the demons out of me. My behavior didn't change. But something did. Ironically, being told that I was demon possessed, and having so many members of a church believe it, was the first glitch in the matrix that gave me a solid piece of reality to hold onto. I could believe that I was a bad child, that was subjective. I could believe that the stories in the bible were true, I was young! I had a vivid imagination. But I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was myself. That the thoughts I was feeling were my own, and the reasons for my anger were my own, that my behavior was controlled by me, not some infectious otherworldly monster. My SELF was MINE dammit that's all I had! Obviously this didn't erase everything I had ever been indoctrinated with, but it's where the fabric started to unravel. After they prayed over me, and it didn't work, my mother claimed that god had revealed that the demons were in the house, not my person, and when praying the demons out of the house didn't change everything, my parents sold everything we had, including the house we owned to move to do more of gods work, and escape said demons. But that"s another really long story. My parents ended up being so poor afterward that my mom was forced to put me in public school in 6th grade. Suddenly I was exposed to the whole world. And I learned a lot. My parents divorced. My mom said it was because my dad watched porn, and she tried to tell me and my little sister he was a dangerous pervert. By 14 I had decided I was not religious, but no one else knew. By this time menopause had driven my mother over the brink on which she had already been teetering upon, and living with her became decidedly impossible. If any of you have seen the movie Donnie Darko, let me just say to drive the point home, my mom is Kitty Farmer. Not to be pejorative, that's just the closest possible example of her character, true to life. I managed to move in with my dad, (who is a normal human being)  and after that, it all seemed like a bad dream, and I thought I succeeded in sweeping it right under the rug. Then came the panic attacks. The deafening silence and overwhelming peace of not having my thoughts and actions constantly policed within a religious context actually threw me into a DEPRESSION! If you can believe that. I didn't know what to do with myself without the constant stress. I started to tentatively form my own misguided teenage opinions, have normal relationships with peers, and experiment quite unabashedly with the "secular" world. But now, out from under the oppressive thumb of my mother, the vestiges of her belief system started to manifest themselves in a much more personal way.

               My guilt followed me everywhere for years. The stink of it still clung to every action and thought that wasn't "godly". The indoctrination had stuck. At least on an emotional level. I struggled with nightmares and anxiety. I wavered back and forth from fear of damnation, to firm disbelief in any such irrational ideas. But I couldn't shake it. My personal fear that stuck very deep was not the fear of hell, but the fear of the world ending suddenly, and being on the wrong side of things. I started fearfully obsessing over the lists of my "sins", wondering how I could ever amend them just in case god was a real and angry god. At this point, I was a sexually active young adult, I had stolen things, I had lied, I had dropped out of high school, I had "sinned" and failed. I identified as agnostic at this point but I was still decidedly terrified of the god that I couldn't decide whether or not to believe in. Especially every time someone claimed the world was ending. That was the worst. I would dream that I woke up and looked outside to find that everything outside was black. I would think it was night and then I would look at all the clocks in the house and they would say it was daytime. Everything was gone. Then I would wake up, immobilized and sobbing. many many variations of this theme plagued me. 

               I was miserable and I didn't understand the root of the problem. I was emotionally stunted, needy, and manipulative. I was constantly trying to drown my misery with everything and everyone I could get my hands on.I was absolutely confused I did not regain my psychological footing until many bad decisions later I made the biggest and most fortuitous miss-step of my life. I had just turned 20 when I became pregnant with my first son with a man I had known for 3 weeks. The real reality hit me square in the face. The person I had known for 3 weeks stepped up, and I decided to go through with it. I put all of my concentration into my new family. I decided to put my energy into them because I was wasting it on myself anyway, so what the heck, why not. I started worrying about them instead of worrying about my "sins" the end of the world. I had vowed to never have kids but when I had my son It changed my whole perspective on everything. The logical, adult part of my brain kicked in. I looked back at my mother's actions and thought, how? How could she have possibly have done the things she did? No matter what she believed! How could she have purposely had a child only to do those terrible things to it? And why did my dad let it happen? I have let it go. I still talk to and visit both of them. But to this day they still don't know whats going on in my innermost thoughts. They shut me out long ago and I have accepted that. The last of my belief fell away after some close thought and scrutiny. I mean I was made to read the bible several timed over during my childhood, so why didn't I see the contradictions before?  I took the time to logically ponder and marvel at all of the strange mechanisms that led me to where I am today, calmly and without fear.  I fully realized not so long ago, with real conviction,for the first time, that I am actually free. I have known it for a while now but I only recently felt it.  The song Imagine, by Jon Lennon sums the feeling up perfectly in the opening lines, "Imagine there's no heaven, its easy if you try, no hell below us, above us only sky."  

              It's funny that I would end up typing this on the very night that the spooky "apocalyptic"  blood moon is looming overhead. Such an occurrence and it's associated superstitions would have paralyzed me with fear in the past, especially considering the perceived blasphemy of the words I am typing. But you know what? And it sounds good to say it, I took a break from typing to look up at the sky with my little boy and enjoyed the sight with my logical brain. And I don't expect I will have any nightmares concerning it. Ha! so there! 

                               

                      To anyone that has been or may still be afraid, It's OK to be afraid! its OK not to know! I stand with you!  Oh and also the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are a good read and were pretty stabilizing for me. And artistic expression. Making things with my own two hands is very calming for me. Try to find a focus. face your fears, don't ignore them, all that

                 

 

                             If you have gotten to the end of this thank you so much and also you are really patient. Feedback is always welcome!

[♦ ficino ♦]

Hello Miamia, and welcome here. It is heartening to hear how you have been putting together your life and that you have your new family. I relate to a lot of what you write because my parents were both mentally whacked out over religion, and the aftereffects do stunt children and stay for a long time. But it's great to find other, firmer perspectives. I like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, too! 

[mymistake]

Welcome!  Sounds like you are working some things out.

[♦ Fuego ♦]

You are amazingly resilient! That's wonderful, and I'm so glad that you made it through the religious hell poured onto you from such an early age. Religion so often pollutes humanity instead of helping it. For many of us it defined reality, and though we couldn't see any of it, we believed strongly and the social ties at church reinforced it. I loved how you said the "stink" of guilt clung to you. The indoctrination pollutes our emotions and becomes a "virtual parent" always telling us what we're doing wrong. So glad that you found your way out. Welcome!

[Mychainsaregone]

Well done for articulating your story like this. I'm so glad you are out of that situation and you are finding your own way

[miamia]

Thank you all so much for your responses! Most of my friends know at least part of my story but none of them have gone through anything similar so it has been really tough to find anyone that wants to talk about this stuff or that can relate. 

[Ellinas]

Welcome.

 

I hope you found the process of writing that cathartic.

[miamia]

Thank you Ellinas I did indeed! 

[Jeff]

Hi miamia. Welcome. I hope you stick around for a while and get to know the place.

Btw. My extimony was all over the place I was so scattered.

Sometimes you just gotta get it all out the best you can

[miamia]

Thank you Jeff I do plan on sticking around! It's really good to see my thoughts and experiences reflected in other individuals. And it did feel really good to write about everything, even if it was messily done.