Family Affairs

K

Kotkijet

At the Start
Joined
May 14, 2005
Messages
33
Hi everybody

This is kinda a sequel to the stupid o'clock thread, only it has the potential to be a useful thread to those who sleep when normal people sleep.

I figured I should start a thread where people can share their stories about how their family fucks them up so much. I'm sure that with anonomity and sympathetic ears, we can get off our chests what annoys us most about our nearest and dearest and get us to have a different perspective on things.

I'll get the ball rolling

Tonight, I pinned my own Dad against a wall on High Street in Hyde and said to him;-

I swear to fucking god, if you bail out on my kid brothers (both still in school), I'll come after you.

Please let me know your own stories so I don't feel so deranged. I mean, Christ and School teach us to honour thy father.
 
I phoned in sick to work the other morning.

"Exactly how sick are you?" he asked.

"Um.....I'm in bed with my sister?" I replied helpfully

(it's old, it's not that funny, but it clearly has a place here)
 
1. At the age of about 12 or 13, I skipped Monday evening Novena and Mass to go looking for birds' eggs with a mate. To cut a long story short, I lied to my parents about where I'd been and I was promised "a hiding you'll never forget". I was struck several times with a leather belt over my bare buttocks and shut in my room crying, left to think about the error of my ways. All I could think was that I would never cry for anyone again in my life, and maybe that's part of what's wrong with me as I've never forgotten either the beating nor have I cried when anyone has hurt me physically.

2. At about the age of 21 or 22, I was listening to a song on the record player, which mentioned Jesus Christ by name. My father told me in no uncertain terms to stop the record as it was blasphemous. I expained that within the context of the song it was entirely appropriate. He wasn't prepared to listen but I insisted he didn't know what he was talking about. He paused and told me to take my glasses off. Surprised, I did. At that point he punched me on the jaw and told me he didn't care what age I was, in his house we abide by his rules. I thought, do I punch him back or accept his point of view. I opted for the latter as by this stage in my life I understood that he was as much a victim of his own upbringing as I was and I knew that within a matter of a few years I'd probably either be married and doing my utmost to make sure my children's experience was more positive than my own or I'd have fled the family nest and living my own life.

I often wonder if the fact I remember these incidents means I've never really forgiven my father, no matter how much I may say I have?
 
Phew! My first inclination (and we're still during a holy period) is to say, "What a bastard!" On the other hand, you're right to perhaps wonder what made him so desperate to have power and control over a young boy, that he could find no other way than to attack you physically? Unless you have an insight into his own past, his own treatment, that's difficult. At first glance, he looks like a brutal megalomaniac, but at second, he was not that different to the sort of father thousands - probably millions - of boys had. Were his own dreams and ambitions thwarted, and did he perhaps see in you someone infinitely brighter than himself, someone he couldn't control intellectually, but could still control through your need to be sheltered, fed, and generally kept at that time, as any child would?

As a young man, you were beginning to not just think for yourself, but to articulate the differences between yourself and your father. Clearly he seems to have felt threatened by this again. He could've just said, "While you live in my house, you do as I say", but he chose to assault you. I can only feel he felt that perhaps his own life was out of his control - either through financial or domestic burdens, or unrealized hopes, etc. - and that he would be master of his hearth at the least.

I heard of one way to let go of the hurt that someone has caused you. Whether you'd think it a load of mumbo-jumbo, I don't know, but if you would like to let go of the hurt in yourself (for it is still there), may I humbly suggest this: You write out the hurt and the sadness caused on a piece of paper. Quietly, and with no anger in your heart, you find a place in which to burn it, and say, "I'm letting this go, and I forgive you". As the last ash falls, you decide to let your anger burn away with it. If you want, say a little prayer, too, to help it on its way. It may take more than one go if the feelings return, but it might help, you never know.

Best wishes with letting it go, and the power to hurt that your Dad had (repeat HAD) over you, long ago.
 
Originally posted by krizon@Apr 16 2006, 10:47 PM
Phew! My first inclination (and we're still during a holy period) is to say, "What a bastard!"
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Would you believe I never, ever, thought of him like that?

I thought my treatment was unfair and disproportionate. We were brought up in times where it was entirely accepted and acceptable for parents to hit their kids. I was punished for telling lies and I thought I deserved punishment. My father was a very intelligent man but he struggled to articulate. He wanted us to be humble and unassuming but he also wanted us to leave school with the qualifications he never had (he deliberately flunked his exams after a fall-out with his own parents).

We never got praised for anything other than academic achievement, for which we were always rewarded. We all understood why he wanted us to achieve: long-terms rewards were always going to be more likely in an environment where you needed to have as much going for you as possible because very often the first question you were asked in a job interview was, "Which school did you go to?" The purpose of this question was to identify if you were a Catholic, in which case you had to hope the company to which you were applying operated a positive discrimination policy in an attempt to redress the anti-Catholic balance but this was very rare. Nearly any firm who opened with the question only employed non-Catholics.

But I digress.

I couldn't understand why such an intelligent man couldn't talk me through the error of my ways, passionately or dispassionately. I wasn't stupid. I didn't see the need for the lesson to be beaten into me. But I didn't think him a bastard for it. It couldn't have been easy for him to keep a wife and clutch of weans on a poor wage. But it made me realise at that age that corporal punishment wasn't always necessary.
 
Originally posted by BrianH@Apr 17 2006, 09:13 AM
I expect that your father went to mass every Sunday?
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Yes, and every Monday evening (Novena and Mass), Friday evening (Mass), Saturday morning (Mass followed by Confession) and Sunday evening for Benediction and Devotions.

I'm sure whatever he did, he believed it was the right thing to do at the time. I don't have a problem with that.
 
So you never asked him why he felt it necessary to bash you about? It's rankling to this day, isn't it, this opposition of intellect and brute force? If your father was so intelligent, he'd have rationalized that having married and having had many children (?) as a good Catholic, he'd need to finance your wellbeing. If he felt anger at himself for having earlier cut off his nose to spite his parents, that was his problem to deal with, not take out on you.

I'm surprised he felt that walloping a defenceless child sent out a message of love, given the words of Christ, who he worshipped so often: "Suffer little children to come unto me" meant 'permit' little children, etc. - not make the little children suffer! I've often marvelled at the disparity between the churchgoing righteous and their behaviour. Your father was obviously incapable of unconditional love - oops! - I think that's something else that the church is pretty big on, isn't it? How very odd, to spend so many hours of one's life in the presence of Christ's representatives, and have learned so little of His message.
 
Originally posted by BrianH@Apr 18 2006, 11:49 AM
Good old catholic church...
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I've never blamed out religion for it. My father was one of many children born of the uneducated, labouring classes and his parents likewise. Maybe hitting out at kids was all they knew.
 
Originally posted by krizon@Apr 18 2006, 12:10 PM
So you never asked him why he felt it necessary to bash you about? It's rankling to this day, isn't it, this opposition of intellect and brute force? If your father was so intelligent, he'd have rationalized that having married and having had many children (?) as a good Catholic, he'd need to finance your wellbeing. If he felt anger at himself for having earlier cut off his nose to spite his parents, that was his problem to deal with, not take out on you.

I'm surprised he felt that walloping a defenceless child sent out a message of love, given the words of Christ, who he worshipped so often: "Suffer little children to come unto me" meant 'permit' little children, etc. - not make the little children suffer! I've often marvelled at the disparity between the churchgoing righteous and their behaviour. Your father was obviously incapable of unconditional love - oops! - I think that's something else that the church is pretty big on, isn't it? How very odd, to spend so many hours of one's life in the presence of Christ's representatives, and have learned so little of His message.
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By the time I got round to resolving to ask the question, it was time for me to move on with my own life. By then, I'd seen him with his grandchildren and he was extremely attentive and affectionate with them. I presumed by then he'd realised he could have done things differently so I didn't feel there was any need for me to rake up the past.

'Walloping' was part and parcel of everyday life for a lot of people, and religion probably had nothing to do with it. Many a Parish Priest in those days thought nothing of giving altar boys a clip round the ear if they misbehaved during Mass.

Yes, I thought it odd that someone who spent so much of his time in devotion of Christ could be so intolerant of others' failings but that was for him to deal with and you have to remember most of his religious 'formation' was pre-Vatican II and was much more austere. He'd have found it difficult to move with the times, as did many catolics of that generation.
 
From what I read here, he was trying to save you from being damned in hell. Maybe not the nicest way of doing it, but I'd choose a well-intentioned person with nasty actions over a selfish mean-minded person abound with social graces anyday.
 
Originally posted by Melendez@Apr 18 2006, 01:49 PM
I'd choose a well-intentioned person with nasty actions over a selfish mean-minded person abound with social graces anyday.
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Nothing selfish and mean minded about beating small children then? And Adolf Hitler (before he became stark raving mad) thought that what he was doing was for the best of intentions.
 
When I was about six I was dared by a bigger lad (all of about 8) to go into a supermarket and steal some chocolate. I was a bad thief, then, and was easily caught when I tried to run away with the Cadbury's snack. Just at that point my Ma came around the corner on her way back from the dentist where she had had some painful and still throbbing work done. This was not good news from me at that particular moment.

Anyway she dragged me home and slapped me hard accross the back of the legs with a thin stick. It was the last time* I stole. She cried her eyes out later, and I still love her deeply. All in all a good result.

(*If you discount the ridiculous price I took on the good thing today.)
 
I'd rather have (and would like to try to be) a person who lived by the credo, probably far too simple for anyone in love with the arcana of religious ritual, of 'do as you would be done by'. If you don't enjoy being bashed, robbed, raped, or tortured, and would rather not die by starvation, gassing, shooting, or beheading, then aspire to the credo. If we could only exchange that for 'E Pluribus Unem', 'Dieu et Mon Droit' and a whole host of other imperialistic homilies!

DO: my grandfather was a Catholic, an ex-altar boy, from a big Irish family. He was a young lad when he took a conscious decision to drop out of 'being Catholic'. He married blissfully, and begat just two boys and my Mother. Not one of them had a hair harmed, they were all taught right from wrong, good manners, fairness with firmness, and encouraged to make their way in the world as they wished, including whether to join any religious persuasion, or not. Perhaps it was as a reaction to my grandfather having seen the blessed poor cajoled into offering up their last ha'penny to the collecting plate, while their many, wizened, grimy, children went barefoot and malnourished.

The priest pestered his parents often to 'make him see sense' and return, but, although young, he stoically refused. "He'll come back, all right, when he'll be wanting the Last Rites!" was the final disgusted snort from God's representative. I'm proud to say he failed to request such services from an authority he no longer respected.

Now, perhaps his enlightened attitude to his family was born out of his refusal to be bound by his Church's patriarchal strictures, or because he had seen much real poverty (not something our family ever suffered) unaddressed by those working for God on Earth, while churches covered their altar pieces in gold leaf and thread. Whatever it was, having been raised Catholic (to the point of departure) and coming from a big family would not have been reasons he'd have accepted for hitting or punching one's much-loved family. As my Mother was born in 1917, his thinking was formed well before that, so merely living in an age when child-beating was common would not have formed an excuse in his eyes, either.
 
Perhaps he simply had a more ambivalent attitude to religion than others, allowing him to see things from a different perspective and not fearing damnation for acting upon his own free will. Not many would have thought like that in those days, I suspect. Believers will say it for God to judge who was right.

I do, however, find it tiresome when people blame religion for all the world's ills. Religion never caused anyone any grief. It has been man's interpretation of religious scripture - amng our many other human failings - that have caused the problems.
 
Originally posted by Desert Orchid@Apr 19 2006, 09:37 AM
I do, however, find it tiresome when people blame religion for all the world's ills.
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I don't blame religion for all the world's ills - it is sometimes a tool used for political ends. What I can't understand is that holders of a belief which is based on love can beat the shit out of small people.
 
Thank you, Brian - we may as well stop arsing about and say, regardless of belief or non-belief, all child-bashers are brutes. But for those supposedly in thrall to a love-based religion, it's hypocrisy. That's it. End of story.

DO - if you read from your original posting to here, you'll find you've done exactly what brutalized women and battered children have done since time began: you've tried to rationalize away your father's wretched behaviour. There IS NO EXCUSE.
 
I hope when you pass away, Krizon (and may it be many decades hence), God doesn't employ you to staff the gates :D
 
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