I did the best I could with what I knew.

I did the best I could with what I knew.

My parents did the best they could with what they were taught.

They did the best they could with what they had been given.

As a parent of twenty-five years I will fully admit that I had and still have no idea if what I am doing is right.   As I have worked through my fucked-upness I can see where a lot of my behaviors stemmed from.  I am not pointing fingers.  As I grew older and my grandparents were nearing the end of their journey, I made time to sit and talk with each one and get a little glimpse into where I came from.  

On my mother’s side I learned a lot about why she was the way she was.  It started over four generations back.  My great-great grandparents had come here from Black Forest Germany.  I don’t know much about my great grandfather’s childhood, but I do know he was a drinker.  My grandmother and her siblings were sent to their grandparents to live.  My grandmother didn’t say much, but she also didn’t have to.  It wasn’t until I was sitting in an Al-anon meeting while my alcoholic boyfriend went to his meeting that I understood a piece of what my grandmother had gone through.  My grandmother had an alcoholic father and an abusive grandfather.  There I was, sitting in a meeting, because I was living with an abusive alcoholic.  My grandmother passed away later that year just weeks after I freed myself from him. 

Ending the relationship was the end of that story.  I continued to go to the Al-anon meeting long after the alcoholic.  I bought and read book after book.  I talked at length with my therapist about it.  My grandmother had developed unhealthy coping mechanisms that kept her alive in the early years of her life under extensive circumstances during the 1940s.  Being that was all she knew, she raised my mother in a very protected naive bubble, but unknowingly passed along these behaviors.

My father is a good man.  He isn’t the warm hugs and fun times type of dad.  He is a hardworking, quiet, take care of business type of dad.  Never truly showing too much emotion, my dad worked hard and long hours to provide for his wife and kids.  Reba’s song: the greatest man I never knew explains the relationship that I had with my father.   I look through old pictures and my favorite is from when I was probably four years old with me at my dad laying on the living room floor watching TV together.  I no longer have that memory in my head, but when I focus on that picture, I get that feeling of ‘daddy’s princess’.  As I grew older, I cannot recall another moment when I felt that way. 

Over the recent years I have come to understand my father, not as my dad, but as a man that also had his own childhood trauma.  Before my grandmother, my dad’s mother, passed, I remember a time when I stopped in to visit for a bit.  I was in my mid-twenties and already a mother.  I don’t recall how the topic came up, but she shared with me how abusive my grandfather was.  She confessed that there were many times she had to step between her husband and her boys.  Recently my father told me of how a dear friendship was torn apart by the hands of his father’s anger.  In a moment, I saw in my father, a man still grieving the loss of a friend and, also, the anger and fear he still held for his father. 

In a time where abuse was survived and hidden, much like my other grandmother, unhealthy coping skills were adapted for my father.  Yet, in their own ways, they showed the strength and determination to stop the violence.  I see now, it’s my acknowledgment and understanding to now remove the cross they carried for their children and grandchildren.  This is what it means to break generational curses. 

When we stop casting blame and begin to see reason can we truly forgive and release the past.