FoTi
Crusader
Re: The old days - Aboard the Apollo - 1973
One that used to make me feel guilty was when my mother wasn't feeling well and my father would turn to me and say "You're making your mother sick". That coupled with my mother telling me she wished I'd never been born and that I'd ruined her health and her marriage :shock:, really stuck with me. My father always told me that my mother was very truthful, so I thought what she said was true....that I had ruined her life. This put me in a horrible spot where I would think that maybe I should kill myself so that my mother could be happy, but I couldn't do that
and this stuff kept going back and forth in my head....it was like a constant battle within myself to just stay alive and on my side. If I satisfied her...I was dead....if I satisfied myself, she was unhappy and I wasn't happy with her being unhappy. I had no way to resolve this and neither did she. I wanted to run away from home, but I had nowhere to go and I knew that my father would have the police after me if I ran away and I didn't want that.

I remember my sixth grade teacher asked me what was wrong because my grades had dropped so drastically from all A's to barely passing and I didn't have any idea what to say to her...I didn't know why....I just knew I didn't care anymore about doing well in life....life had lost it's color...it's brilliance....it's magic....it's sparkle.
It never occurred to me to talk to anybody about this back then. Nobody ever talked about this kind of stuff back then. Whatever went on at home was nobody else's business and was never discussed outside the immediate family. It was forbidden.
My parents could never really discuss anything with me. God knows what they experienced while growing up, or after that, that made them the way they were. I felt sorry for them sometimes and feared them at other times. I wanted to love them but they weren't there to give or receive love, with me or with each other.
The word "love" was never uttered in my house growing up....it was as if it was forbidden. I never even heard my parents say that they liked anything or anybody, but there was plenty of dislike from my mother and looking down on others from my father as well as from my mother. This seemed to be how they coped with life and made themselves feel better about themselves and made themselves think they were more superior to others. They sure had me convinced they were better than anybody else, including me. I remember feeling like I was worth less than a piece of furniture when I was at home, with my parents, during my high school years....that's pretty low. I had vey low self esteem and very little confidence in myself.
When I was little I wanted to have six kids when I grew up. I was an only child and I was lonely and would like to have been in a big family,... so I wanted to have a lot of kids, when I grew up, so that they would have each other to play with and would never be lonely. By the time I was in my last year of high school, my family had totally convinced me that having children was a really bad experience and a way to ruin one's life... so, along with some other factors, I decided to never have any children. I guess I had been mentally sterilized by then.
Some people should never have kids
.....I've met quite a few of those in my lifetime....too many, actually.
Parents can help to make a child's life beautiful and fulfilling or ugly and miserable, and I think the love and support of a parent is a huge factor in a child's life.....it can make or break a kid....sometimes for the rest of their life.
Thanks Hats! You make some excellent points which actually made me feel better about that incident. The following remark of yours also sets the stage for another pearl of wisdom said by Mom's and Dad's of those days: Here is your remark, we all learned to skidaddle at 5 pm and be scarce and here is the associated item having to do with THE PURPOSE OF CHILDREN, "Children are meant to be seen but are not meant to be heard." Its not a perfect match because skidaddling involves both not being heard and not being seen but still it ties in somewhat. That one is really pretty ugly. In its day, it was taken as being sort of tongue in cheek and sort of light hearted. From today's perspective it looks more like an attempt to nullify a kid's beingness and suppress his very existence.
Lakey
One that used to make me feel guilty was when my mother wasn't feeling well and my father would turn to me and say "You're making your mother sick". That coupled with my mother telling me she wished I'd never been born and that I'd ruined her health and her marriage :shock:, really stuck with me. My father always told me that my mother was very truthful, so I thought what she said was true....that I had ruined her life. This put me in a horrible spot where I would think that maybe I should kill myself so that my mother could be happy, but I couldn't do that
and this stuff kept going back and forth in my head....it was like a constant battle within myself to just stay alive and on my side. If I satisfied her...I was dead....if I satisfied myself, she was unhappy and I wasn't happy with her being unhappy. I had no way to resolve this and neither did she. I wanted to run away from home, but I had nowhere to go and I knew that my father would have the police after me if I ran away and I didn't want that.

I remember my sixth grade teacher asked me what was wrong because my grades had dropped so drastically from all A's to barely passing and I didn't have any idea what to say to her...I didn't know why....I just knew I didn't care anymore about doing well in life....life had lost it's color...it's brilliance....it's magic....it's sparkle.
It never occurred to me to talk to anybody about this back then. Nobody ever talked about this kind of stuff back then. Whatever went on at home was nobody else's business and was never discussed outside the immediate family. It was forbidden.
My parents could never really discuss anything with me. God knows what they experienced while growing up, or after that, that made them the way they were. I felt sorry for them sometimes and feared them at other times. I wanted to love them but they weren't there to give or receive love, with me or with each other.
The word "love" was never uttered in my house growing up....it was as if it was forbidden. I never even heard my parents say that they liked anything or anybody, but there was plenty of dislike from my mother and looking down on others from my father as well as from my mother. This seemed to be how they coped with life and made themselves feel better about themselves and made themselves think they were more superior to others. They sure had me convinced they were better than anybody else, including me. I remember feeling like I was worth less than a piece of furniture when I was at home, with my parents, during my high school years....that's pretty low. I had vey low self esteem and very little confidence in myself.

When I was little I wanted to have six kids when I grew up. I was an only child and I was lonely and would like to have been in a big family,... so I wanted to have a lot of kids, when I grew up, so that they would have each other to play with and would never be lonely. By the time I was in my last year of high school, my family had totally convinced me that having children was a really bad experience and a way to ruin one's life... so, along with some other factors, I decided to never have any children. I guess I had been mentally sterilized by then.
Some people should never have kids
.....I've met quite a few of those in my lifetime....too many, actually.Parents can help to make a child's life beautiful and fulfilling or ugly and miserable, and I think the love and support of a parent is a huge factor in a child's life.....it can make or break a kid....sometimes for the rest of their life.

