Bebop,

Did you and your brothers comfort each other? Did having siblings help? It is amazing to see the differences in how each sibling reacts to the situation. My father’s childhood was awful. His mother was married a million times (actually 6).

She abandoned her first three children (2 girls and a newborn boy) with a relative of her husband. (My father met this brother for the first time when dad was in his 30s). Her next daughter was raised from birth to marriage (How do you just pick one child to raise out of 6?!?). The fourth daughter and my father were farmed out to different relatives, then eventually to a crazy couple that lived in town. At 8 years old he would have to stand in the corner for hours if he dared visit his mother on the way home from school. The youngest two were finally able to return home when my grandmother’s health was failing and she needed someone to take care of her a year before she died.

I don’t know my eldest two Aunts all that well, but my uncle was mentally unbalanced and an alcoholic. They were not left with a loving relative, but an abusive one. My middle Aunt is a wonderful woman that married and had the most perfect family I’ve ever seen. She is my saving grace, the reason I’m able to have a “normal” family.

My youngest Aunt acted out from the time she was 12. She developed very early and is very beautiful so she sought the attention of older men from that time on. And I mean OLDER, she was 12 “dating” a 30 year old. She eventually married 8 times herself, had 8 kids and was a grandmother at 30 and a great-grandmother in her late 40’s. Her middle daughter is my age and had a baby at 13!!!! By the time she was 53, she had a great-great- granddaughter. Her children and grandchildren are scattered far and wide, and many have nothing to do with her now.

My father was an alcoholic that put his mother on a pedestal. She died when he was 12 so he wasn’t old enough to be angry with her, to realize that she wasn’t fit to be a parent. His Aunt attempted to adopt him, but for some reason known only to his mother, she would not allow it. That Aunt would say “even a wolf doesn’t abandon its young.” But in spite of his drinking problem (which he did eventually overcome), he was determined to be the best at everything. An attempt to get his mother’s approval I’m sure.