(((((agony))))) Both of my parents lost their fathers when they were young and virtually abandoned by their mothers.

I my mom’s case, her mother married a world class *** that had to travel a lot for his job. He brought with him a very spoiled teenager. My mom was about 14 and my aunt about 12. Both requested to go back and live with my great-grandparents. My mother viewed it as an opportunity to return to a loving stable home. My Aunt however felt that my grandmother just abandoned her new family (which in all reality she did) to her new husband, baby, and step-child. She felt that grandmother should have done more to make her feel welcome in their new home. She wasn’t wrong. My grandmother was embarrassed because both of her daughters were born out of marriage, and she was able to re-write her history when she married grandfather.

In my dad and his sisters case, after being shifted from relative to relative they ended up living with a crazy woman in town. Some days after school he would stop and see his mother; he was rewarded with beatings from the crazy woman. His mother only took them back in when she became sick and needed someone to take care of her, she died a year later. My dad’s response to this whole thing (he was the baby) was to idolize his mother, and he felt he wasn’t “good enough” and spent the rest of his life attempting to achieve perfection. His sister on the other hand was older and she knew what they were going through wasn’t right, she sought the attention of much older men (in their 30s) while she was in her early teens (like 14). My father kept his family together in a tightly knit ball, my Aunt has kids she has no idea where in the world they are, literally.

In the end, you have to ask yourself, if the decision your mother made to allow you to return to your grandparents home (whatever her motives) was the best decision for you. Do you think that you’d be the wonderful person you are today if you had lived with her? I’m a firm believer that things happen for a reason. I found out as an adult that one of my favorite Great-Aunts wanted to adopt my father, for whatever reason, his mom would not allow it, spite I think. But if she had, my parents would have never met, and my brother and I wouldn’t have been here.