So what's your story vis-a-vis family drama? Mine's pretty standard, as you saw. Almost boringly standard.
Hm. It's part of a larger document I had started typing up about my life, so here goes.
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My father was roughly 40 when he married my mother, who was 19 at the time, against the understandable major resistance of her family. She became alienated from her family over this, and she didn't have that many social contacts to begin with, so she was basically left alone in an emotionally abusive relationship with my father. Now, my father never cheated on her or hit her (that I know of), but he would enforce his opinions upon her and always seek quarrels with people. He was also into some health programs which changed over time. I remember one of them said that having salted food was bad, so he got very angry with my mother when she accidentally left some salt on some potatoes that she didn't want to eat and gave them to me.
Another example is how he at some point believed that drinking only distilled water was good for you, so that was the only water we were allowed to drink. Until we went into a store which sold that water and asked if that was drinkable. The cashier looked at us like we had asked whether sulfuric acid was drinkable and said ...No. And that was the end to the water affair. It still surprises me looking back that that worked; normally my father would get in an argument with people over such things until they told him to go away or caved in.
So anyway, we moved to a new country. It quickly became apparent that neither of my parents had picked up the local language well enough to communicate with the authorities, cashiers etc or otherwise get by in everyday life. Kids, on the other hand, pick up languages pretty quickly... so I was not in school most of the time, but instead out with my parents helping them to claim child support from state or similar things (my parents weren't exactly qualified workers either, and my father had some severe health problems). And if a decision came from the authorities which my father did not agree with (which was quite often), it was me who would have to go with him to the authorities or translate appeal letters.
Imagine this. A child of 8-9 years translating stuff between a 50 year old man who does everything he can to avoid working and wants his son to translate everything exactly like he wants to, including all and any belligerent threats (or attempted bribes. Sometimes two sentences apart from each other) to the social worker, and said social worker who gets understandably irate by how the man treats him and the man's son. When you are a child and translating this, the frustrations and the anger at the other party get (even subconsciously) focused on you, because it's you who speaks the words. That was no fun.
Additionally, I had read some example letters and books on Germany's culture and knew that of course that shit would not fly. So I tried to persuade him to let it go when he inevitably threatened to complain to the man's superior. That this 9 year old with much less life experience and therefore of course infinitely inferior to him would dare to question him thusly, irritated him even more.
Eventually, I started having spasms. Nothing major, but eventually enough to convince even my father to consult a hospital. (I say even, because he was normally distrustful of doctors. And lawyers. And people who weren't him, really.) My parents were told that I had epilepsy of unknown origin (and also short-sightedness). I later learned that epilepsy spasms may be triggered by stress if there is a predisposition to that, so that might have been it. I stayed in the hospital for three months.
That was good, because people noticed I wasn't visiting school and my parents got a stern talking to from the countries' equivalents of CPS workers. After that, I mostly went to school uninterrupted, but still helicoptered by one of my parents on the way from and to school. We lived literally one crosswalk and hundred meters from the school, and not in a dangerous neighbourhood either. The helicoptering continued until I was 15 or so, even to highschool which was 15 walking minutes away. That made me the only child in my grade which would get walked by parents to school. (sarcasm on) That, of course, earned me my classmates' utter respect (sarcasm off).
In primary school, I was also the only child who did not have access to a TV, until we had an assignment of tracking our TV watching habits for a week, so my father decided to buy a TV, something he had been opposed to because it contained "dangerous radiation"(tm) and was also bad to my eyes. But of course it could not fly that a child of his could not do an assignment for lack of a TV (what would everybody else think?), so a TV we got. Laughable, when I think back on it. Of course, because of the radiation and my poor eyes, I was allowed to watch it half an hour a day tops.
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After that, it kinda strays into stuff I am not willing to share publicly.
I actually wish I had something more exciting. Like, "Well, I'm the product of consentual incest and was raised in a circus, and when I'd miss a jump my father would make me eat hákarl while my mom read me explicit love-letters from their courtship days at the family reunions."
I might have to steal that one.
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Topic: Why did Faye's dad kill himself? (Read 27890 times)