The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Kelly:

Ooh, hey, step-father nightmares. It's been a while since I've had those. I probably should have seen that coming when I started talking in this thread, but somehow they always catch me by surprise. For 20 years I've been big enough and strong enough to break him in half and for 15 he's had no real emotional or financial leverage over me, but I still get bad dreams when I think about him in a concentrated way.

It probably says a great deal that I don't get nightmares about my mother and the paranoid schizophrenia. At least as much as the fact that completely cutting myself off from his mother meant not needing to compulsively watch "The Ref" two or three times around the Holidays every year. Interesting thread this. It's broken open some sores that needed air.

Abi @ 129, thanks!

And, now that I'm thinking about it, and since I've already let a cathartic/nerve-wracking chunk of info out into the ether I may as well go a step further in case it might help someone else along.

That would be to note the narcissistic and emotionally abusive step-father who I tippie-toed around for years after growing up and moving out. Not because he made my mother happy, but rather because he provided her with a dysfunctional but stable equilibrium that reduced the chances of her having another severe psychotic episode. That came to an end when the most recent episode turned into a giant ugly divorce with me getting to play the role of "responsible adult" in the family one more time--a role my grandmother and I had been handing back and forth since I came out of my adrenaline-junkie death-wish days around the age of 23.

The funny things is that if I don't really examine it too deeply I tend to think of my childhood as having been mostly a happy one. It's only when I let the analytical part of my brain loose on the sub-strata and the memories I don't want to look at that I'm reminded of just how much trauma lies beneath the surface. Funny old place the brain.

Drat! Abi, I hate to bother you, but I forgot to clip my url from my post @ 126. If you'd be willing to pull it when you get the chance, I'd very much appreciate it.

Thanks Abi for the email scrub*. I hadn't thought to completely obscure mine.

With that in mind I'll go a step further and note a bit more about my own personal family dysfunction level. It's nowhere near as bad as some in this thread in that with the exception of some emotional monstrosity on the part of my step-father's mother it wasn't the result of deliberate action but rather the side-effect of massive parental chemical imbalances.

Nonetheless, growing up the son of a full-blown paranoid schizophrenic** has its traumatic moments. If not for a maternal grandmother*** who went to truly heroic efforts to provide me with a stable environment, and a girlfriend (now-wife) who helped me see that a complete disregard for self-preservation didn't look all that different from intentional self-destruction, I don't think I'd be alive to post here. There's something about finding out at ten that when you were a baby your mother almost killed both you and herself that screws with your childhood sense of security.


*I'm using the version you set to post this message so it should be clear.

**Diagnosed, medicated, and occasionally institutionalized.

***May she rest in peace.

JJ @ 9 for some of us, portions of family are significantly more traumatic than a pain in the ass....

I guess I'll just leave it there because it's really something I'd rather not talk about while any of the principles are still alive. I'm not posting this under my full name as I usually do because there are people that might be hurt if they use google and think they see themselves in this post.

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