Looking into the Past

During our regular Sunday night phone call tonight, I finally worked up the courage to ask Dad about his marriage to my mother. Dad and my mother divorced when I was quite young. I was only 8 or 9 when they separated. I guess that would have made me around 10 years old when the divorce was granted. Consequently, I have no memory whatsoever from the time when Dad and my mother were living together except for the odd school related recollection and that the family holidays were spent on Queensland's Sunshine Coast in a caravan park.

I guess I should say from the outset that I trust everything Dad told me tonight was the truth. He has never said a bad word to me about my mother in the past. When it comes to the life he shared with my mother, he has always been rather reserved, preferring not to say anything at all.

From what Dad told me tonight, the marriage hadn't been a very healthy one for several years before the separation. Although Dad had no first hand knowledge of this, he was told by both his brother and brother-in-law that my mother had cheated on him with several partners. I was a bit surprised to hear this information. Previously no-one had ever even hinted to me that something like this had occurred. The closest I had come to thinking about this sort of thing happening was when I once tried to sit down and work out the time between my parents separating and my mother repartnering with her defacto husband. I had my suspicions that she had moved in with her partner very soon after she separated with my father. It looks like my suspicions were correct on that one.

In regards to any physical violence within the marriage, Dad emphatically denied it. I asked him about the possibility of violence within the relationship tonight because my mother once told me that Dad had held a gun to her. I have always had my suspicions that that particular snippet of information fed to me as a child/adolescent was a load of garbage. In fact, Dad stated that the only time any physical violence occurred in the relationship was when he hit my mother as a reaction to her hitting him first.

There were a few other little things about the marriage that Dad disclosed to me tonight. Throughout the marriage, he felt that everything he tried to do was treated with contempt. My mother's family was quite wealthy while my Dad came from a working class family. My Dad went into his own motor trimming business to try to provide more for our family. My mother did help with the business for a time, however did not continue to do so. Dad indicated that he worked hard to make the business profitable, which it was, however he became very ill with asthma and was admitted into hospital for a short while. My mother had refused to come and collect him from the hospital after his release. After my Hubby's short stay in hospital earlier this week, I could not even imagine what possessed my mother to not want to pick Dad up from the hospital. Due to Dad's illness, the business was sold shortly after.

There was also the question of what happened to the rent money that Dad sunk into my childhood home. The house was built and owned by my mother's parents. Dad and my mother paid them rent to live in the house and to eventually pay it off. The rent somehow made it into my mother's hands instead of my maternal grandparents.

Unfortunately, Dad couldn't shed any light on how my mother had treated my brother and I. Dad indicated that during the last couple of years of the marriage, he was working at the business six plus days a week and had consequently "missed" that time with my brother and I. The only thing that Dad did tell me tonight was that he thought that my brother and I were fearful about telling him anything when he had us for access visits, although Dad also indicated that he had not tried to glean any information from us. He further indicated that he thought that my brother was more easily controlled by my mother than I was which may have caused more problems for me.

Whilst I don't really remember how my mother treated me as a child, I am pretty sure that my brother got the raw deal. I remember sitting outside on the back stairs with the family dog, listening to my mother hitting my brother. I remember my mother having a cane with which she used to hit my brother. I don't think she ever used it on me though.

My problems with my mother did not occur until my latter adolescent years. For the life of me I cannot articulate why. To be honest, I had a bloody boring youth. I was working when I was 15 and wasn't into anything nasty at all. I didn't do drugs and I hardly ever went out to a nightclub for a drinking binge before I turned 18. I remember feeling quite depressed during my latter adolescence and turned to churches and youth groups to gain some sort of meaning to life. In short, I was a boring goody goody of a kid. I have no idea what prompted my mother to tell me to piss off out of her life when I was in my early 20s. I cannot articulate a proper reason why I think my mother is incredibly controlling and not a very nice person. Maybe after I grew a brain in my adolescence I realised what type of person she really was. Maybe we clashed because of that. I guess I will never know.

All-in-all I can't see anything in my childhood that would constitute a reason for how I am now. Nothing spectacularly bad happened. I dearly wish I was able to recall more from my childhood and adolescence. I guess my brain is not wired in such a way that I can recall what happened personally. Is this perceived lack of memory abnormal? I don't know. I have my suspicions that it is probably not though and most 34 year olds only remember snippets from their childhood.