For the Love of the Children

Tonight I admit I was channel surfing and came across Dr. Phil. His show was about families who are only able to communicate by shouting at each other and threatening to either do physical harm to each other or abandon the family. That brought a flood of memories from the past and also a feeling of thankful relief when I consider my life now.

My childhood was far from nurturing. My mother worked herself into a drunken fury by late afternoon every day. Her target was my father who sat silently drinking cold beer after beer while she screamed accusations and obscenities. As I grew older, I began to realize that her accusations were of unfaithfulness on his part. These delusions on her part intensified as I grew older. When the screaming grew too much for him, he would take my twin brother to a motel for the night, leaving me alone with my raging mother. She would keep me up all night, not allowing me to sleep, while she talked about her childhood and her innocence when she married my father at the age of nineteen. He was thirty nine. A year after they married, she said he was impotent and never made love to her again. She was always telling me over and over from my earliest memories as a child how babies were made by a boy putting his peepee inside a girl's peepee. I didn't know what she was talking about and it scared me. When my periods started, she began accusing my father of touching me. She even asked our family doctor to examine me to see if I had been molested. I was horrified! My father never even hugged me or gave me a kiss. He was always uncomfortable with closeness. The horrible fights went on nightly until my mother passed away in her sleep when I was sixteen. I was the one who realized she was dead. It was a hot summer night and I stayed up late watching a scary movie on TV. I suddenly became aware I could not hear her breathing. She was asleep on the couch as usual, after having drunk herself into a stupor. I reached out to touch her body. I will never forget the coldness of her skin. I knew she was dead. I woke my father and told him. He tried to wake her, then called an ambulance. I don't remember crying. I just went to bed. The funeral is a hazy memory. All I really remember is being led to her coffin by a family fiend who said I should say goodbye to my mother. I remember when I looked at her, I thought how beautiful and peaceful she looked, like an angel.

I am so thankful that my life has been so different from my childhood. My husband and I have never gotten into a verbal battle. He, too, came from a home in which screaming was the norm. We agreed to follow the Bible's admonition to never let the sun set in anger...Literally to never go to bed in anger, even if that meant staying up until we had talked out a disagreement rationally and calmly. My daughter never witnessed a verbal battle. Now, in her own marriage, she and her husband maintain the same Bible-based admonition.

It is so sad to see so many families in upheaval, even violence. Husband and wife raging endlessly in front of their children. Children verbally and sometimes even physically attacking their parents. Parents, for the love of the children, find ways to rationally talk out your differences and do so privately beyond earshot of the children. If nothing else, agree to disagree. And if after doing all you can to resolve your problems and being unable to do so, then move apart rather than subject the children to your endless battles. Children mimic adults and often began to mirror back to their parents the behavior of the parents. It can be a vicious, violent situation that results.