Thread
| re: POLL thread: was your childhood ruined by bad parenting? netskyIam 24 Aug 08 3:08AM | Thread Closed |
Still on a mammary lane roll, because I got none, and this thread is still atop, so I'm not dominating (ahhhh) the list.
My earliest memory of an out of house scenario: being dropped off for an afternoon with some stranger who lived and worked from a coral rock house set back in a shaded yard from SW 27th avenue.
The nice man there asked me questions and gave me pages to colour. I was no more than three and one half. He was nice to me. Years later when I was old enough to think for myself and inquire, my mother explained, "You were not talking, even at age three. Your father and I (translated: myself alone) worried that you might be retarded. The psychologist said you were normal and just a slow bloomer.
In fact, I was retarded. I was retarded by a mother who did not, at that time, know how to parent an infant. Never held, never much touched, nothing at all to stimulate interest in other people. Never got a cooked breakfast beyond oat meal on a cold morning. Yet, she's a very nice person. She just had no idea. This was the 'fifties. I had an easy childhood, really. There was no intentional sadistic abuse, or was there? I recall cold cereal I learned to pour from the box myself, that was my first life skill after getting out of diapers. The mother had coping problems. Worse was to come. She got pregnant again, an accident again, and I think it must have been worse for my little sister. There is one picture of me at that age (see profile) and one other, which my grandmother Fern paid to have taken at a studio. And those images are lies, posed lies. I smiled for George, our beagle-bassett, but never much smiled for mom.
POINT: those of you who really suffered (and I did not) have to deal with baggage not dissimilar to mine. I hope that any of you youngsters who read this drivel of mine will take a lesson, and determine to be, when it is your time, creators of lives better than what you were dealt, yourself.
This is much on my mind lately. The mother next door is raising two beautiful, perfect boys, three and nine, respectively. I've watched them grow. I've seen how she manages and keeps them safe and secure and affirmed, all the while supporting a husband and a keeping a job and nursing her aged grandfather, and with such poise and balance. And if you met her, you'd fall in love with her too, and pine, and wish you had her in your young life. She is the best person, perhaps, I've ever known. She balances stress and strains and never complains.
And her boys will grow to be perfect, functional, loving, ideal men. Mothers mean everything. It's the hardest job and the most important job in the world of humans, to be a good mother and a blessing to one's children. Over and out of steam.
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| re: POLL thread: was your childhood ruined by bad parenting? markfelician 24 Aug 08 3:55AM | Thread Closed |
I will dare not say that I did not receive good parenting to sugar coat my existing personality problems. My mom was a former club singer and has had two husbands before my dad. She was naturally good; in terms of providing us with our needs and tending to us when we were sick. But.. she has the tendency to hurt us, physically. As a learner I knew I was kinda slow compared to my classmates even if I was consistently in a section A class. One time, I forgot to memorize the multiplication table and she beat me with a badminton racket. That was the first time I saw my skin turned black and blue and I hid it perfectly not to be ridiculed by my classmates. The beating went on and on and I started to hate my mother for it. She has high hopes and expectations from 12 year old. Failing my exams was my biggest worry. So I would eventually cheat just to get a passing grade. I was too scared that she might get mad and hit me again.
My dad worked as a seaman. In a year, he comes home for a vacation for two months. My mom would brainwash me and my sister not tell my dad about the beating and make it appear as though we are a perfect family. Of course it did not help that I already had a hint that I was gay.
My dad on the other hand was a complete stranger with a militaristic attitude. He would, compare my report card to that of my sisters and I knew I was way behind. He would share a topic and expected all of us to share a piece of our mind. I was naturally the silent type so he seemed displeased that I couldn't give him a spectacular answer like my older and younger sister. At home, it was always a battle for excellence. But no matter how hard I tried, I just keep on failing and failing while my sisters garnered more awards and medals.
My sisters, on the other hand were sympathetic towards me we had a great relationship.
I started doing great in college and immersed myself with extra curricular activities and I was lucky enough to be in the Dean's List every year. That was the only time I got a recognition from my parents although it did not felt as rewarding as I hoped it to be.
I wouldn't say I'm a result of bad parenting because I did not stray away from the path of
righteousness. But until now, I just can't write poetry about my mom or my dad. I wander why?
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| re: POLL thread: was your childhood ruined by bad parenting? netskyIam 24 Aug 08 4:10AM | Thread Closed |
I wander why? is the perfect typographical truth. Thank you for the story of your youth. I think it may take decades for any child to fully sort the truth of what his/her poor parents caused. Poor parents, in both senses.
My mother beat me too, with a leather belt, my dad's.
When I got too old for her to handle, she forced me to wait for my dad to come home from work,
then she forced him to belt me for her.
I cannot write a poem about my mother.
But I can and did write a poem or three about my dead father, long ago,
and about his mother, Fern, too: two people who did not harm me at all.
I am touched to read about your childhood, Mark.
I guess a poll format was not in order after all.
We cannot poll children for simplified votes.
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| re: POLL thread: was your childhood ruined by bad parenting? markfelician 24 Aug 08 4:17AM | Thread Closed |
I agree. Well This one I wrote for my dad months ago.
Twighlight
markfelician
Fidgety dancing
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to the tempo of your ironclad vibrato,
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I sweat and trembled,
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Universe decompressed.
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I was a boy.
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You were the monster.
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Your curses scratched the core of my being,
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My bruises never healed.
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You never allowed me to cry,
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And I tried my best not to.
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But it did fell one day, it was the day you called me a fag.
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I will never surpass
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nor level with my sister's accomplishments.
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I will never make you proud,
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so I stopped and died trying.
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Your shadow gawks upon me in this room, your voice reverberate like rain water.
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Why in this world
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you still haunt me dad?
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And I thought ending my life would rid me of you.
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I was wrong, I guess ghosts can scream as well.
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besides the badminton racket, mom slapped me in front of everyone when I answered back. also she beat me with a plastic snake which hurts really bad. Guys, don't get me wrong, I love my mother very much. :)
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| re: POLL thread: was your childhood ruined by bad parenting? netskyIam 24 Aug 08 4:28AM | Thread Closed |
Myself, being wiser now, can finally admit: I do not love my mother very much.
If I were you, I would hate that mother. I would despise that mother. I would cut the tumor from my brain and feel no guilt at all.
Fern had two sons, the one being my dad.
Florence had two daughters, the once being my mother.
Florence was dysfunctional in a crazy sort of way.
Fern was sane, gentle, saw my mother for the mess she was, and rescued me from home as often as she could.
My best poem of all poems is about the one woman in my childhood who gave me her soul. And I've cited this poem before, and will again. Wise and gentle, Fern
made my dad gentle, and in turn, by her interventions against my mother, I inherited some good qualities after all.
Fern
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| re: POLL thread: was your childhood ruined by bad parenting? netskyIam 24 Aug 08 4:29AM | Thread Closed |
The summer when I was ten,
I knew she was ill, was all.
Several weekends were sleep
overs in Coral Gables with Fern.
Lemons rolled briskly under the palms,
sliced in half; hollow peppermint sticks
for sipping straws. There were
scrapbook tours of a girlhood
grown old far from the catchings
of crawdads in Cedar Rapids ponds.
Coins were baked in a birthday cake.
I learned to help to seal the preserves:
paraffin goes on top of the sweet,
install a seal, turn down the rim.
One weekday I heard my mother
on the phone from another room
"We don't expect her to outlast the summer."
Then I knew—to not ask her
for more than I had overheard.
The next weekend:
"When will you get well?"
"Oh. By the end of summer. I'll
be just fine again."
The only Fern in one boy's life
curled and browned September
2nd. Pour warm wax atop the jar,
emplace a seal, turn tight the rim.
_______________________
post script: I am not a misogynist after all
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| re: POLL thread: was your childhood ruined by bad parenting? markfelician 24 Aug 08 4:34AM | Thread Closed |
i love your poem. :) i would like to hate my mom as much as I wanted to but were family and she is not that bad now. i would stick by her no matter what. even criminals have a family that loves them, well maybe not wholeheartedly. But still.
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| re: POLL thread: was your childhood ruined by bad parenting? netskyIam 24 Aug 08 11:09AM | Thread Closed |
But still.
I looked at your profile and noted two things with pleasure: that you are pilipino and that you are sultry-cute. Once I had a pino boyfriend and we were very close, and he was always close, very close, to his family. It would have been impossible for him to have cut off any part of his family. His mother, though, was perfect. She watched her father die over the course of several days, tied to a post in the center of the town square by the Japanese occupiers, deprived of all physical contact and water, upon pain of death to the villagers, because he was a teacher and suspected of being a resistance collaborator. I remember these things, but Pinos remember them ever so much better, and keep close to the ones they must love. It is a quite a trait to emulate.
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| re: POLL thread: was your childhood ruined by bad parenting? netskyIam 24 Aug 08 11:28AM | Thread Closed |
PS: William was a carefree and happy and balanced person. Even when he was dying of AIDS, he coped and did not grow depressed nor hopeless, not through all that time. He coped so heroically and realistically.
He would never have told me about his mother's father. I fished into Dee's past, myself, and asked her to tell me of the war years. The story came direct from her.
So did also come William's remarkable integrity and and poise.
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| re: POLL thread: was your childhood ruined by bad parenting? netskyIam 24 Aug 08 11:36AM | Thread Closed |
a)So did also come William's remarkable integrity and and poise.
b)So did also come, William's remarkable integrity and and poise.
c)So did also come, William's integrity and remarkable poise.
(I think I prefer the third version. I should ask a Pinoy)
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