How I got here
Part 1 of a long story of fear, trauma and love
This part of the story will be free to all subscribers but the remainder will be behind a paywall. It’s a difficult thing to write and I hope that you understand the decision.
I grew up in a typical suburban way. My parents moved to Nassau County from Brooklyn in 1972, following the relatives who had proceeded with them to get away from the increasing crime in the area where they had all grown up, met, and married each other.
My parents knew each other from the time that my mom was a toddler. My father and her brother went to grammar school together and became lifelong friends. After grammar school they went their separate ways, my uncle to Xavierian High School and my dad to Brooklyn Tech, and then my uncle to St. John’s University, and my dad into the army and the 82nd airborne unit. They stayed in touch during vacations and leaves. When my dad returned home in 1962, having been accepted to the New York City police academy he suddenly noticed my mother was no longer the annoying little sister but a lovely young woman who had just graduated and was working as a secretary for a bank vice president in New York City. Within a few months they were engaged and in October of 1965, they married. I followed in 1966 and my brother in 1967.
When the story is told in my family it is presented as a great love story, and it is. Not great in the sense that it has a big story arc, but it is great nonetheless because peppered through this story is the alcohol. Normally told with a nod toward the amusing side of drunken behavior there was, throughout my childhood, trauma, and a great deal of suffering due to drinking.
My dad was raised in Brooklyn, the son of an immigrant Irish mother who came here when she was about seventeen and a father with a temper and drinking problem. My grandfather died when I was twelve but my memories of him are not warm and fuzzy. He teased to the point of tears when he bothered with me at all, which was not often. He was generally out of work and could almost always be found in the local pub. My grandmother worked for the telephone company, raised three kids mostly on her own, and had little time for the niceties of life. She had a steady stream of relatives from Ireland making pit stops in her small Brooklyn apartment on their way to the American dream, and she was overworked and overtired. Her husband was too free with the money, the drink, and when he was in his cups, his hands.
It seems now, inevitable that my dad and his brother started drinking early and continued for many years. They both joined the army out of high school, my uncle Tom distinguishing himself with two tours of duty in Vietnam, a Purple Heart, and many commendations for bravery. Those years in combat stole whatever peace of mind was to be his and he spent many years with those demons chasing him. I’m not sure he ever found real peace. He was a dear man despite it all, the best storyteller and whenever I think of him I smile.
My dad served his time in the army and got out as the war in Vietnam started, he then chose to serve New York City and in the 1960’s it was a city prone to riots, drugs, and a large variety of human degradation he discovered through four years of undercover work in the vice squad.
It seems that some things never change.
Generational trauma is a thing. Generational suffering. It becomes part of the culture of the family and can become so much a part of you that you have no idea it is not normal. In the case of my family, it was this call to serve, admirable to be sure. Still, the consequences of that service coupled with the Irish clannish mentality which demands that trauma and suffering be pushed down, not discussed, and strongly discouraged from ever seeing the light of day can affect your mental health and ability to cope from an incredibly young age.
My earliest memories of my dad are a mix of intense love and intense fear, he never laid a hand on us, but his wrath was fearsome. As I grew up and became more aware of what caused these moods and anger my brother and I became adept at avoidance. We were avoiding him, avoiding trouble, avoiding anything and everything that could direct his attention towards us. The mission was to lay low and not be seen. If you were noticed the mission was to get away as quickly as possible, agreeing to anything to shorten the encounter. We became adept at sneaking in and out of the room and, eventually, the house, and lying about what we were doing, just to avoid a conversation became commonplace. Hardly skills you want to see develop in children but necessary for survival in some cases. Normal childhood mistakes, spilling something, breaking something, or just being a dopey kid became minefields to navigate. There was no such thing as a minor incident and so avoiding any incident became essential.
In some instances we were like war buddies my brother and I, growing up in a constant state of “what’s next?” fighting a common enemy. Other times it took not even a second to decide to throw each other in the fire to avoid getting burned ourselves.
This kind of avoidance was mixed up with the dad who planned summer road trips to places like Hershey Park, cabins in Maine, Savannah, Georgia where his sister was raising her family, and every battlefield on the East Coast. He would stop at all of these places to expose my brother and me to history because he loved history and he wanted us to love it as well. Every motel we stopped at had to have a pool and he would join us in the pool with my mother looking on from her chair armed with suntan lotion and towels responding with a smile to every shout of “Mom watch me”. It was not all bad. A lot of it was good, until it was not and then it was bad, really bad.
If you asked me about my childhood how I answer depends on how close, we are (remember that Irish clannish thing I spoke of?). An acquaintance would be told I had a nice childhood, typical of a 70s suburban kid. A friend would be told it was ok, that having a dad who was an alcoholic colored a lot of it, but we did ok. Close friends (consider yourself a close friend now) would hear that perspective shows that it was somewhat traumatic.
We suffered. My brother, my mom, my dad, and I suffered, but had you asked any of us if we were suffering the answer from three of us would have been no. My mom was much more given to emotion and willing to talk about it more so than the rest of us, and she would have spoken about it but only to a degree. I have noticed that when you grow up in a family that is centered around addiction, the ranks close pretty tight and very few if any are let into the fold. It creates a loneliness that is hard to shake and an insularity that can be hard to give up.
A poll released in October of 2023 revealed that one in four people fifteen years and older feel lonely. That’s a staggering figure. The loneliness I felt growing up was a kind of self-induced loneliness that came from not wanting to share my “real life” with any of my peers (more in part two). This led to a lack of self-worth and some questionable decisions as a young adult. That a quarter of the world feels these feelings breaks my heart. I think social media has contributed greatly to this, especially among young people who think they have relationships with strangers because they follow them on TikTok. But that isn’t what this is about, although had I had Instagram and TikTok as a teen who knows what kind of mental health issues I would have had, I had enough with my face buried in a book for half my life.
I think, on the whole, an antisocial tween with her head buried in books is healthier than living her life on social media but again, that is not what this is about.
It’s about how I got to the place where I can live in abundant and expectant hope despite having taken a bunch of body blows during my life. I’m not unique and my suffering and grief is no worse than anyone else’s but it is redemptive and I have learned to view it that way. I don’t always like it but do try to remember it.
More to come. Thanks for sticking with me.
Thank you for sharing this.
Sending hugs. Thanks for letting me into the fold.