Passing Down Generational Cruelty
You grow up in a place where people fight. People come out of the bathroom ready for war. People come to the table with knives up their sleeves. Nobody cares how they skin each other. You grow up in a place where people say what they think they need to, to win the hour.
You grow up in a place where everyone stops growing. It’s devastating: rude, hereditary. ~Excerpt: Kin. Yrsa Daley-Ward (from Bone)
I had a concept of what kind of family I was born into when a few decades ago in 1988 I went to my grandfather’s memorial service in Illinois and my great aunt Irene completely ignored me because she was mad at my dad. She was mad at my dad because her sister, my grandmother, spread shitty half truths about him and turned a large number of extended family against him. Not a single person came to his defense that I as a young married pregnant with my second child, abused woman, saw. Which was weird because until then my understanding was my grandma was the target of ridicule in her family not the wagon circler. I had only heard whispers about the lies about my dad. When Irene and several other of my grandmother’s sisters pulled their bullshit toward me, it registered as something. But what that was my immature, living in defensive mode in my own life, brain did not register consciously. It definitely didn’t register in my brain on any level that I could stop that kind of toxic legacy of generational cruelty.
I left my core family at the end of my 17th year to get married and moved from Illinois to Texas. My parents had three children, I’m the only daughter. I never had a life plan, I was more a go where the current took me at any given moment person. I was happy to get out of my alcoholic father’s and lifelong depressed covert narcissist mother’s home. My jump was with no plan, no real insight or intention.
As a 17 going on 18 year old in the 80s coming from a deeply dysfunctional family, my capacity for a healthy relationship was nil. I loved the guy like a kid loves their first car but they’ll soon find out it’s a klunker, never to be relied on or safe to be near. Within the first few months of our wedding he had dragged me off our bed then climbed on top of me and choked me, hit me in the face with the back of his hand more than once, called me a cunt, and continually told me I was worthless and my family was shit. My wedding night consisted of a blackout drunk asshole pushing himself on me to get his job done. Yes, I know what that’s called.
Walking into that celebration of my grandfather’s life, and being subjected to the cruelty my aunt and her siblings were capable of, the knife drawing Yrsa writes about in Kin, was pretty clear. It was the knives dipped in poison part I missed completely.
It was the knives dipped in poison part I missed completely.
To think I would be protected among the group of people I was born into was a fantasy. So when great aunt Irene was going to walk past me I said something like “you can’t even give me a hug hello?”. It startled her and she dropped her cruel cloak and hugged me. It was probably the boldest thing I’d said to an elder until that moment in my life. I didn’t feel powerful. I felt rage. I felt protective over my father, not yet knowing his deeply flawed self among a family tree of deeply flawed, cruel humans. It had been so long since I’d seen family, I was looking forward to not being anywhere near my abusive husband, and here she was actively cutting me away from what I thought was a real family. The moment taught me a lot that I didn’t understand for decades because I was busy spending 18 years defending my children and own life in my own home in Texas.
To think I would be protected among the group of people I was born into was a fantasy.
I hardly saw any family after getting married because he isolated me from anyone I thought could help me. Also, my “family” aren’t the kind to step in and stand up for someone who is being bullied. An example is when I called my parents sometime that same year to tell them the future ex pushed me on a staircase at his parent’s house — I was still pregnant at the time. Dozens of years later my mom told me my dad was so angry he was going to drive from Illinois to Texas and beat the shit out of him. That never happened, nor did they make a single effort to call him out about abusing their daughter. I learned that ever consistent lesson women in my family are taught: Be quiet. Go along. And when the wars break out you better be in the majority no matter who is the target or you become the target.
I learned that ever consistent lesson women in my family are taught: Be quiet. Go along. And when the wars break out you better be in the majority no matter who is the target or you become the target.
I can’t say I’ve learned to ignore the toxicity because it cuts so deeply. There’s no controlling anyone else’s behavior, so choosing family has become my healing and it’s working well. There are a couple people I miss from my blood family, I don’t know how those will pan out, or if they will.
I think I understand some of my grandmother’s personality. She was bitter and angry and fast to cut someone verbally, at least those are the stories of her. She was pegged as the black sheep of her large group of 10 or 11 siblings. None of them tried to help her, they used her as a target to make themselves feel righteous while promoting her husband, my grandfather, and his reputation as spotless. Something tells me that’s a fiction and he was no angel. My dad paid heavily and I don’t think he ever got over it. My dad was an alcoholic as long as I can recall, but he became more and more detached from life as his years went on. I asked him once the year before he died if he felt bad when he woke up each morning after drinking so much. He told me he didn’t feel anything. I believed him. After he died, I briefly talked to one of the wives of my parents’ friend group and she said it was clear he hadn’t wanted to be in the world for a long time. I’m sure there were plenty of secrets he took to the grave with him, but his Aunts and probably his mom especially, cutting him so deeply was a wound I doubt he recovered from.
I think I understand some of my grandmother’s personality. She was bitter and angry and fast to cut someone verbally. She was pegged as the black sheep of her large group of 10 or 11 siblings. None of them tried to help her, they used her as a target to make themselves feel righteous
I read something to the effect that monsters can be charming to everyone except their target and get away with horrible things. As I’ve grown older I see there is monster in all of us. My grandmother was just the person the floodlight was shone on, an easy target because she had a lot of anger, so no one else needed to accept their own cruelty.
I had grown deeply bitter and angry from 1980 to 2017. In 1997 after almost 18 years of that abusive marriage when he wouldn’t stop abusing my oldest son, I divorced him. I was trained by my own family so well that he could have abused me my whole life and I probably would have taken it, but when he decided to have an affair it broke everything. One of his spitting curses toward me from early on in our marriage was how I for sure would cheat on him someday, that I was that kind of person. I’m not of course, and it always hurt me so bad that he’d think that. I didn’t realize it was his cover for doing it himself.
At first for a few years after I cut him loose I felt free, I finished college, got some low paying jobs that motivated me to find better jobs. I did well. But I definitely didn’t have a career, I let the current take me wherever and leveraged opportunities into better pay. It worked and I had an amazing 17 year run of financial growth, I even weathered the housing burst after being sold a shitty loan by a flunker of a real estate agent who got hers and walked away from clients like me who didn’t understand what I literally signed up for. Most of my work was in the oil industry, the most lucrative work in Houston at the time. In 2014 the team I built was laid off and it sent me into a years long spiral of financial and emotional despair. In work I was skilled. In life I was skill less. The teachings I have from my parents, my older relatives, my parents two other children, is get your cuts in before the other person can and malign anyone who dares breathe a criticism in your direction. In other words, trust no one. And the ex carved that truth in concrete on my heart with his own cruel training.
Mary Karr comments in The Art of Memoir about the tyranny of group think in family. It’s what my family has done for generations, rally a group of family members to reinforce their narrative until it becomes a history. It’s a pretty smart tactic. Lies get crafted into history as my parents two other children craft a narrative much in the same ways the aunts of two generations ago did.
It’s a pretty smart tactic. Lies get crafted into history as my parents two other children craft a narrative much in the same ways the aunts of two generations ago did.
My parents oldest threatened to rape me when we were teens. I spent weeks terrified, expecting him to do it knowing no one in my home would look out for me. Never a role model or example of character for me, he helped teach me to settle for abusive men. And I did. He’s held up that model well over the years. Both of my parents other children have cheated on their spouses who then divorced them, cheated people out of money — ironically both stole thousands each from that same grandmother who lied about my dad. They never paid her back, the oldest was specifically written out of her will (one of my close relatives once said this grandmother was treated like an ATM, and she was. Admittedly, I borrowed money from her too. I paid it back plus interest within a year.) — my parent’s other children turned a blind eye to bullying, they perpetuated bullying. They’ve created that scenario of spreading shitty partial truths tweaked just enough to rally the unsuspecting family troops and act exactly like their great aunts before them. They are my generation’s cruel narrative creators. No elders in the family challenge them.
Was I problematic in relationships? Of course I was. I didn’t know how to harness agency or self advocacy. I lashed out at people who deserved my anger and people who didn’t deserve it at all got the same treatment and I may never get the chance to repair those relationships. My parent’s other children earned my anger, as did my parents and the abusive ex they groomed me to welcome. I’ve grown to have a bit of compassion toward my parents, knowing they worked with their own poorly filled toolboxes.
It’s these silences, lack of agency, self loathing immersion and dysfunction that allow family trauma to get passed on. If you don’t call that shit out, it will poison generation after generation. Still, the ones who speak up will be targeted. No one knows what to do with you. Those circled wagons do not break up peacefully. The reality is the cruelty my family has crafted is so solidly infected into my biological family tree no one notices anymore. It’s a song the dysfunctional family sings together, a choir of sorts, to make themselves feel good, feel righteous, feel right.
