Post by grandmalou on Jun 1, 2009 11:50:20 GMT -5
Grandma Lou here...
I think this might be a fairly good time for my introduction. What jarred me to do this, is a program on TV a little bit ago. And a website that may be of interest, which might open some eyes concerning the effect of QF/P on children. The website is www.hookersforjesus.net and the program was Joni Lamb on Daystar Channel.
OK, so it's a Christian channel, but she has been interviewing people for the last two weeks in a series called "Crossing Sexual Boundaries".
This one really touched me this morning though, because her story could have easily been mine. She was raised in a Christian home where the father was the absolute ruler of the roost...a siriusly tough disciplinarian. The woman being interviewed left home and became a prostitute. And described then, her own personal hell on earth. Drugs, beatings, rapings, shoved out into a hallway naked, etc. It was unbelievably sad.
Quivering in fear, I entered into the wacky world of too many patriarchs...
I was raised by an abusive mother. She divorced my father when I was three, and we moved in with her parents, who were my solid rock for the longest time. How two such precious people wound up with two alcoholic children, I'll never know. But both my Uncle Jim and Mom were alcoholics. I found out many years later (from my father) that while Dad was fighting for our country, my mother was home entertaining the troops who were home on leave. the day before he came home, she had an abortion so that he wouldn't know she was pregnant with someone else's baby. But for all of my growing up years Mom held over my head the constant threat that she was "going to send me to live with my horrible, abusive dad if I didn't straighten up". In between her rantings, there were head injuries, never treated, a busted kidney from being slammed into a door knob, never treated...a coconut pie in a Pyrex plate broken over my head...picked broken glass out of my hair for a couple of weeks. It is a miracle of sorts, that I have even a smidgeon of brain left. I still can't stand coconut cream pie!
When I was six Mom remarried. She and my new stepdad drank a lot, every weekend. I was sick a lot...tonsillitis, pneumonia, allergic reaction to penicillin.
We moved in and out of my grandparents' home as she went from one bad relationship to another over many years, always blaming me for each failed relationship.
When I was thirteen I started my monthlies, and every month I hemorrhaged. And the headaches started that I had for "no apparent reason" most of my life. I was nearly molested when I was 14 by a boyfriend of hers, but fought and won and sort of became a 'mouse' after that, trying real hard to be invisible so he would leave me alone. He did. But Mom drove me to distraction all those quiet months, wondering what my problem was, finally slamming me into a door. My left kidney got the knob. I peed blood for about three weeks. I broke down and told her what had been "my" problem for all those months, and she blamed me for running around in my thick long flannel pjs in front of this idiot.We left him the very next day, and moved back to Grandma and Grandpa's.
I made a solemn vow that I was "never" going to be like her, "never" get divorced, "never" treat my kids the way she treated me...that I was going to give MY husband and My kids all the love I had never had. And that would guarantee happiness all the days of my life!
When I was sixteen and she had just remarried for the fourth time, I ran off and got married to get away from her abuse. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Jimmy (named after my uncle) was born 11 months later in 1960. In spite of the fact that his dad tried to kill him before he was born. I was beaten, raped, kicked in the gut, nearly drowned, first at a swimming place, next by him trying to flush my head down the toilet... to try and make me lose the baby I wanted so badly. I went back home five months pregnant.
The night I went into labor, Ray and a car load of his buddies drove up the driveway, which was fenced on both sides, and demanded to see me and "the baby". My step dad told him the baby wasn't born yet, but was soon coming and he needed to leave so we could get to the hospital. Finally had to threaten him with a shot gun, and there were no phones to call 911 with back then. Oh, some folks had them, but it was a small farming community in northern California with a slow to progress citizenry. He finally let us go into town and to the hospital. I nearly died after Jim was born, due to puerperal sepsis...better known back then as "childbirth fever". I was in the hospital for three weeks. Ray came to see Jim about a month after his birth...I was just barely getting back my strength. He took one look at the little guy's blond hair and blue eyes, and proclaimed that this was NOT his baby, but my step-dads! Ray himself had blond hair and blue eyes, but I think his 'plan' was to try and get out of paying child support.
I got an annulment on the grounds that I had lied about my age. And damned if I didn't get remarried four months later! And it didn't work either. Just under a year. But it got me away from Mom for awhile.
I went into Nurse's training to become a Licensed Vocational Nurse...a one year course, and I could have a decent job to support myself and little Jimmy.
And three months from graduation, Mom had a "nervous breakdown" and I had to quit to move back in with them and take care of her, as my stepdad wanted to have her committed to the local 'nut hut'. I felt this strange sense of loyalty to her, you know?
As soon as she was better, I moved out again, finding a job as a Nurse's Aide. And found "the love of my life", whom I could not marry because he had a wife in a mental institution and divorcing such a one was illegal.
We had Sandy. He was a very sweet, caring, tender human being, gentle and loving with both Jimmy and Sandy.
And my mom hated him. And made our lives such hell that he left and went off to Viet Nam. On the rebound, I guess, I married Vyckie's dad and she was born 10 months later. It was an on again/off again marriage of about five years.
When my girls were little, we moved to the state of Nevada. That is because I, being idiotic, thought my son Jim, had a right to choose living with his father.
He had gone to visit for the summer, and it had been the first time his dad showed any interest in him at all. In my twisted way of thinking, Ray could give Jim all the things I couldn't...since he was a prominent business man in Carson City. I later found out the way he became so was that his second wife's father passed away, leaving her a small fortune, which Ray promptly glommed onto and invested in service stations, tire repair shops, and (GULP) whore houses. I, on the other hand, a California girl,
was just out of my third marriage and living on welfare. No job, no car, a tiny little rented cabin with a garden Jim helped me plant, and then he went to spend the summer with a dad he barely knew. At the end of the summer when he called and said he wanted to stay with his dad in Carson City, I reluctantly agreed, then moved us there so we could be near him. I missed my sweet little boy so much!
I got a job in a casino as a keno writer. Got good at it too, as before the computerization of keno, it was an art form...Chinese art, to be exact, and I was artistic.
But I got laid off for the winter, because that's the way casino work is...dependant on the tourist trade. So I went to work at the hospital as a Nurse's Aide.
And that's where I met J. N. He was in the hospital with pneumonia. We began to date when he got out, and I soon found out that everybody in the whole damn town liked this guy! He was the president of the 20/30 club, which did all kinds of wonderful things for little kids...toys at Christmas, food baskets, eye glasses, etc.
I was having some serious disputes at the time with my room mate, another single mother, and JN invited me to move in with him.
At the time, I had just lost my cousin, who hung himself when he was 22. We were raised together like brother and sister. I was 5 when he was born.
My Uncle Jim, as I mentioned earlier, was an alcoholic He had married a Hollywood type who looked down her nose at the rest of us "farm folk". The two of them "partied down" every weekend, leaving Johnny with Grandma and Grandpa and me. My mother usually joined them in their excursions.
When Johnny was about 5 he and his parents stayed in the house he'd always lived in and my grandparents built themselves a new home across the road.
But the livestock, etc., was on Uncle Jim's side of the road, so every morning Grandpa went to take care of them, and would find Johnny running around the outside of the house, buck naked.
This was northern California, and I mean to tell you this little guy even ran that way in the snow!
When Grandpa asked him why, he said...
"My dad said I have to grow up TOUGH, so I'm doing it so I can be tough."
When he was a teenager, his parents divorced and he and his mother moved back down to LA, where she was from. Quite often, he would bring his buddies home from school, and later find them in bed with his mother. He wrote this in a letter to me once. He was sickened by the sight.
This was going on even when he got married and had a little baby of his own. So to "teach her a lesson" I doubt she ever forgot, he used one of her silk blouses to hang himself with, out in her garage.
I think the shock of losing my cousin messed with my immune system, and I got mononucleosis. The doctor told me I couldn't go back to work for at least six weeks. Great. Out of a job, sick, depressed, NOT a good time to make major decision...JN proposed, saying he would take care of me and the girls.
We got married. Even started going to church sometimes. He was Lutheran. At that stage of my life I didn't know a Christian from a wall.
I soon found out, though, that he was NOTHING like the Jesus I had heard about. Addicted to gambling and pornography, he expected things from me that were WAAAAAY beyond kinky! And the worst was yet to come...Vyckie's side of the story comes in here...in a day or two...
Eventually I found myself sick, needing surgery, broke, broken, in a state where there was NO welfare...except they told me they could take my children and put them in a foster home until I got back on my feet...no help with back payments on my house, utilities, or anything, no way to pay for the surgery I needed. I told them "F---you very much"...and walked out. Into another pit...went out with a friend, got drunker than a skunk and wound up with Larry!
It was either become a prostitute to ONE man or go to work in a whore house.
That's what abusive, controlling, patriarchal OR matriarchal relationships can do.
Where there is controlling, there is no love...
Grandma Lou
I think this might be a fairly good time for my introduction. What jarred me to do this, is a program on TV a little bit ago. And a website that may be of interest, which might open some eyes concerning the effect of QF/P on children. The website is www.hookersforjesus.net and the program was Joni Lamb on Daystar Channel.
OK, so it's a Christian channel, but she has been interviewing people for the last two weeks in a series called "Crossing Sexual Boundaries".
This one really touched me this morning though, because her story could have easily been mine. She was raised in a Christian home where the father was the absolute ruler of the roost...a siriusly tough disciplinarian. The woman being interviewed left home and became a prostitute. And described then, her own personal hell on earth. Drugs, beatings, rapings, shoved out into a hallway naked, etc. It was unbelievably sad.
Quivering in fear, I entered into the wacky world of too many patriarchs...
I was raised by an abusive mother. She divorced my father when I was three, and we moved in with her parents, who were my solid rock for the longest time. How two such precious people wound up with two alcoholic children, I'll never know. But both my Uncle Jim and Mom were alcoholics. I found out many years later (from my father) that while Dad was fighting for our country, my mother was home entertaining the troops who were home on leave. the day before he came home, she had an abortion so that he wouldn't know she was pregnant with someone else's baby. But for all of my growing up years Mom held over my head the constant threat that she was "going to send me to live with my horrible, abusive dad if I didn't straighten up". In between her rantings, there were head injuries, never treated, a busted kidney from being slammed into a door knob, never treated...a coconut pie in a Pyrex plate broken over my head...picked broken glass out of my hair for a couple of weeks. It is a miracle of sorts, that I have even a smidgeon of brain left. I still can't stand coconut cream pie!
When I was six Mom remarried. She and my new stepdad drank a lot, every weekend. I was sick a lot...tonsillitis, pneumonia, allergic reaction to penicillin.
We moved in and out of my grandparents' home as she went from one bad relationship to another over many years, always blaming me for each failed relationship.
When I was thirteen I started my monthlies, and every month I hemorrhaged. And the headaches started that I had for "no apparent reason" most of my life. I was nearly molested when I was 14 by a boyfriend of hers, but fought and won and sort of became a 'mouse' after that, trying real hard to be invisible so he would leave me alone. He did. But Mom drove me to distraction all those quiet months, wondering what my problem was, finally slamming me into a door. My left kidney got the knob. I peed blood for about three weeks. I broke down and told her what had been "my" problem for all those months, and she blamed me for running around in my thick long flannel pjs in front of this idiot.We left him the very next day, and moved back to Grandma and Grandpa's.
I made a solemn vow that I was "never" going to be like her, "never" get divorced, "never" treat my kids the way she treated me...that I was going to give MY husband and My kids all the love I had never had. And that would guarantee happiness all the days of my life!
When I was sixteen and she had just remarried for the fourth time, I ran off and got married to get away from her abuse. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Jimmy (named after my uncle) was born 11 months later in 1960. In spite of the fact that his dad tried to kill him before he was born. I was beaten, raped, kicked in the gut, nearly drowned, first at a swimming place, next by him trying to flush my head down the toilet... to try and make me lose the baby I wanted so badly. I went back home five months pregnant.
The night I went into labor, Ray and a car load of his buddies drove up the driveway, which was fenced on both sides, and demanded to see me and "the baby". My step dad told him the baby wasn't born yet, but was soon coming and he needed to leave so we could get to the hospital. Finally had to threaten him with a shot gun, and there were no phones to call 911 with back then. Oh, some folks had them, but it was a small farming community in northern California with a slow to progress citizenry. He finally let us go into town and to the hospital. I nearly died after Jim was born, due to puerperal sepsis...better known back then as "childbirth fever". I was in the hospital for three weeks. Ray came to see Jim about a month after his birth...I was just barely getting back my strength. He took one look at the little guy's blond hair and blue eyes, and proclaimed that this was NOT his baby, but my step-dads! Ray himself had blond hair and blue eyes, but I think his 'plan' was to try and get out of paying child support.
I got an annulment on the grounds that I had lied about my age. And damned if I didn't get remarried four months later! And it didn't work either. Just under a year. But it got me away from Mom for awhile.
I went into Nurse's training to become a Licensed Vocational Nurse...a one year course, and I could have a decent job to support myself and little Jimmy.
And three months from graduation, Mom had a "nervous breakdown" and I had to quit to move back in with them and take care of her, as my stepdad wanted to have her committed to the local 'nut hut'. I felt this strange sense of loyalty to her, you know?
As soon as she was better, I moved out again, finding a job as a Nurse's Aide. And found "the love of my life", whom I could not marry because he had a wife in a mental institution and divorcing such a one was illegal.
We had Sandy. He was a very sweet, caring, tender human being, gentle and loving with both Jimmy and Sandy.
And my mom hated him. And made our lives such hell that he left and went off to Viet Nam. On the rebound, I guess, I married Vyckie's dad and she was born 10 months later. It was an on again/off again marriage of about five years.
When my girls were little, we moved to the state of Nevada. That is because I, being idiotic, thought my son Jim, had a right to choose living with his father.
He had gone to visit for the summer, and it had been the first time his dad showed any interest in him at all. In my twisted way of thinking, Ray could give Jim all the things I couldn't...since he was a prominent business man in Carson City. I later found out the way he became so was that his second wife's father passed away, leaving her a small fortune, which Ray promptly glommed onto and invested in service stations, tire repair shops, and (GULP) whore houses. I, on the other hand, a California girl,
was just out of my third marriage and living on welfare. No job, no car, a tiny little rented cabin with a garden Jim helped me plant, and then he went to spend the summer with a dad he barely knew. At the end of the summer when he called and said he wanted to stay with his dad in Carson City, I reluctantly agreed, then moved us there so we could be near him. I missed my sweet little boy so much!
I got a job in a casino as a keno writer. Got good at it too, as before the computerization of keno, it was an art form...Chinese art, to be exact, and I was artistic.
But I got laid off for the winter, because that's the way casino work is...dependant on the tourist trade. So I went to work at the hospital as a Nurse's Aide.
And that's where I met J. N. He was in the hospital with pneumonia. We began to date when he got out, and I soon found out that everybody in the whole damn town liked this guy! He was the president of the 20/30 club, which did all kinds of wonderful things for little kids...toys at Christmas, food baskets, eye glasses, etc.
I was having some serious disputes at the time with my room mate, another single mother, and JN invited me to move in with him.
At the time, I had just lost my cousin, who hung himself when he was 22. We were raised together like brother and sister. I was 5 when he was born.
My Uncle Jim, as I mentioned earlier, was an alcoholic He had married a Hollywood type who looked down her nose at the rest of us "farm folk". The two of them "partied down" every weekend, leaving Johnny with Grandma and Grandpa and me. My mother usually joined them in their excursions.
When Johnny was about 5 he and his parents stayed in the house he'd always lived in and my grandparents built themselves a new home across the road.
But the livestock, etc., was on Uncle Jim's side of the road, so every morning Grandpa went to take care of them, and would find Johnny running around the outside of the house, buck naked.
This was northern California, and I mean to tell you this little guy even ran that way in the snow!
When Grandpa asked him why, he said...
"My dad said I have to grow up TOUGH, so I'm doing it so I can be tough."
When he was a teenager, his parents divorced and he and his mother moved back down to LA, where she was from. Quite often, he would bring his buddies home from school, and later find them in bed with his mother. He wrote this in a letter to me once. He was sickened by the sight.
This was going on even when he got married and had a little baby of his own. So to "teach her a lesson" I doubt she ever forgot, he used one of her silk blouses to hang himself with, out in her garage.
I think the shock of losing my cousin messed with my immune system, and I got mononucleosis. The doctor told me I couldn't go back to work for at least six weeks. Great. Out of a job, sick, depressed, NOT a good time to make major decision...JN proposed, saying he would take care of me and the girls.
We got married. Even started going to church sometimes. He was Lutheran. At that stage of my life I didn't know a Christian from a wall.
I soon found out, though, that he was NOTHING like the Jesus I had heard about. Addicted to gambling and pornography, he expected things from me that were WAAAAAY beyond kinky! And the worst was yet to come...Vyckie's side of the story comes in here...in a day or two...
Eventually I found myself sick, needing surgery, broke, broken, in a state where there was NO welfare...except they told me they could take my children and put them in a foster home until I got back on my feet...no help with back payments on my house, utilities, or anything, no way to pay for the surgery I needed. I told them "F---you very much"...and walked out. Into another pit...went out with a friend, got drunker than a skunk and wound up with Larry!
It was either become a prostitute to ONE man or go to work in a whore house.
That's what abusive, controlling, patriarchal OR matriarchal relationships can do.
Where there is controlling, there is no love...
Grandma Lou