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It seems easier to focus my search light for understanding on my mother’s earliest beginnings in my efforts to see if I can learn anything useful about how she ‘got made’ to be the Borderline abusive mother that she was rather than spend the same effort looking at my father’s early beginnings.

Part of this neglect on my part of attention to my father’s early history is that we did not have his family AT ALL in our childhoods as we had my mother’s mother.

I’m not going to go into detail about this right now, but did just find this statement my father made about his parents – and his mother – in this June 17, 1957 letter he wrote to my mother.  Evidently my mother had definitely had ‘words’ with my father’s parents, and my father states here that he supports my mother:

“I wrote a note to my parents yesterday.  I told them I wasn’t sorry for anything you said to them, that my only regret was that I’d failed to do it myself a long time ago.  Don’t think that I have any idea of making up to them – I simply wanted to put them straight.  I don’t want them to have any idea that this was your doing.  I think that woman has things just the way she wants them and to H – with her!”

In considering the profoundly critical influence that mothers (and other early caregivers) have on infant-child body-brain development – including attachment patterns – these words my father wrote seem to indicate that he DID NOT have a warm, easy, loving, caring attachment relationship with either of his parents – including his mother.

What influence did my father’s mother have on the way he developed that led eventually to my father’s ability to be such a ‘perfect match’ for such the abusive and ‘unstable’ woman that my mother was?  I would have to include a lot of thinking in my forensic autobiographical study to try to figure out as specifically as I might be able to – what on earth happened early on during his development TO MY FATHER that made him so willing and able to support my mother no matter what she EVER did – during all the years of my childhood (and beyond, though he finally divorced her after 37 years of marriage).

I am too tired to go off on THAT search.  But neither could I ignore my father’s words in this 1957 letter I am transcribing today…..

[We do know that my father’s only brother and his only sister both died of alcoholism as did my father’s father.  How happy could his mother have been?  In 1990 my father told me that while he was growing up his mother never left her house except for required shopping and never had anyone come over to visit.  I strongly suspect depression – and if she was depressed from the time my father was born (he was not a wanted child), her depression would have greatly impacted my father’s body-brain development.]

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