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Sunday, January 29, 2017. I spend an infinitesimally small about of time perusing anything on facebook anymore, but occasionally I pop over there and scroll rapidly through posts to look for important life event news from family and friends. After a comment I saw last night posted by one of this group my inner rage-o-meter is having a really hard time calming itself down. Hence this post –
Someone made a comment about having recently made a trip from the American southwest (where they have mostly resided since birth) to a big Midwest city (during the nasty cold snowy days of January). The comment stated that this person saw “many immigrants” there “who did not look” particularly “happy to be in America.”
So here’s a little news from my side of the white immigrant-ancestry family this person is a part of:
Somewhere back there in time, nobody knowing for certain when, a husband deeply concerned about his wife’s deepening grief and depression after having lost her much loved only brother to drowning at sea, brought this woman with him as immigrants to Prince Edward Island, Canada thinking this would provide enough solace to begin to repair this horrible grief.
Back there in time – on my mother’s mother’s side of the family, someone connected to this couple – as far as I can tell – found their way to America before the Revolution. Only they were crown supporters through and through, so much so that they evidently marched their own way back north over the Canadian border (to rage, pout and throw stones?).
At what point in time my mother’s mother’s ancestors/relatives, all from the British Isles, decided to lower their personal flag of crown-dom to return south to the Boston area, nobody seems to know.
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Now my mother’s father’s side of the family was connected at least back around 1835-45, to immigrants of British and French origins who arrived in Halifax, Canada as members of the first Unitarian church of that nation. Following that ancestry forward it is true that my father’s family came into the Boston area sometime after five of his siblings died of the flu around the 1880’s-90s. A lot of grief followed that unhappy family into America, for sure.
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Then on my father’s side…. His mother, a British descendant white woman, was a member of the Daughter’s of the American Revolution, descended from ancestor Simone who was a record keeper involved in the line of provision to the revolutionists. (There is no information about my father’s father’s side of the family – except in general that they were white immigrants from the British Isles.)
We do know that my father’s father died of alcoholism, as did my father’s brother and sister. We do evidently know that part of the hatred Mother held against Father’s family had to do with old Crown vs Revolutionists hatreds so that Mother “made” Father disown his entire family.
Mother forbid Father from even attending his father’s funeral, a fact that contributed to my father’s deep grief until his last conscious breath. (There was one dead live birth child in my father’s family, again no doubt contributing to family grief.)
My father also told me that his mother was “so depressed” that she never left her home except to do necessary shopping.
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Then we can move into disastrous family interactions that impacted descendants. Mother’s mother divorced her husband in 1930 under enraged conditions, and it is known that she abused and neglected my mother, who in turn ended up becoming a psychotic madwoman who tortured and abused me from birth and for the next 18 years.
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This is nothing but the briefest sketch of the non-indigenous (to North America) trail of immigrant history in my family. I also note that of the last 10 years of my life, six were spent living in Arizona with the American-Mexican border wall in my back yard as I was surrounded by the most fantastic people who were first generation Mexican immigrants into America.
Then most recently I lived three years in an apartment complex is Fargo, North Dakota 95%+ filled with refugees and immigrants. Again, wonderful people who awed me with their polite kindness, tenacious spirit, their deep faith, their honest grief, their adaptive hopes in their new country, and their hard work in a very difficult climate area.
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Yeah, I suspect there are a whole lot of people in America who delight in throwing “first stones” from their proverbial glass houses. I would rather not be one of those kinds of people.
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Here is my first book out in ebook format as it provides an outline of the conditions of my malevolent childhood. Click here to view or purchase–
Story Without Words: How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?
It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge. A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.
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Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame
Stop the Storm 