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What If?
A very special friend I once knew wrote:
>i thought of a question i'd like to ask everyone. > > the question is..........How do you feel you would > have turned out if you had never been abused? What > and who would you be?
For me, the answer is quite saddening.
Dad was the youngest of a family of 5, and the "baby" of the family, born and raised in the back lands of Oklahoma on a small farm. Grandpa was nearly full-blood Cherokee; one of his great-grandfathers was European. Grandpa was also a hard-core southern Baptist elder who ruled with an iron fist.
Grandma was a full blood Choctaw who completely submitted to Grandpa. Between the southern Baptist influence and the tribal influence, Grandma lived literally to serve her husband's every whim - and that of her son; and thusly she raised her daughters.
Not surprisingly, her son - my father - followed in the footsteps of Grandpa; the old concept of the wife barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
When my dad was still a young boy, the family lost their farm to the Dust Bowl - and the entire family moved to the Mojave desert in California where Grandpa was able to obtain work in the oil fields not too far away.
The community had 3,000 people max, and several protestant churches. No Catholic or other churches of any kind... a true WASP community; and still pretty much is to this day.
Mom was the first-born of two daughters in a matriarchal environment. Dad, patriarchal family. Mother, matriarchal family. Oil and water, anyone?
Now - assuming that my mother and my father had not divorced leads me to a single sad conclusion.
As noted, my mothers family was matriarchal; and had similar - indeed, very nearly identical but inverted perspectives; the women ruling with an iron fist, the men in complete submission and acceptance. They knew no other way; "that is the way it is and has been forever", after all.
If I had never been abused...
First, mom and dad would never have been divorced; and dad would have opened his mechanic's shop once he went off active duty (army) and saved up the funds; and he would not have been killed while taking me to the oil fields to show me where he worked.
In this life, he died when I was amost 7 years old.
My sister and I would have been raised in the same "good ol' boy" environment, seen the same examples where the man can "do no wrong" and the woman must ask "how high" when told to jump; the environment that approves a man striking his wife and children when they do not obey; an environment where my mother's fierce matriarchal approach was overwhelmed completey by the paternal side of the family. Constant strife, anyone?
An environment encouraged by the entire community; the small-town closed-minded blindness of people who distort the Bible to justify their abuse of their families; conditioned by word and example to go down the same narrow-minded patriarchal path.
I would have been a small-town closed-minded young man, becoming a small-town closed-minded self-righteous Bible-thumping wife abuser; completely self-confident and self-assured that all was right with the world - very likely a mechanic like my dad, for even at 6 years of age, he had me "help" him when working on cars.
If I never had been abused... I would have become a monster.
Written in mid-1993
One year after I wrote this, a participant in the support group - Amou - pointed out that the environment described above is an abusive environment - that it is abuse. She is right.
What would I really have become? I don't know...
