My mother eloped from her well-to-do family with an unemployed alcoholic who had been molested by his father. My mother said I was born mad at her because I refused to nurse. There is a rumor that I was a breech birth. Her parents paid for me to stay in the hospital for one month to give my mother a rest (no bonding). I was named for a rich great aunt on my father’s side in hopes she would name me in her will. My parents left me alone in my crib when they went to church, and a distant relative of my father’s found me screaming and alone, and took me home with her. For a short while my parents thought I had been kidnapped, before the relative returned me. Just barely able to walk, my parent’s inattention allowed me to toddle into the path of a truck, for which I received a spanking so severe that I went in the other room and held my breath until I fainted.
If I had been “trailing trains of glory” upon birth they were extinguished fairly rapidly.
You are not ‘anonymous’ to me Nan. I see you. And I see the hurt you’ve endured. Ouch.
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What a caring response! Thank you.
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Can Anonymous write another side to this?
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She can’t predict her moods. This one was after she had totalled her car and quit driving for good. She’s had better days, I hear…
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Oh this pains my heart to read such abandonment and absence of love. How could one leave a child, blame a child, hurt a child.
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