The Beginning

Today is September 17, 2023. Today would have been my parents 52nd wedding anniversary had they stayed married. I was unaware about the date of their marriage as they divorced when I was 4 but was informed about it in 1994, by my dad when I picked my wedding date for my first marriage which was September 16. My dad never forgot the day my grandma drove him and my mom to Elko, Nevada to elope. He always lights up when he reminisces about his marriage to my mother.

The reason I’m writing today is because this day has now become a marker in my life as it was the beginning of the end for my brother and I, even though we weren’t born yet. My brother came the following year and I joined 2 years later and we would truly never know what a healthy family was.

A couple years ago I sat down and asked my dad some questions about his life with my mother because I had recently discovered some unsettling things about my brother, (those will be written about in the future). I found out that they had a real advantage as a couple that the majority of people do not get, after they married my dad went to Germany for the Service and my mom went with. The advantage they had was they were two young kids in a foreign country and the only family they had was each other. They had no outside influence close to them that could disrupt their connection, no in-laws telling them what to do, no family members dictating their relationship, they only had each other.

This was significant to me as todays day and age everyone seems to be an expert in other peoples relationships and most have no problem throwing out unsolicited and unnecessary advice. Once I realized what an advantage they had as a couple it was quite clear to see what happened in their marriage to cause it to fail while chatting with my dad about their relationship.

I could write two books about their marriage, one would be bitter and angry and one would be sad and regretful, from all the “stories” I’ve been told throughout my life about their time together.

Once my dad left the Service their marriage lasted a few more years and my brother and I would spend the rest of our lives wondering when we would see our dad again. Sometimes it would be every day, sometimes we would go months without seeing or hearing from him, we didn’t see him or hear from him the entire time I was in Junior High. My brother found his phone number once and we ended up breaking into a neighbors house to call him. I can remember crying while my brother dialed the phone only to have my dad ask who we were because it’d been so long since we’d heard each other’s voices. I’d love to say we stayed in contact after that and we did but it was the same as before, we never knew when it would be, one stretch was 11 1/2 years. Throughout our childhood we would often ask our mom when we’d see him again and we were usually met with “if he wanted to see you, he would” or some version of that to make us think he didn’t want us in his life. We would keep this bit of information with us forever, my brother took it to his grave in 2009 and I still carry it with me, it was a true statement but not a complete statement. The statement should have been “he does want to see you but I’m so angry that he left us I’m doing all I can to make sure you kids think he’s a monster so you’ll never leave me the way he did”

I didn’t start dissecting their relationship until a couple years ago when I stopped contact with my mom after I found out some seriously traumatic things she’d done. I started dissecting my life, my brother’s life and putting the pieces of our lives together. I started the deep dive into healing only to find many layers of narcissism, abuse and trauma that started long before I came into this world.

My goal is to write about it, the abuse, the neglect, the protection my brother gave me and mostly the loss I feel having parents who contributed to my brother’s death and how it affects me as an adult child of a narcissistic parent and a parent who enables the narcissism. Writing what little I have today causes the tears to flow from the little girl inside me who was robbed of a safe space and for that little boy who just wanted a dad.