Another book to recommend
I just finished the book Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter by Barbara Robinette Moss. It was wonderful. Her story of poverty, neglect, and abuse is so much like my mother’s; some of the incidents are nearly identical.
“Get outta that bed,” Dad shouted, spraying droplets of beer and saliva across our sleeping faces as he pulled the blankets from our beds and wobbled sleepily to the kitchen table, dropping into our usual 3 a.m. chairs as if they were assigned seats. …“I want this place spotless!” Dad shouted, waving one hand while holding a beer in the other. “This place is a pigsty!” He stumbled backward, bumped into the kichen sink and dropped the beer to the floor. He turned around and steadied himself, clearing his throat, then turned back to face us, shoving the dish rack full of clean dishes onto the floor as he turned. Shattered bits of glass pierced my bare legs and I sat up with a jerk. John slid from his chair and ran under Mother’s in case we needed to run. David rubbed a cut on his foot and wiped the blood on his T-shirt. Mother breathed an exasperated sigh, wrapped her arms around John and dropped her shoulders into her numb, impervious state.
When I was about nine, I read some book or other about a poor but virtuous little girl who was wronged by various caretakers but is rescued in the end. I told my mom that I thought it sounded fun to be that little girl, to be poor and mistreated but ultimately virtuous. My mom was cooking or ironing or something else domestic. She gave me a wry smile before she said, “I was poor and mistreated growing up and let me tell you, there was nothing fun about it.”
She wasn’t kidding.
My mom’s drunken father used to wake her and her four siblings up at some godawful hour at night and making them line up against the wall while he ranted at them. The littlest two children would start falling asleep and the older ones would have to surreptitiously hold them up because their father would beat them if one of them moved. They would pee in their pants, standing there, waiting for the father to pass out so they could sneak back to bed. Their mom worked the graveyard shift and so they were at their father’s mercy at night. Like Barbara Robinette Moss’s family, the kids had an alert system to let each other know whether or not their father appeared to be safe or if he was roaring drunk and dangerous.
He chased their pregnant mama with a shotgun, knocked them down stairs, beat the baby in her crib for crying.
My mom tells these stories in the same, matter-of-fact way this book does. It was her life, she shrugs, she got through it. She and her sisters will get together and joke, “Daddy was only mean when he was drunk but then he was *always* drunk!” They tell these awful stories and laugh like crazy because what else are you going to do?
There’s a long excerpt on the Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter website. Please go read it!
Depending on her age and knowledge of available resources, there may not have been anything else your mother and her siblings could have done about their abuse and neglect due to an alcoholic father. But today family members affected by another person’s drinking can find an Al-Anon or Alateen meeting nearby in almost any city around the world. These meetings offer fellowship and mutual support.