Pandora's Aquarium: Some History - Pandora's Aquarium

My mom called yesterday to let me know my dad is in the hospital. The knowledge he is slowly wasting away and won't be among the living for not too much longer causes me to think of his life and I may never have the nerve to ask him one question which is why did he marry my mom a second time?

My mother met my dad when she was 15 and he 18. That would be around 1951 He was about to enter the Navy. His father farmed my mother's mother's land. Both my grandmothers became friends. I loved both my grandmothers very much but they were as different as night and day so their friendship was odd. Anyway my mother and her mother were visitors at my dad's family homestead a couple of times a year and usually stayed a week or more.

When my dad got out of the Navy my mother was in nurses training. I do not know how they hooked up then but mom became pregnant with me. They were married in a double ceremony at neighboring farm with dad's brother in 1958. I was born 7 months later. My father's dad did not believe I was really my dad's daughter so he paid very little attention to me growing up. He preferred my sister who was born 13 months after I was.

The earliest memory I have was when I was 4. For many years I believed this memory was just a reoccuring nightmare. My dad was holding me in his arms. He is crying and I am crying and scared. My mother is screaming and trying to take me from my father. I remember being in between a living room and a kitchen and the kitchen floor seemed not to have a floor just dirt. This is one little memory of the floor is what validated my dream to a memory as my mother told me when I became an adult that the house my mom and dad lived in was a farm and my dad was raising pigs and the kitchen floor was indeed dirt as dad was preparing it for cement and then a permament floor. My mother confessed that this memory was when she left my dad for the evil stepfather. My sister was already in the car and our stuff was packed in the car and mom was trying to get out of dad's arms so she could leave him. My mom left my dad for a man that had been in the Navy with dad. Talk about betrayal.

My living Hell began at this point. I cannot write about it yet so will skip to where my brain is today.

When I was 17 my dad was going through a divorce with his second wife and brought my sister to my mother and I as she was living with him and he did not want her to be there with him while he dealt with the mess of his divorce. We lived in a different state. My sister and I woke the next morning after their arrival to find them in bed together. They had been divorced from each other nearly 14 years and had not spoken or seen each other in at least 8 years. Mom rarely talked about dad to us. We visited him in summers which he paid for. As far as I know dad did not pay any child support but bought us clothes and stuff when we visited. Anyway to say the least this was a beyond comprehension.

Skipping alot in my 17th year but they remarried a year later as soon as dad's divorce was final which means we then moved back to my birth state. This time around they have been married since 1979. It sounds so romantic and the benefit to me was I was able to get to know my dad better and spend more time with him since he remarried my mom. Yet I harbor resentment and anger about it.

I do not understand why my dad would marry a woman who took off with his daughters to be with a pediphile and it went on for 7 years. No he had no way of knowing it was going on while it was happening but he did know about when he remarried her. I have been very close with mother and until last year in therapy the realization came to me she was not my hero as I thought for taking me away from the evil stepfather and she herself is abusive emotionally and verbally. The current flashes of memory I am experiencing are more of her abusiveness than those of the evil stepfather. Not that my dad is an angel himself. He is a recovering alcohlic and he has been dry since the mid 80's so he was drunk most of my childhood and while we visited him in the summers. My dad is weak in some ways emotionally distant in other ways. He is quiet, reserved but with a good sense of humor. Many say I am most like him even though he did not raise me as a child.

My daughter just got home from picking up some of my meds yahoo!!!!! So will continue later. Blessings to all.