Home Life?

1 Peter 2:13-17, the Message Bible;

Make the Master proud of you by being good citizens. Respect the authorities, whatever their level; they are God’s emissaries for keeping order. It is God’s will that by doing good, you might cure the ignorance of the fools who think you’re a danger to society. Exercise your freedom by serving God, not by breaking the rules. Treat everyone you meet with dignity. Love your spiritual family. Revere God. Respect the government.

The picture shared here is a photo of a painting I did for my father for Christmas in 2007. It depicts the garage and woodshed of the home I grew up in. Pops has passed on to his reward, so this painting hangs in my home now.

Life at home was never easy. On good days there was a tenuous calm that exuded our house. On bad days mom was yelling at all of us, smacking us when she was within reach, shouting her usual refrain; “Wait till you father gets home, he’ll take care of you!” You see she tried to leave most of the discipline to him.

When I was growing up dad was not the “ideal” disciplinarian. He, like my mom, came from a broken home. Neither of them grew up learning how to parent. They had never seen any good examples of how to be parents in their own or in any of their relatives. So dad, like his father before him, would hit first and find out what happened after we had been beaten down – until he learned to overcome his anger issues.

My oldest brother took many beatings for me and the rest of our siblings … he didn’t like to see us getting knocked around, especially if it was for something we hadn’t done. But I took plenty of beatings, some deserved and some not.

I wasn’t a Christian; though I tried to live a godly life, just without God. Mom would make us attend church every time the church doors opened and I lived like I believed it. I could talk the talk and look like I was walking the walk. Thus I attended without complaint, was a faithful choir member and sang specials whenever asked, but it was all different ways to run away from reality.

When days were rough around the house I would run, sometimes quite literally, running to the local swimming hole to swim and fish with my oldest brother and his friends. Or I would hike up the hill behind our home to our hilltop hideout where I would play among the wildflowers, or build imaginary buildings, roads, etc. with pine cones, branches and pine needles. Sometimes my running would be running away to my fantasy world while hiding in my room, out in the local park or sitting under the trees, among the headstones in our town cemetery. Another way I ran was by participating in afterschool activities; sports – I played basketball and volleyball in 8^th grade, continued playing volleyball throughout high school and I also ran track, Future Homemakers of America, 4-H, band, and choir. I also stayed many weekends with my girlfriends.

I felt an outcast in my own home, my own family. Oh, I know that I was loved by my family; at least in the small ways that they each understood love and family. But our parents were not from families that had a proper understanding of real family love. Both of their families’ were survivors of abuse and divorce.

In my father’s family, my uncles were men who ran from the anger of their father and the lack of a mother at home, to attend Seminary and become the Pastors of churches in different denominations: one was a Baptist, another was Presbyterian, but I don’t know what denomination the third was.  They learned to love from the pages of God’s word instead of the lives of their parents. In what little time I spent with them, I thought them stoic and their families quite withdrawn.

His sisters, my aunts, became wives and mothers. Their homes and families were quite different from the uncles … there, fun and laughter abounded. I enjoyed the times that we spent in their homes. I felt that they knew what being “family” was all about!

My mother’s family was quite different, though her parents divorced when she was 12, her father was gone a lot of the time before he left their family home. He was a driver for the family trucking business and they drove all over the eastern states – New York to Chicago, etc. Family rumors said that Papa had a girl in each of the cities that they made regular trips to. Years after he and Gram divorced he married a lady named Phyllis. She was very different from my Grandma Jady, but I loved her, too.

Grandma Jady was a Christian whom my Papa Dick thought too religious. This was one of the reasons that he didn’t want to stay with her. But he loved his children – Nancy and Jerry – as well as he knew how. Mom and Uncle Jerry lived with Grandma Jady most of the time, but there was the time that they lived with Papa and Grandma Phyl.

When Papa left Grandma Jady, she became sickly and, at times, suicidal. So my Great Grandma Clark, Papa’s mother, took care of her and her children. She was like a mother to my Gram, though she was her mother-in-law. With Great Gran’s help, Gram was once again able to care for herself and her children.

My mother’s family was full of incest, pedophilia, child sexual abuse and molestation. Every female child was molested by Great Grandfather James Clark and his son, my Papa Dick. Great Grandpa raped his daughter and granddaughter; Cora and Jeanne, and possibly my mother too, didn’t even know their own virginity as he took it from them at such a young age. But this type of activity didn’t stop with the patriarchs; it continued through every generation, to the point that we molested each other. We girls went so far as to have sex with each other in our preteen and early teen years and also with Rick and Dave at times. All of this I have repented of in great tears, years ago. Is it any wonder that we are a family full of runners?