It worries me when I hear myself using some of the same words and tones my mother used. She was a classic case of the "cycle of family violence." Her father (my grandpa) would beat her for whatever he decided she did wrong, and not much she did was ever good enough. That's the reason she got married as soon as she was legally old enough to quit school. My dad wasn't like that.
When I came along and got old enough to be expected to behave, the cycle perpetuated. I won't claim that I always behaved, but there were a lot of things that didn't merit the spankings I got - and she'd grab the nearest thing, like a ruler, flyswatter, hair brush... many years later she finally admitted that she got so mad one time, she scared herself. At least she never used a heavy strap, like her father used on her. It got to the point where I never knew how she'd react to anything. Even if she thought something was funny, her next action sometimes was to reach for the flyswatter or ruler. When my parents divorced and my dad got custody, it was a relief that we were no longer living under the same roof.
I found out about the strap thing shortly after she died, when my aunt explained a lot of things I hadn't been told before. Of course it didn't stop the crazy thought processes that pass for logic on her side of the family. In the same five minutes, my mother told me that "Grandpa did a lot of things he shouldn't have done" and then she lit into me because I told her I wouldn't abandon my cats for four days to travel up north to attend his memorial.
As I tried to make my aunt understand, they've had decades to deal with this and come to whatever terms they did. I had about 2 minutes to digest this, and then I was being criticized for not having warm, fuzzy feelings toward a child abuser.
For crying out loud, it took me 15 years after my grandfather died (the one I lived with - the one who was anti-Semitic and into the "men are the bosses and women do what they're told and have whatever opinions they're told to have" thing) to even
begin to forgive some of the things he said and did. There's no way I'm going to give a free pass to someone who, in this modern day, would probably have ended up in court over what he did.
Still, my mother kept nagging about kids. "I intend to be a grandmother," she told me once. Pointing out that I don't have much patience with kids and probably wouldn't be a good mother didn't faze her. She insisted that I'd do just fine. She didn't care that I wasn't married. Her brother was the only one of her siblings who didn't go through at least one divorce, or have an out-of-wedlock kid. I finally told her, "Look, I'm over 40. Considering the medical things going on, I'm too old to even think about this anyway." And then I held up my Gussy - one of the nicest cats I ever had - and said, "This is your grandcat. He is the only grandchild you will ever have" (not an out-to-lunch way to consider it, since Gussy really did consider me his "new mom" after I rescued him from what would have been a really short life when he was a kitten).
That must have penetrated the grey matter a little. The next May, she wished me "Happy Mother's Day."
