Self-Care Alert: This post has some offensive swearing (cuss words), and mentions war, alcoholism, and physical violence.
This isn’t Spencer, but I thought I’d talk about our grandfather, stick it up there under Freeing Finch’s chapter 6.
You know, Finch’s grandfather sounds a lot like our grandfather, although he didn’t lose both his legs to diabetes. He has a shity life. His mother died when he was young, and his dad couldn’t look after him, so I think he had to be looked after by an aunty. I guess that’s what they did back in the old days, split the kids up among the relatives. From what I gather he was just like a servant around the place, but that’s just what I gather from what I heard, I don’t know the true facts.
I think he lied about his age to get to the war, you know, Second World War. He was an engineer, a pretty smart dude. He ended up in the ah-Papua New Guinea, where they were blowing up bridges and all sorts of things, keeping the Japanese out of Australia. I think he was on like the Kokoda trail and all that, then he was doing stuff in Australia, make sure the Japanese, if they invaded, they wouldn’t be able to get far. I know he saw a lot of crap (horror and death); I know he saw a lot of stuff but, you know back then, they get home and ah, they’re told to go and marry and have a lot of kids, because of everyone who died they had to make up the population or something (we are speculating here).
The lady he married, she was ah-Anglican, she grew up not far from where we live now, and she was a nurse in the army. But because she didn’t go overseas, she didn’t get a veteran’s thingy or rather. The love of her life died, in the war. My grandfather used to tell us this story about how he was at this dance, in some little old country town, and saw the most beautiful woman in the world, who happened to be my grandmother. And I think she settled for him. Unfortunately, this was after the war, she didn’t know him really. I don’t know why she settled for him, maybe he tricked her.
He was a raging alcoholic, beat his wife, beat his kids. They ended up having six kids, who knows how many miscarriages. His work took them to Melbourne and Sydney. My mum was the second or, second kid born, the first girl. So, you know, back in the day, in the late ’40s, girls were considered to do all the housework. So, the brother, he-ah, don’t know what he did, probably took the brunt of his father's brutality, and the mother, our mother, had to take the brunt of her mother’s brutality. Her mother wasn’t a very kind, loving woman. She didn’t have much love in her when I knew her. Maybe she had love in the olden days, back then. My mother was left to do the housework and raise the kids because her mother had to go out and work. After all, the grandfather, my grandfather he-ah, drank all the wages, probably gambled them away too.
He always used to gloat about how my grandma went from the Anglican church, she-she converted to Catholicism because that’s what he was. That’s a bit of a shame.
Mind you, my grandmother’s family wasn’t all that good either, because you know, her grandfather, he’s got himself a statue in the town near us. He was called the Father of this town. Can you imagine a secret society where people have grand… father, no what was it? The grand… he was the grand, he was the great grand dude (grand master). Anyway, that all trickled down our (generational) line. But anyway….
My grandfather was an angry man, if you drove (a car) with him, holy gamoly, you’d have to hold on for dear life. Not only that, but he’d also be yelling and screaming and swearing at the people, as he drove. Just like in Freeing Finch, like you know, he’d be mad if they did and madder if they didn’t.
All I know is my parents were on their best behaviour when we stayed at my grandparent's house and us kids loved it.
Sure, my grandfather had rules, you couldn’t sit in his chair, you couldn’t talk while the cricket was on or the football was on, you know there were all these rules and stuff. Our grandmother got up before the crack of dawn and “hm-hm-hm-hm-hm-hm-hm”, that’s how she walked around the house, “hm-hm-hm-hm-hm-hm”, we just thought it was normal, do you know what that was? That was from years and years of cortisone because she had bad asthma. She had bad asthma probably because my grandfather smoked a pipe. They probably all smoked pipes back in the hospital, all these war wounded soldiers who came in, she was looking after them like, a nightingale or whatever. “Hm-hm-hm-hm-hm.” That was our grandmother's legacy I suppose (more of a trademark).
She did all the cooking and all the cleaning when I was growing up. They lived in this house, he being an engineer, underneath the house, was like this cave and it was dark, and he had invented all these sorts of things, and they used to go camping and he had all these contraptions and all sorts of stuff. He brewed his own beer, I got to taste it when I was a bit older, I didn’t mind that beer, it was pretty good. A little bit sweeter than some of the other beers.
You just had to mind my grandfather, you know we weren’t, I don’t know if we were afraid of him, he didn’t whack us or anything. He tried to whack my sister when she was about 5, I fully stood in front of him and said, “Don’t you dare ever touch my sister again or I’ll whack you!” I-I told him that. I wouldn’t let him lay a hand on her.
He was whacking her because, the thing is she was mucking around, and then he said, “Stop mucking around”. Little 5-year-olds man, when you tell them to stop mucking around, man they take some time. You can’t just go from high games to no games, anyway.
But we used to love it. His car smelt really cool, I used to think his car smelt like the beach, but it probably smelt like a pipe. I still love the smell of a pipe.
We’d go down to the beach, he lived on this-this hill, it was such a steep hill, they lived halfway down the hill, in Northern Sydney.
The thing is, a weird thing, you know he used to hold our hair, and it was like a game, every time. He did it until the day we died (no idea what that’s supposed to mean), and then he did it to our kids. He’d hold our hair, mine would’ve been in a piggy tale. He’d hold our hair and we’d walk away and say, “Stop pulling our hair”, and he’d say, “I’m not pulling your hair, I’m just holding it. You see and that was pretty funny for us grandkids because we’d laugh and go “Ho-ho-ho” you know and say, “Grandpa you’re so funny.” He’d just do it every time you know. I don’t know it was just easy to do it, we didn’t mind. (See note*).
Back in the day, my mum had to have really long, long plaits (braids), really long down by her side, and, he wouldn’t let her cut it, but I can imagine what ‘holding her hair” meant.
I don’t know, I think he really wasn’t a nice man. They all hated him (his kids), they did, the whole lot of them. Just before my mum died, that last couple of years, while she was fighting the cancer, she did a whole lot of forgiving for her father, you know. It’s a shame she forgave him all at the end, I don’t know.
She got out of the house, well I think she was 17 or 18, the way to get out of the house back then was to become a nurse. So, she did, she became a nurse. So, what, her youngest sister was about 3 and she’d raised her youngest sisters and brothers. And this poor little sister ended up becoming a nun. Do you know one of those ‘black and white’ nuns? They never showed their hair…, and even now she’s in this closed nunnery, and doesn’t know anything about the internet, emails, anything. When Covid came, all they knew was there was this virus going around and people were dying, and everyone just had to stay indoors.
She’s a teacher, but she teaches this old-fashioned Catholic thing where like the priests, they stand facing the other way, and you have to wear something on your head, it’s weird. There’s a whole lot of people into that religion. Just let us not talk about that.
Anyway, my mum, she-she wasn’t able to love me, unfortunately, she said to us that, she didn’t bond with us until we were about 7 or 8. Who tells a kid that man, who tells a kid that, and expects a kid to think, “Oh wow, I was loved”? You know.
Who would have known that our dad was a raging alcoholic too, I remember when we were really little kids, and he must have hidden the abuse once we got older. So, this is why this is why Spencer couldn’t talk about it. It’s pretty rotten.
You know, once my mum died, some of the uncles and aunties would start talking to me about when we were kids, and how our father would give us beltings and stuff like that, hit us around the head. You know that’s what he’d do, it’ll be a clip over the ear, you know, so hard that your ears would ring. Maybe that’s why, since the age of, I don’t know, year 8 (grade 8), my ears, just continued to ring, and they never stopped.
I asked my dad recently, he was lying in the hospital, after you know, he’s just living on alcohol, and, I said you know, “There was a lot of domestic violence and stuff when I was a kid wasn’t there dad?” He said, “I” as if this was an excuse, “I was just trying to be like my father.”
I won’t even go on about him. My dad’s father. He was a mean bastard, sorry about the swearing again. Far out. You didn’t want to mess with that man, him I was terrified of. I was terrified of my dad’s brother too. Don’t even get me going on about that. It’s just ridiculous that these people could just get away with everything because back then it was “behind closed doors.”
You know what? This one here, she’s been teaching this week full time at this school, as a relief teacher, in America, they call it a substitute teacher. She’s been giving them these lessons about, you know self-worth and affirmations about themselves and helping them to build themselves up, and she’s finding out things. Not bad things, but you know, one little girl in year 5 (grade 5), coloured in this ‘I am loved’ and if it was never… there was – always, mostly, sometimes, and never. She coloured it in, ‘I am never loved’. And this one here, they asked her about it they said, ey? What about your parents?” “My parents don’t love me, they’ve got no time to love me.” You know, you hear that, and you just go ‘shit man!’ (Not to the student of course.) That poor kid, you know. I remember my parents didn’t love me but there was a reason they didn’t love me, I was broken and in the way.
Then there’s this other kid yesterday in year 4, you know, she said, “I’m never enough.” Oh man, and she fully believed it and I told her, I said, “Mate, this body here’s been living for forty-eight years, and only the last couple of years, only in the last year even, we’re learning that we are enough as we are because we are, and it took us that long.” (We used the first person though). We said to this kid, “You have gifts and talents inside of you that you don’t even know about, you potentially can change the world just by knowing that you are enough. If there was no one else on this planet and only you, you’d be enough. Anyway, this has been really depressing.
I don’t know if we’ve been talking about trauma and stuff, I don’t think we’ve said anything else other than people get beaten up a little. Suppose that’s trauma. Yeah, it is hey, pretty much a lot, you’re not allowed to beat kids up. Back then you were.
The thing is kids were getting more beaten up than we were, my parents got beaten up more than we were, we just got clipped over the ears and you know you learned to run, just faster than him, you know, round the corner, slam your bedroom door, then the mother would calm him down somehow.
I’ve got to edit all this stuff, I just wanted to say, thinking about our grandfather and how angry he got, you know, and how everyone just kept him quiet, kept him happy. His whole life everyone didn’t do anything. You know there was this one time, I was a teenager, and he was just pushing himself around and I, I fully had it, and I just said…, I just said something, and I punched him hard in the arm. Like, you know how you’d punch your mate in the arm, like just a ‘how you doing’ punch? Well, I punched him in the arm! But really hard. Anyway, we tousled to the door, like you know it was like Banana’s in Pyjamas’, trying to get into the door.
Anyway, I was proud of myself because no one else ever stood up for themselves or anyone else. You know what? I had it coming. Cause you know what? Guess who would have got in trouble. My grandma. She would have got in trouble because I punched my grandfather in the arm. But can I tell you what? And this might not have been the reason, but I tell you what? It wasn’t long after that, that my grandma, had twisted bowels and her shoulders just fell out of their sockets, cause of all the work she’d been doing for so many years or something, or genetics.
Anyway, she decided, that she would go into an old people’s place, because she couldn’t look after my grandfather or herself anymore. It must have been a lot longer than that (older than a teen), I can’t remember, maybe I was already an adult when I punched him in the arm, I can’t remember. Yeah, I was probably an adult.
Anyway, she went into that, and do you know what? My grandfather went to another place, you know what? He died a year later. Do you want to know what he died of? A broken heart. Cause his wife left him, and she’d just looked after him the whole time. Can you imagine, what a poor, sorry, son of a poo, that fella turned out to be? Man. Far out. But you know what? There were no psychiatrists or psychologists or anything. He was probably autistic, he probably had ADHD, and no one helped him learn how to regulate his behaviour. No one got him to talk about his feelings or anything. You know, I wonder with all these feelings and talking, and therapies, maybe, society will get better. It just looks not so great to me but.
I never hated my grandfather, maybe I did for a minute or two, I think I was angrier at my parents, for not dealing with it themselves you know. Here my only thought, he’d been in the war and was not loved as a child, but they weren’t loved either. You can’t blame the people who hurt you, like sure they hurt you, there was a reason for it. They shouldn’t have done it!
But if you just live your life, just going, (I am like this) it’s because they hurt me, my life is ruined. Man, then you’re giving them power, control. I don’t want to blame my parents for the crap. I don’t want to blame my ancestors. I don’t even want to blame myself for stuff that I’ve said and done.
All I want to know is the truth. And I want to be able to live truthfully as myself. Truthfully as myself, not lying about who I am. Not lying to please other people, because if you don’t, please them, they’re going to be mad at you, reject you, kick you out.
It’s about time we all stood up and said, “Okay, that was the past!” “But what is the truth about who we are now? Can we move forward, in the future?”
That’s-that’s what I want to do.
Anyway. I’m not telling you my name, but I belong to this body here in Unpretending Spontaneous. Take it easy.
Note * We grew to not mind, some within us have just shown another version when we were much younger and having our parents teach us to stand there to get it over with, in fact, I remember training my children who are now young adults how grandpa held hair and what to do if he did.
Unpretending Spontaneous is the name used by a Multiple System from Australia, the technical term is currently called DID - Dissociative Identity Disorder. This blogcast is our journey as we attempt to function well in society as a multiple while healing from our traumatic past.
This got me thinking about Herons. They seem to be one of the most awkward looking birds on the ground, but when in flight and soaring? They become so elegant and purposeful, eh? Did you know that they are also considered very intelligent? Anyway, just wanted to remind you that you matter too and it was bittersweet to read about what you remember. Thanks for putting words to your experiences and I am sorry for the generational trauma that all before you, including you, had to endure. It is also an honor to watch you not only break that curse, but thrive showing everyone how it is done. I am here and I care.