The Traditional Family Role

Normally I give my opinion on things rather than share something of my past, but this post will be a bit different, though it is, as per usual, based on something from CNN/Time. This might be long so bare with me.

As you can see, the article I sited as the link in the title is an article about how we all hold on to the 'Traditional Family". So let me tell you what my "Traditional Family" life was like when I was growing up.

I had a father and a mother, of course. My dad worked, my mother stayed home and took care of the home and children. They are both members of the Baby Boom Generation where such things were idealized into things like the television show "Leave it to Beaver". They, as many members of their generation, grew up to want that more than anything in the world.

The only problem is, it never existed.

As I was growing up, my mother worked in the yard building beautiful flower beds for us to play in. We had a garden the size of a small house, and a back yard that was so large, you could fit a total of three of the house that I grew up in, inside it. We always had fresh vegetables and fruit to eat, and my mother canned them in the fall so we never bought out. We used to go into the garden to pick fresh peas and carrots in the summer when we wanted a snack and I rarely ever saw sweets, except on the holidays when my mother gathered my sister and I, and baked so many cookies, cakes, pies, and other sweets that we couldn't eat at the kitchen table for weeks for all the food.

At Christmas, she'd  get us, and (sometimes) some of our friends together, and we'd make homemade ornaments for the Christmas tree (baked and shellacked bread shaped like dough bears for example). On Easter, we'd dye eggs (Ukrainian Easter Eggs one year, that I turned out to be allergic to the dye) and on Easter morning, we'd wake to chocolate and candy eggs hidden all over the house and have candy for weeks. On Halloween, my mother made hand sewn costumes for us, and my dad took us trick or treating.

My mother used to come to our figure skating lessons with us, and at one point got roped into running the music for practice.

It sounds ideal, doesn't it? Only it leaves a great deal out.

For one thing, where exactly was my father in all this? He was working. And he was out with his friends. Most of the time, except when he wanted to eat and sleep (and maybe a few other things from my mother), we never saw him. He wasn't interested in anything we did. He could have been, he had the time, but his friends were more important to him

And then there's the fact that he was an alcoholic. He was also an abuser. Barely a night went by (he came home at 4 and 5 am most nights) when he wasn't drunk, and angry at nothing. The last ten years that they were together, we barely had a night go by when they weren't screaming at each other, throwing things at each other, or my father wasn't doing something like shoving my mother into the wall screaming at her. The neighbors knew this was going on. Family knew this was going on. Heck, even the police knew it. No one ever did anything to help, even when my sister and I called them begging them to come and stop my parents before they killed them. The police were notorious for driving him around the block a few times, and then dropping him back off, because he was their friend (small town).

When they finally split when I was 14, it was a blessing. To this day, my sister and I wish that they had done so years before that. The fighting stopped. There was peace in the house again.

But that only lasted for so long because you see, my mother hadn't worked in 17 years. She had no idea how to even go about starting to do that, never mind actually how to balance a check book and pay bills. My father had done all those things.

She went to work but could only find a part time job. We couldn't pay the mortgage much less have food in the house. And trying to get money from my father was like getting blood from a stone, and she had to find a way to pay a lawyer so the law could force my father to pay for child support. And even then, most months, he missed. Eventually they garnished his wages, but by that time, he owed us $18,000 in back payments and we had been on welfare for two years.

We were forced to move from my childhood home.

When I was 15, I went to work part time in the public library. My mother couldn't afford to pay my way through high school, so I paid it myself (including my prom dress). The rest of my money went to the household, things like buying food and paying for a phone in my house. We never had a car so I never learned how to drive because my father took his with him and we couldn't afford the $480 cost the schools were charging and my mother had never learned.

When I finally graduated school, I was able to start working full time to help pay the bills. By this time, my mother had had a breakdown. I'm the only thing that kept the family together and I was too scared to tell anyone what happened, when she was rocking back and forth on our front step crying her eyes out. She once tried to walk "home" in bare feet, despite the fact that when she said "home", she meant my grandmothers house, over a half hour highways drive away. If I hadn't been there, there's no telling what would have happened. Throughout all this, I was forced to be the adult in the house, and took care of paying the bills (I actually started taking her paycheck at one point, and depositing it after getting her to sign it), took care of the house (I even know how to fix a leaky tap because we couldn't pay for someone to fix it for us), and took care of my little sister (though she probably doesn't remember much of that).

It wasn't until I was fairly into my adulthood that things started to change. She found a full time job, and eventually met my stepdad (whom my sister and I simply adore. A very good former military man, and current policy officer). She died of lung cancer in 2003.

My sister married, and then divorced (lets just say her ex is the worst possible man imaginable and leave it at that). She has a wonderful little boy who is much loved fathered by the douche bag ex husband of hers.

As for me? I'm on my second marriage. The first was with an abusive man. It took alot for me to learn that I didn't have to put up with it just because "Traditional Values" told me that I should. With this second marriage, I don't think I've ever been this happy in my whole life. Its anything but Traditional. I'm a computer geek, and work full time. My husband loves role playing games and also works full time. We are both Liberals and I don't see us having kids.

So this "Traditional Family Life" that everyone reveres? It doesn't exist, and it never did. Its all imaginary.

I'm so tired of the promotion of "traditional family life". You saw what this idiotic idea did to my immediate family, never mind my aunts, uncles, and cousins who had their own oddyssey to go through.

Its time to chart new paths, not wallow in the old.