My Many Coloured Days

I often wonder what life is like for people without mental illness...I know everyone has their quirks and glitches, but I mean life without hallucinations, voices, and moods that turn on a dime.
Mental illness and addiction hang from my family tree like bananas, (pun COMPLETELY intended). My maternal great grandmother was a 4ft 9in firecracker with 9 kids, she begat my grandmother who used to chase my mom around and beat her with golf clubs...my mom begat me (with the spermatazoa of her 17 yr old drug dealer boyfriend who had an ongoing sexual relationship with his own sister at one time)...kooky, huh??!!
My maternal grandfather died from liver abuse due to chronic alcoholism...my entire sperm donors family was so backwards and drunk that they not only made their own moonshine, they were still using an outhouse and bathing in a creek in 1975.
My mom was the strangest blend of June Cleaver and Joan Crawford you could ever conceive... a manipulative, intelligent, kitchen goddess who could walk out of a room loving you and walk back in hating you. When I was young I have mostly good memories of her, although her own paranoia did result in intensive programming that family was all you ever had, (mom, dad, siblings, not the family you would create for yourself as an adult). I remember a HUGE lecture where I was told I had "betrayed" the family when I was 7 cause I told our babysitter (her best friends daughter) about the $2.00 bill in the dictionary...this was tantamount to a Hilton posting the safe combination on the internet!!
When she was having a good day, the sun shone brighter, the flowers smelled sweeter, and I could not imagine any better place to be...her good days got farther and farther apart as I grew older. In those early years, my mom would hug, kiss, and tell me she loved me endlessly. She would still rock me and stroke my hair as I listened to the comforting beat of her heart and the squeak , squeak, squeak of my grandmother's antique rocker. I surrounded myself with her warmth and memorized her smell. She was so dear to me that the mere thought that she would die one day brought me to tears.
When I was 11, she decided to home school my sister and I...this quickly turned into me becoming a full time mom to my 3 younger siblings, ages 9, 2 1/2, and 2 wks. I cooked, cleaned, changed diapers, and walked the floors with the baby at night. I packed my dad's lunch and faced his wrath and physical abuse regularly. My mom was working 3 jobs and my dad was working 2, trying to stave off an inevitable chapter 13 bankruptcy because my dad was fired from his good job at the phosphate mines. They were so stressed out and miserable that there was no option but for the sh!t to roll downhill. On the other hand, my mother's own relationship with her mother had changed dramatically as she entered puberty, and sometimes I think it was just fate...simply a matter of time before she was jerked away from my grasp. During this time, my mother really changed, and it hurt very badly...she would literally wake my father out of a sound sleep when she was mad at me so he could hit me.
I think back on those days and shudder still...I was terrified to have children of my own for fear that I would be like my parents...I still worry that the pubescent curse will be repeated with my oldest...although I will fight it with everything in my power.

(To Be Continued...)