The rest of the story
Yesterday someone tried to read me out for "not being feminist enough." Given what feminism has turned into, she was a) absolutely correct, because I can't stand today's socialistic "feminism," and b) not aware that she was in fact complimenting me. Highly. But I was annoyed at her enough that I snapped back, "So where the hell were you when my adoptive mother needed you?" Her reply being mainly along the lines of "Hunh?", I gave her a brief synopsis of what my adoptive mother's life with her first husband was like. "But -- but -- I wasn't even alive then!" wailed my would-be interrogator, who turned and booked, anything to get away from this mad, bad individual who had dared to turn her righteous crusade completely on its head and confuse hell out of her.
Which left me with the realization that nobody would have helped my adoptive mother get out of the intolerable misery caused by being trapped between a sadistic, control-freak husband, a conniving older sister, and a child who, quite naturally, had no idea of her adoptive mother's back-story and only knew that her adoptive mother hated her for what seemed to be no good reason. Back then, once you were married, you were on your own. If a woman's husband was a good man, all well and good. If he wasn't, well, you covered up the bruises and pretended to a cheer you could never feel again and prayed for help that never came, not even from your own family. She had nobody. Even her close girlfriend from high school and a few women friends she'd made after getting married -- all of them wives of men her husband knew -- wouldn't have been able to do much for her even if they'd wanted to. And it was the sort of thing which you never told your parents or siblings or other relatives, either out of pride or because you knew in advance they wouldn't help.
I'm the only one who might be able to bring her some real justice, however posthumously. -- No, let me correct that: she did receive ome justice in life, after all. Her first husband died in 1958; she was married around 1963 to a wealthy man who took good care of her, took her on trips with him to Japan and Europe, and generally gave her the life she had yearned to have all along. She died in 1995, years after her second husband died. God or a guardian angel must have been watching over her, after all.
Even so, I was there for the last 13 years of her marriage to her first husband, and witnessed her agony first-hand, albeit from a perspective that didn't allow me to know why she was the way she was. It was many years after the last time I ever saw her before I had all the information together to interpret what I had experienced and realized just what a quiet, affluent, hopeless hell she was living in then. I'm the only one with the rest of the story, and the will to tell it. Maybe I can do that to some extent here on my blog -- and maybe some of those who read it will gain enough understanding applicable to their own lives that they will heal a little, too. As mean and cruel as she was to me, she was, in the last analysis, like a small pet rabbit terrified out of her wits, trapped between two large and hungry wolves. And there was nobody at all to help her, defend her, protect her. And it's left up to me to tell the rest of her story, and, I hope, bring her peace, whever she is.
Which left me with the realization that nobody would have helped my adoptive mother get out of the intolerable misery caused by being trapped between a sadistic, control-freak husband, a conniving older sister, and a child who, quite naturally, had no idea of her adoptive mother's back-story and only knew that her adoptive mother hated her for what seemed to be no good reason. Back then, once you were married, you were on your own. If a woman's husband was a good man, all well and good. If he wasn't, well, you covered up the bruises and pretended to a cheer you could never feel again and prayed for help that never came, not even from your own family. She had nobody. Even her close girlfriend from high school and a few women friends she'd made after getting married -- all of them wives of men her husband knew -- wouldn't have been able to do much for her even if they'd wanted to. And it was the sort of thing which you never told your parents or siblings or other relatives, either out of pride or because you knew in advance they wouldn't help.
I'm the only one who might be able to bring her some real justice, however posthumously. -- No, let me correct that: she did receive ome justice in life, after all. Her first husband died in 1958; she was married around 1963 to a wealthy man who took good care of her, took her on trips with him to Japan and Europe, and generally gave her the life she had yearned to have all along. She died in 1995, years after her second husband died. God or a guardian angel must have been watching over her, after all.
Even so, I was there for the last 13 years of her marriage to her first husband, and witnessed her agony first-hand, albeit from a perspective that didn't allow me to know why she was the way she was. It was many years after the last time I ever saw her before I had all the information together to interpret what I had experienced and realized just what a quiet, affluent, hopeless hell she was living in then. I'm the only one with the rest of the story, and the will to tell it. Maybe I can do that to some extent here on my blog -- and maybe some of those who read it will gain enough understanding applicable to their own lives that they will heal a little, too. As mean and cruel as she was to me, she was, in the last analysis, like a small pet rabbit terrified out of her wits, trapped between two large and hungry wolves. And there was nobody at all to help her, defend her, protect her. And it's left up to me to tell the rest of her story, and, I hope, bring her peace, whever she is.