When a Traumatic Childhood Defines Who You Are
Would you change it, if you could?
It’s hard for me to really imagine growing up without a family.
After all, I have eight brothers and sisters. I have always been surrounded by family. They are my bubble wrap. They are my baseline.
No matter whatever else happens in my life, in the world, I start out with eight brothers and sisters. And my dad.
So, maybe it makes sense that I’ve always kind of romanticized my dad’s upbringing. He was raised in a Texas orphanage. His mother sent him there when he was very young and she was having what was called in 1950s a nervous breakdown, but what we’d probably recognize now as a major depressive episode.
She was ostracized by her family after having a baby out of wedlock. The story I grew up with was that her father chose a name — Grimes — and changed hers so that it looked as if she’d been married.
She put her baby in an orphanage in Texas so she could recover. And she did. But she couldn’t regain custody of her son. So she went to work at the orphanage. She stayed there until he graduated high school.
With only my own childhood to frame her experience with, I grew up believing that she loved my father so much — nothing would keep her from her son…
