Vunil, your thread is making me think about a lot of things. It is creepy how completely my family has submerged all the trauma in their lives--and it is confusing, because the outside world thinks they are fine. My nmother's parents let a 17 year old boy go into her room for over a year, when she was 12--this was 1955! He was molesting her, and when she finally told her parents, they didn't do anything. He was the nephew of their minister and they just let it keep happening. When my father left my mother, she melted down, and took in a 17 year old runaway who was sociopathic, basically reproducing her own abuse again, but putting me and my sister in danger too. I know something happened to my sister, that this boy must have attacked her--my sister absolutely refuses to talk about it except to say she's forgiven my mother. And my mother says she's not angry at her parents for not protecting her. When all this stuff is bubbling under the surface, and no one talking about it, sometimes I feel crazy. My nfather's parents were highly troubled too, and he diverts it all into obsessively reconstructing the biographies of emotionally disturbed writers(he's an English professor). Once I asked him if he was going to write a memoir and he said no, because his life wasn't interesting(in actuality my relatives have all the makings of a southern gothic novel). This is bizarre coming from a man that thinks everything he does is grandiose and special--there's some major blocking out of trauma. I've started writing my own memoir, just to express some of this craziness, to find my voice.
