Whew! Some tough questions. How did my parents react when I was sick, upset, or in some kind of danger?
Upset is an easy one--I learned very early on not to show any upset with my mother. I do remember, though, one very good conversation with my dad when I was in my last year of high school. He empathized with something I was going through, and it's a memory I treasure. It's sad that it's the only time, in all my growing up years, that I felt heard by a parent. Not surprisingly, it occured after he stopped drinking. He really became a different man. Unfortunately, he died a few years later. I don't consider him to be an N--mostly he was very busy building a business and enjoying life, and just not as engaged as he should be with how things were for us kids.
As far as danger goes, being in dangerous situations was a way of life for us. I grew up in the far north and we accepted physical danger without hardly giving it a thought--it was a way of life. I remember being terrified many times--up in a small airplane in a raging storm or complete whiteout, out in the ocean huddled in the bottom of a boat not knowing if we were going to live or die, battling getting swept out to the open ocean in a rowboat, having to get rescued at camp on a beach with the tide rushing in. But, those experiences were never processed. They were just accepted. So, that's probably another reason why I haven't given as much importance to my personal safety as I should. In the last few years, my mother and I have been able to talk about these incidents and that has been healing.
I do have a fairly painful memory about being in danger. I was in an automobile accident that had the potential to be a fatal one when I was a teenager. My boyfriend and I were coming home from an outing and were hit by a car that ran a stop sign. It probably would have been fatal if the car that hit us had been just a few seconds faster. When I told my mother about it, she hardly had any reaction. It just wasn't any big deal to her, although I know she would have grieved if I'd been killed. But I didn't hear, "Oh, thank God, you were OK." or "Tell me exactly what happened." I don't think she was being deliberately malicious or callous, it was like it just didn't register with her.
As far as memories related to illness, there are definitely some not so good ones there.
Gail