cjd and brawling
Jun. 10th, 2021 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mayalaenWhen I was 7-8 years old, we brought my grandmother to our house to die of a disease no one had really heard of in the US -- Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or more commonly known as mad cow disease in animals.
My dad’s sisters had never gotten along well, but with their mother dying and their marriages going badly, they were at each other’s throats.
cut for length
Taking care of grandma was a really hard thing to do, especially since even nurses didn’t know what to do. It was tiring and sad and scary because any of her bodily fluids could make us sick, and there’s no cure, so we had to be extremely careful.
Somehow my cousin (on my dad’s side) Mark and I got left at the house one day with his mom and the ONE sibling she fought with the most.
Mark is 2 years younger than me, and I always was very protective of him because his mom was an ass. She made it her mission to emasculate and abuse Mark’s father and Mark. Never physically, but as many people know, it doesn’t have to leave a mark to traumatize a person.
Mark and I were in the living room, which was next to the room grandma was dying in. We were already scared because his mom and her sister were in the house without any other adults. We knew they were volatile with each other.
My grandma was pretty advanced in the disease process, but she could still recognize Mark and I as well as a few of my other cousins. She couldn’t talk, couldn’t control her own body, but she would smile for us and we were the only things that made her happy.
We knew she could still understand what was being said around her, though the disease makes that difficult and also causes hallucinations and confusion.
Not long after we were left along with grandma’s asshole daughters, they started to fight in the doorway to her room.
It turned into a screaming match, and that escalated to slapping, then to flat out brawling to the point they were rolling around on the floor screaming at each other and knocking furniture over.
Mark and I were too scared to move. Too scared to say anything.
We sat on the floor in the living room waiting for them to stop, both of us fairly certain one of them was going to be killed by the other, and possibly they would also kill our grandma.
Years later looking back on it, I never considered it a traumatic event. Too many years watching people in movies and TV shows having complete meltdowns if they’re traumatized conditioned me to believe that’s what trauma looked like, and I never did that, so I must not be traumatized by that and other things that happened in my life.
Now that I’ve hit a time in my life where my brain is forcing me to deal with things that happened when I was little (if you’re under 35, I’m sorry, but it’s coming), I’m realizing that there was a lot more abuse, trauma, and fear in my life than I assumed.
I always told people I was privileged by an easy childhood. Sure I’m schizophrenic and have mental issues, but I had parents who loved me, I never went hungry, I was never homeless, and I felt like my parents were supportive of me.
I’m now older than my aunts when they decided it was perfectly acceptable to try and kill each other in front of their mother with children watching them, and I can’t imagine ever doing that to a child myself.
I’ve never hated them for it because I knew they were both messed up, but so am I.
They had no right to do that to us or our grandma, and I was relieved when both of them died years later.
My dad’s sisters had never gotten along well, but with their mother dying and their marriages going badly, they were at each other’s throats.
cut for length
Taking care of grandma was a really hard thing to do, especially since even nurses didn’t know what to do. It was tiring and sad and scary because any of her bodily fluids could make us sick, and there’s no cure, so we had to be extremely careful.
Somehow my cousin (on my dad’s side) Mark and I got left at the house one day with his mom and the ONE sibling she fought with the most.
Mark is 2 years younger than me, and I always was very protective of him because his mom was an ass. She made it her mission to emasculate and abuse Mark’s father and Mark. Never physically, but as many people know, it doesn’t have to leave a mark to traumatize a person.
Mark and I were in the living room, which was next to the room grandma was dying in. We were already scared because his mom and her sister were in the house without any other adults. We knew they were volatile with each other.
My grandma was pretty advanced in the disease process, but she could still recognize Mark and I as well as a few of my other cousins. She couldn’t talk, couldn’t control her own body, but she would smile for us and we were the only things that made her happy.
We knew she could still understand what was being said around her, though the disease makes that difficult and also causes hallucinations and confusion.
Not long after we were left along with grandma’s asshole daughters, they started to fight in the doorway to her room.
It turned into a screaming match, and that escalated to slapping, then to flat out brawling to the point they were rolling around on the floor screaming at each other and knocking furniture over.
Mark and I were too scared to move. Too scared to say anything.
We sat on the floor in the living room waiting for them to stop, both of us fairly certain one of them was going to be killed by the other, and possibly they would also kill our grandma.
Years later looking back on it, I never considered it a traumatic event. Too many years watching people in movies and TV shows having complete meltdowns if they’re traumatized conditioned me to believe that’s what trauma looked like, and I never did that, so I must not be traumatized by that and other things that happened in my life.
Now that I’ve hit a time in my life where my brain is forcing me to deal with things that happened when I was little (if you’re under 35, I’m sorry, but it’s coming), I’m realizing that there was a lot more abuse, trauma, and fear in my life than I assumed.
I always told people I was privileged by an easy childhood. Sure I’m schizophrenic and have mental issues, but I had parents who loved me, I never went hungry, I was never homeless, and I felt like my parents were supportive of me.
I’m now older than my aunts when they decided it was perfectly acceptable to try and kill each other in front of their mother with children watching them, and I can’t imagine ever doing that to a child myself.
I’ve never hated them for it because I knew they were both messed up, but so am I.
They had no right to do that to us or our grandma, and I was relieved when both of them died years later.