Dead on Arrival - Resurrected by Grace

Hers: My "Dead" Mother's Dead Mother

The following is an excerpt from my mother's testimony:

I was thirteen years old when my mother died. She was sick for over a year and I was her caretaker. I took care of her and my two brothers and sister. I had a stepfather; he made a living as a logger; staying at the logging camp during the week and coming home on weekends. My mom and I had had a very close relationship. She had made a lot of wrong choices that caused her great pain most of her life. She married and divorced my birth father twice in the Mormon church. She had an affair with a serviceman and ended up pregnant with my little sister. Later she married my very wicked stepfather.

Despite her tortured childhood, my mom has never spoken ill of her mother. In fact, I've only ever heard her say she was "beautiful". Off the top of my head, I don't even remember her name. But I know she was beautiful. She was also a nurse so one might assume that she was very health conscious. But things were different back then and instead, she was a chain-smoking, Pepsi addict who often used the smoldering end of one cigarette to light another. She could make one hell of a nice bed though and taught my mom all about "hospital corners". She uses this method to make her bed each night and you'd be hard-pressed to find a neater sheet in any army barrack. 

I think it's safe to assume my mother's mother had a weakness for handsome men in uniform as well. Three marriages total and an affair besides. She was beautiful, yes, but reckless. This penchant for relationships, although not technically genetic, would be a trait that she would pass along to her daughter. Watching your mother be used and then discarded by men changes a person. It completely distorts what a marriage is meant to be and set my mom on a path with no map. When giving young Peggy Sue "the talk", she simply explained that "Sex is when the daddy parks his car in the mommy's garage." It doesn't take a psychology degree to see the lasting impact this statement might have on a child. 

That was the only sex ed my mother received so when she was raped by a grown man at the age of fourteen she honestly had no idea what happened. I think it must have been a shock to later realize, as an adult, that you were a victim of sexual assault. How strange. How horrible. When she started her period while out with some neighbors at a rodeo my mother had no idea what was happening to her. She assumed she was dying. Her neighbors? They wrapped her in a horse blanket and sent her to the truck. No explanation or reassurance that everything was going to be okay. If you were to meet my mother today, you would see none of the evidence of this kind of trauma in her speech or demeanor. She's a changed creature; a pearl in an ocean of broken shell. 

Not knowing a lot of personal history about my mother's mother I can't say what might have contributed to her poor parenting skills. All I know is that I feel both sorry for her and angry with her simultaneously. In my mind, she is the tragic backdrop against which my mother's story takes place. Many people did wicked things to and around my mom but her mom is responsible for cultivating an environment for those things to take place.  She should have protected her. End of story. 

P.S. Her mother's name was Donna Mae Anne Bies.