My Family of Origin

Reading on the blogs of other multiples I see that there are lots of references to the family of origin and the realtionships that have or haven't survived. So I thought it might be good to post about my situation with my family of origin.

I come from a family of six children, two girls and four boys. The oldest boy was my half brother but we never referred to him as if he were any different than the rest of us even though his last name was different..

Growing up, the parts that I have always remembered, we all fought a lot. Someone was always unhappy about something. I remember very little time we ever really got along. Slapping, hitting, pinching, name calling those were regular occurences at my house. Even though we were told we weren't supposed to do those things, we did.

There was five years difference in age between my older brother and me. Then there was seven years difference in age between the youngest, my sister, and me. That made me the older sister to almost everyone.

My father got sick with cancer when I was six and my mother went to work sometime after that. Once she went to work, I felt like I was the mother at home. I finished up laundry she laid out for me to do, cooked dinner, cleaned house, helped the younger kids with their homework and tried to make them be good so my mother didn't get mad and whatever else might be on the list she wrote out for us each day.

My father died when I was twelve.My older brother began molesting me that same year. My mother remarried when I was thriteen. I was sent off to boarding school when I was fourteen. I left home when I was nineteen and was married by twenty with a child just before I turned twenty-one.

During all of this time, we had a place on a lake where we spent a lot of time in the summer. Even after we were all grown, summertime meant time at the lake, but we still picked on each other all of the time.

Despite all the fighting, I adored my younger siblings. I felt like they were my kids. I played with them, helped with their homework, made sure they had birthday parties even invited the neighbor kids, baked cakes the whole thing because I wanted their lives to be normal even if mine wasn't. Despite that only one of them is close to me and that relationship is strained.

To be continued............

multiple personality disorder MPD dissociative Identity disorder did