My mother's violent and unsupportive up bringing

I had the pleasure of interviewing my mother.  She was born in 1965 in SE Rochester.  She was the youngest of ten children.  There was a lot of physical and verbal abuse in my mother’s family all of which she was subject to.  They were very poor, my mom started babysitting when she was 11 so she could get clothes and pay for school supplies and food.  She grew-up fast being that her mother and father were absent parents, she relied mainly on her older brothers to give her rides here and there.  She was the only family member to graduate high school including both of her parents.  Her life became even more hard when she got pregnant with me and and me a week after she turned 17.  She fought for her high school diploma and continued on with a few college courses, but never obtained a degree. Life was tough for her, but she can out on top and did the best she could, considering her circumstances.

Violence was an everyday occurrence in my mother’s home growing up.  It was between her mother and father, the children where only verbally abused by both parents.  Her father was the only one who worked out of the house and her mother stayed home.  Every night around supper time her parents would start drinking and by the time bed time would roll around for the children her parents where belligerently drunk and would yell and scream and push each other around.  There were numerous calls to the home.  And even before my mother was born my mother’s parents had their second and third child taken by the state of Minnesota and both where adopted out of the family because of all the police interventions.  They went on to have six more children, all of which were able to stay in the home.  My mother personally was determined to continue on the same cycle of violence as her parents taught her.  She wanted something different for me; however, this was not the same for her brothers.  They all got into drugs and had numerous domestic assault charges.  Manuh and Bekoe talk about confronting violence.  They say most of the programs for anti-abuse are geared towards prevention in the year 2010.  In the 1970’s however, it was something was ignored.  And in the 1970’s, no one reported abuse of any kind  Now-a-days there is many steps that can be taken to act upon violence.  The problems still remains that no one is reporting domestic violence.  Manuh and Bekoe talk about getting the work out there about violence by gathering data about violence and putting the statistics out here for everyone to se to beware that they are not alone.  Then they state that there needs to be a great deal of resources for violence, making help accessible to victims.  Although it has gotten better, the act of abuse still remains hidden.  People are still scared to get it out in the open and report violence to protect them.   If this was done, more data would be produced and more resources could be made available to persons how experience the types of abuse that actually would get reported. 

Education in my mother’s family was never important, which is clear as my mother was the only one who graduated high school.  Still she had it in the back of her mind that it was important and worked on her studies without any help from her mother and father.  It was impossible to ask her parents anything at night because they were always drunk.  But she always felt like she should get an education.  When she entered colleges she was pushed into programs that where secretarial in nature.  It was almost like she did not have a choice, it was what women did.  She she took her few colleges course related to gaining a secretarial job.  According to her family education was not important.  She said that her mother was the one who over looked the fact of her being overly excited about school.  She believes that this stems from her mother’s upbringing.  Her mother was raised to become a mother and a wife and that is just what she did.  Friedan explains this type of experience in her “Feminine Mystique”.  In the 1950’s and around that ear, Friedan explains that education was to be important for women and that they should act a certain way to get a good husband and be a housewife.  The single best sentence from this essay is as follows, “The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropping from 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. A century earlier, women had fought for higher education, now girls went to college to get a husband.”  This is the idea that was portrayed to my mother. But she wanted a higher education that her siblings and her parents and she got no encouragement from her family.  It was like my mother was living in the footsteps of her mother in obeying what her parents had taught her…to be modest, get a good husband and disregard an education. 

 

It is sad that my mother did fall in to her mother’s beliefs, however, I am very proud of her for obtaining a high school degree and entering into college despite zero encouragement from her family.