I will admit I had an odd circumstance for a religious upbringing.

My mother was raised a Catholic, while my father was an atheist. When I was young, they decided to start going to a Southern Baptist church, while sending me to a Lutheran school.

In my teen years, I rather rebelled against that upbringing, seeking spirituality in other ways, flitting from one thing to another and not really finding satisfaction with any.

I also carried with me the memories of the abuse I suffered at the hands of my father as he drank one glass after another of whiskey, and how my mother would not only capitulate to it, but try to cover everything up as well.

There finally came a time when he stopped drinking and the abuse ended, but once that sort of trauma occurs, it’s difficult, at best, to recover. Now that I am in my 50s and can look back on the different pathways my life has been on, I can try to piece together some sort of harmony to move beyond it all.

At least, that’s my hope.

For decades, I carried a lot of anger towards my father for the things he put me, and my mother, too, through, and have never quite been able to rationalize the dichotomy that formed after he stopped drinking.

You see, after he got sober, he did truly become a different person. He tried to do his best after that to be a positive influence in the world, and I am glad of it. However, that doesn’t change what happened as I was growing up.

In my mind, there are two different men I would say were my fathers. The one was a good person, and would never hurt a fly if it landed on his face. The other was a man filled with loathing of life and took it out on everyone around him.

I’ve grown to understand mental illness, having suffered from different forms of it in my own life (some of which are related to PTSD, as you could probably assume), and have been able to take a more compassionate view on him, at least on the surface.

But there are still times where that small child huddling in the corner, scared for his life, wants to come out. It’s in those moments I realize just how far I have yet to go when it comes to healing from the traumas.

Most of my upbringing was within one church setting or another, and the phrase “Honor thy father and mother” was an immense deal. They pressed it into the head of every child. After all, it’s one of the “Big 10” and to disobey it was to bring the wrath of God down on one’s feeble little body.

Yet, that was happening at the same time, as my father would take another drink and give a heavy thwack for me not tying my shoes correctly or fast enough. Then would come the fifteen minutes of incoherent screaming about the useless thing I was.

I simply could not rationalize how I was supposed to give honor to this man I despised, yet knowing if I didn’t somehow accomplish it, it would doom me to perdition.

It just didn’t seem right. It wasn’t fair.

Meanwhile, I felt much animosity towards the mother of my life, the one who was supposed to protect me from such things happening. She did nothing but continue confirming how apparently deserving I was of such treatment by saying nothing against it and trying to “smooth over the ruffled feathers” of my bruised body and ego.

That, too, was something to honor?

These are hard questions and even harder to come to terms with. I don’t think even after all these years I have any answers, other than the idea of forgiveness. Even that is easier said than done.

Sometimes, I can do no more than to “fake it ’til I make it” and pay lip-service to absolving. Other days are easier. Those days, ones filled with joy and laughter with the family I have made for myself, can at least help mitigate when the emotional crumbling occurs out of nowhere.

How do you give honor to a father or mother who frankly does not deserve it?

The sad answer is: sometimes you can’t.

What we’re shackled with are chains too difficult to bear, and we need help to extricate ourselves from them. The weight of them has to be carried by someone else for a while.

Sometimes, all we can do is walk away from the family we’re genetically saddled with and start over again.

All we can do is hold that child within us as they shiver in the night from fear and reassure them that things will get better.

The sins of our fathers and mothers do not have to become our own.

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