My dad had a decent-sized family. They moved so much that they were almost never in one place for more than a year. By his birth father and mother, there were two sisters and him. Eventually he had a brother from his step-father. As I recall, these siblings all shared a single room, my dad having no space truly his own as he grew up, meaning he developed a sense early on that he had very little say in his life about what went on around him. As for his birth father, no good tales have been passed. He was apparently often drunk and abusive, especially to their mother. One story holds that at the dinner table, my dad's dad took a piece of meat right off the plate of my dad (who was then still in a high chair), and in response my dad, barely able to speak anything anyway at this point, told him "Son of a bitch!" The man then smacked him with his hand out of the high chair. Not too cool.
I don't recall how long that marriage lasted, but thankfully it didn't. Their mom remarried, and they had the other son. My dad considers this man to be his true father, though from the sounds of it, this guy was not too cool either, even if dainty by comparison to the other one. One of the few stories I recall about him is that he once ripped the head off my dad's long-favorite stuffed dachshund as punishment of some kind. I've never met either of these guys and I'm kind of glad. I'm pretty sure neither of them were still around by the time I was born.
In school, my dad did very poorly. He says that he shouldn't have passed high school except that the districts he was in were too lenient. People didn't know about things like ADD back then and if I'm remembering right, the teachers told him that he was just born with less intelligence, or something. I think he used the word "stupid" but I doubt the teachers would say that.. Anyway, no one thought too highly of him. When he finally got out of school and became his own man, the first thing he did was to buy his own hat. In American culture, it was customary for all men to wear hats until President Kennedy broke the taboo, being the first president to never wear one, but my dad wouldn't have any of that. He has always wished he could live in the 1930s and 40s, I'm not quite sure why but it fits his moral platform perfectly. His feelings of lack of control now led him to exert as much control as possible over his life.
So then my dad told his family that he was going into the Marine Corps; his family laughed at him because they knew scrawny ol' him would be spit right back out. Apparently they had a severe underestimation of his determination in life, because although it was extremely tough and traumatic, he did it. And it shows. He was in military service of some kind for several years. When he chooses to use it, I've met no one with a greater willpower than his. In recent years, he went to the dental college for students to give him a filling. They had to put him out for the operation. I'm told that the normal dosage was not enough, and they gave him two or three times that amount before he finally became unconscious. When he awoke much later, he was told that he'd been found wandering the hallways in a daze asking people for water. That guy just won't be put down.
My mom was born into a very well-off southern Christian family. Her mom and dad dated in high school, soon afterwards marrying and having their first kid rather quickly. Over the decades they had three daughters and a son. Their dad was a football jock in school and then became an architect, working for Disney. He designed the Pinocchio Restaurant in Disney World, Florida, and parts of Epcot Center and of Disney France. Their family (including me) gets to go to any Disney theme park for free, as long as he or his wife goes along, and large discounts at the stores. (He died a few years ago. For some people this might have been quite sad but I'm afraid by the time he went away, I wasn't much involved with him even when I visited.) My mom's mom is generally a very positive person. Unfortunately a little too positive, really, refusing to accept unfavorable realities when they are presented. Very much a fundamentalist Christian, though her husband just went along with it.
My mom was raised in a fairly idyllic world where everything went well and there were high expectations. One interesting thing I'm told about her childhood is that she could be given a single toy and it could entertain her for hours. She says she was and is a very curious person. I'm not sure if it's true but my mom says she scored 156 on an IQ test in junior high, and I can believe it. She did very well in school... up to a certain point. I've gotten wind of some incidents of being pampered up for something and having it not happen. But what really changed things was being raped when she was around 13 or 14 years old by someone she knew through school. Now, I grew up being told by my dad that THIS is what caused my mother's mental illness. The trauma on a young impressionable mind resulting from such a thing. My dad says that in the moment he found out who was responsible, for five seconds he was prepared to kill him, but then thought better of it. I've only found out in the past year that my mom does not believe this incident caused her condition. I don't know quite what to think but I do believe it's multi-factored. My dad indicated his belief that the way the incident was handled by her family --- covering it up and trying to make her forget about it --- was also a primary factor. At any rate, my mom's schooling excellence dropped quite low after this. Today, my gramma appears most upset not by the fact that my mom was raped, but by the loss of future potential that my mom showed in school. Regardless, she did attend some sort of college, but found some problems with most jobs. I don't remember enough details to say more on that, but apparently she was coming to the conclusion that she was going to become a nun.
Now with religion. On my dad's side of the family, I'm not sure when the Urantia Book was adopted. It's a book full of revelations said to have been received through possession of a person who did not care about the subject matter but was used as a vessel to communicate a number of cosmic realities, based largely on Christian text but adding all sorts of new dynamics using science principles of the day, and written with as eccentric word usage as possible. In my opinion, most of the book's appeal comes from the sort of trancy state the language puts you in, making you feel like you're listening to a supreme intelligence, but that's just me. It puts things in a more cosmic and galactic context than ancient Christian texts had the potential to describe. At any rate, my dad was raised with it, and believed in it fully for some time. During his early twenties, he went to a Urantia Book meeting somewhere in California, and this is where he one day met my mom, who by this point was also following its text. I think the high language was probably right up her alley. She's drawn to religion which is taken very seriously by its followers.
Somehow in all that, my mom and dad met each other. And here's where things get reeeaaally sticky, I've just gone and had my mom refresh my memory and add some details for me. It's so bizarre and complex that I'm going to outline it in points. All or most of it is based on Urantia Book content and may confuse those unfamiliar with it.
- Some time before meeting my dad, my mom says she was told by Jesus that he wanted her to bear Lucifer as a child, and she agreed.
- The reason for Lucifer being born as a human child would be to give him a second chance to learn the love of God and believe in his existence, and also therefore prevent all the end-of-days prophecy stuff.
- Part of my dad's spiritual philosophy (which he's talked with me a bit about) is that Lucifer deserves a second chance, because for forgiveness to be available to all beings, as he believes it is, it has to be available to Lucifer as well. Some sort of ultimate way to prove such a thing.
- My mom tells me now that it was actually my dad's desire for Lucifer to take his own body and through it allow Lucifer to learn the truth of God and all this stuff. She also says that my dad actually agreed with some of Lucifer's "manifesto" which is given in the Urantia Book, apparently including certain freedoms as agiven instead of earned.
- While I never heard any of that from my dad, my dad has been writing a story based in Greek myth for a long time, concerning the Evening Star and how it stopped and refused to go down, thus creating perpetual night, and then somehow this being was cast down to the Earth in order to bring day. Upon doing so, he landed in the body of a mortal human; this human was given the chance to decline the presence of this other entity, thus extinguishing it, or to merge. It's a lot more complicated than that but it gives me possible reason to believe what my mom is saying on this...
- So because of my dad's support of Lucifer in this way, my mom decided he would make a good husband to raise Lucifer. But then right around the time they became engaged, my dad apparently turned the tables again and said, "no, it will be ME and not our son." At that point my mom decided to give up on the whole thing and just forget about it one way or another.
- Apparently 10 years later or so (or when I was 10 years old? Not going to ask her again), somehow Michael came to her (a prominent local figure in the Urantia Book, responsible for the spiritual backwardness covering our planet), and revealed to her that it was actually him requesting for her to bear Lucifer as a child, those years ago, and not Jesus. And, she says, Michael was now asking that HE be allowed to take over her child, which she refused. Ummm...
So uh, that's why my parents got together. Yeah. I think I'll end this entry here and pick up with the time between then and my birth with the next entry. Until then, hope you.. enjoyed this. And my gods, I can't begin to imagine what it means for me if any of that stuff is true.
