FOO Fighter

FOO = Family Of Origin

My childhood was a very confusing one.

In my first four years, it seemed that everyone loved me; I was a welcome and adorable addition to the family, contributing an upbeat joyfulness that everyone, including friends and family, seemed to love.

I was two months shy of my fifth birthday when I began my school career. My first year of Kindergarten went well, as well as first grade.

Then second grade began. A couple pivotal things happened in the second grade. The first was that I was not memorizing my addition and subtraction facts. I really had no understanding why that was important to do, so I just blew it off. The second was that I was no longer considered desirable in my Family Of Origin (hereafter referred to as FOO), as was concluded by my paternalistic grandfather, who also dictated that it will be necessary to beat me to rid me of my undesirableness.

My first beating took place because of the addition and subtraction facts, where my father sat me in a chair in front of him and then barked the fact at me, reading it from a flash card. If I were not able to bring the correct answer up from memory in a second, then he compelled me to stand up, thereto lashing his belt across my buttocks repeatedly. He repeated the whipping as he continued a couple more times through the deck of flash cards. How is that for pedagogy?

Thereafter, if I were kept at school to work on my schoolwork that I'd not finished during the school day, my father would beat me whenever he got home from work. Without inquiring, he assumed that if I were kept after school, then I would have been in trouble, which was not the case in these situations. In essence I was beaten and punished for trying to learn at school.

Only in the past couple years have I become aware of what the medical consequences of the beatings were.

During the second grade I began to gain an immense amount of weight. Though I was husky of build before that, I was not grossly overweight. I am thinking that the explanation was that in lieu of love, there was always the satiating fullness of eating.

In the next school year, I then developed what was called then neurodermatitis. That is a fancy term that means I was scratching my hands and forearms in effort to calm an insatiable unending itch that lay deep within my skin, so that my skin would erupt in sores and bleed. Later that year I began having repeated instances of giant hives, where my lips would swell up to enormous size, and my eyelids would swell shut.

Though this is not necessarily medical, my grades plummeted after he started and continued to beat me. When he stopped emotionally and/or physically abused me, my grades strangely went up.

In all these symptoms, my father didn't realize (probably didn't want to know) that all of these started when he started beating me, and they continued as long as he kept on beating me.

This is the first installment of what I have to say about my FOO, as there will be more to say in the future.

Right now, I am emotionally exhausted and I just can't write any more for the time being. Later.