by Cheryl Vollmar

It’s taken a long time to fully understand why my mother raised me the way she did. She’d grown up being beaten and raped in a home that was backwards, backwoods, and even more religious than the home she built with my father. Religious applies loosely because my grandfather was a minister who didn’t always practice what he preached. Mother was made to cook, clean, and wait on her family like a servant. Her father believed a woman belonged at home rearing the children and taking care of the home, so she was not allowed the luxury of an education past the age of sixteen when she was old enough to get a job. She also met my father that year; he was thirty-eight at the time. My grandfather thought my dad had money because he drove a little sports car, and happily gave her away in marriage just ten days after she turned seventeen. I was born two years later. She went from being a child to being a wife and then a mother before most girls her age had even completed their first year in college. She hadn’t had the opportunity to date, or get to know herself like most people do in their late teens and twenties. She didn’t know what the world was like outside of her little bubble of home and church life, and never learned how to survive on her own. She was raising me as best she could only with the resources and examples she had from her own parents, and those resources were twisted and absolutely insane.

Continue reading A Stone Skipped V2: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child →