The Dynasty - Origin Story

The title of this blog may be a little odd, but it is one that is deeply significant to me personally. I grew up in one of those picturesque families. My father had a high paying job and my mother was able to stay home to raise her children. We lived in a large home on a large block fairly close to the center of the town. I was the youngest of 4 children. All of us had music lessons or played sports.

My mother always ensured that we dressed in a way that was presentable. However, there we often time when her fashion taste was radically different to mine, and this caused some degree of tension. I remember frequently feeling self-conscious because I felt like I was radically overdressed compared to my peers when attending functions outside of school.

Things were not what they seemed though. I don't have living memory of interacting with members of my father's family growing up. And my memories of my mother's family are filled with volatility. I hear many stories from both of my parents about how controlling and nasty my father's father was. There were numerous stories of how poorly he had treated my mother in their early marriage and how the rest of my father's family were 'just dreadful'. But the stories were always vague and lacking in detail. There also seemed to be a great deal of secrecy. I was aware that my father maintained contact with his family, but only from his workplace, never from home - not in my living memory. I do have memories of doing some weekend work with my father. I manned the phones and the front desk on Saturday mornings from 8am - midday for $10 a week. Occasionally one of my father's family members would phone the office and ask to speak with my father. They never knew it was me on the phone. I always had conflicted feelings about taking these calls and forwarding them through to my fathers' office. But I knew that it was not my place to ask about them.

I remember having contact with my mother's family in my early years of life. But the memories I have are mostly around how my mother would become inconsolably sad for days at a time after taking a heated phone call from her family. It didn't seem to be any one family member in particular. Contact with her parents or siblings seemed to always end with my mother being very distraught. I was a child, and details of these events are not clear in my mind, but I do remember the way these calls made me feel.

I was aware that my mother did not have a happy childhood. She grew up in an extremely religious and ridged household. She never used the phrase abuse, but the stories she told were of events that would be classified as abuse. Her family was also extremely poor with much of what her father earned being returned to the Church. Both of my mother's parents had lost their mother in their early childhood and were subsequently raised by fairly cold and distant fathers and stepmothers. I have vague memories of interacting with my mother's parents and siblings when I was a very young child. These memories are not bad, but they do lack any memory of warmth or affection. By the time I was in primary school, we had very minimal contact with either of my parent's families.

But all accounts, my father had a happy childhood. The stories he told about his upbringing were always positive and he spoke with a sense of affection about his relatives - except in the presence of my mother. The story I was told was that my father's family did not approve of his relationship with my mother and treated her very poorly. As such, my parents chose to limit contact with all members of my father's family.

From early in my life, my parents would talk about the dreadful experienced they had both had with their families. My mother and father said that they have 'created a new dynasty' with our family that was different and better than what they had grown up with. They would talk with a great deal of pride about how hard they have worked to create this new dynasty and there was an unspoked mandate to be loyal to the dynasty and to defend it.... at all costs.