This is a question I've heard many times throughout my life. From my mom, my counselor, from friends in joking tone, and from a new dear friend that I met a a retreat I got to go to.
"How did you end up like this?"
When asked by my mom, she was asking in relation to supporting those who find themselves on the outskirts of friend groups. Being someone that would sit with the loner, until the person became comfortable enough to make friends and I would take their place sitting alone.
When asked by friends, they were wondering about my "prudish" nature, my quirks, and my "strange" belief systems.
When asked by my counselor, it was in the tone used when Leigh Anne (Sandra Bullock) asked Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) how he ended up being so gentle and not even wanting to hurt anyone in a tackle when playing football.
When asked by this new dear friend, I'll call him P.J., it was a tone of maybe amazement? One of wanting to know more. I had just shared with him that I feel a bond with bike gang members and truckers, in the same sentence that I love Veggie Tales and babies and didn't want to kiss a boy until my wedding day.
My answer to the question, every time it is asked, is "I don't have any idea."
Watching the movie Courageous before work today, and I was blown away by the statistics they use for the incidences of children from fatherless homes being several times more likely to end up addicted to drugs, pregnant in teen years or a father of a baby in their teens, more likely to land in jail, and have multiple other legal problems. It's crazy!
I don't come from a fatherless house, but my dad was not always present. He was in the garage, or at work, or otherwise occupied.
Both of my parents came from households where they were beaten. My mom's mom beat and abused her. My dad's dad beat and abused him. They came from broken homes, so they tried to keep us from growing up in a broken home. Unfortunately, this is difficult to do without seeing it modeled. Instead of getting hit, my brother and I got silent treatments, isolation, and parents who would isolate from us to prevent anger from over spilling. Oftentimes we also received raised voices and watched as many holes were punched into walls in anger. I'm so grateful that I never had to watch my mom or brother get hit or hurt. They say, and I believe it, that more trauma damage is sustained when survivors not only receive the trauma, but have to watch a loved one go through it. I believe that to the core of me to be true.
Even hearing the yelling matches and fights as I drifted off to sleep when I was a child was difficult, and I was too young to know what they were fighting about!
I don't think I ever put two and two together until today. Somehow, watching Courageous has got me processing why/how I ended up the way I did. I can easily point out how it made me more prone to trauma in my college years. I can point out the ways that it has given me unhealthy coping mechanisms. But that's not what P.J. and my counselor are asking. They are asking about how I turned out okay, maybe even "good". It would be acceptable to be angry, hateful, resentful, depressed, and unforgiving. For awhile, I was. There are still parts that I battle with. However, the bounce-back from my trauma has been interesting.
I don't know why I am the way that I am. It'll be a question for the Good L-rd someday.
