God “Dissed” Me

But I was.  I was very disappointed and I stopped believing.  It was the summer and I was 12 years old.  My parents were heavy alcoholics.  My dad was a teacher and appeared to be fully functioning, but he would drink at home, drink on the road, and usually spend a significant amount of the weekends at a favorite bar. He was a passive drunk.  My mom was a super aggressive, violent, and mean drunk.  She was a terrorist to her own kids.  I bet she was sober 15% of the time I was growing up. No one wants to hear about all the details.  Nowadays, everybody has some story about how they were mistreated.  So, I won’t elaborate too much except to say that she beat the &^%$# out of us and tried to poison my two older brothers once.  She beat all of us with 2×4 piece of wood, belts, toys, hands and pulled our hair until the scalp separated from the underlying layer.  But she especially beat my second to youngest sister.  Year after year went on like this. But one year she became pregnant with her 8th baby.  (2 miscarriages, and 5 live births)  She was 45 yrs old. I was a preteen and I had been going to the private parish school and church close to our house.  I prayed and prayed that this pregnancy would change her and that she would be sober permanently.  I really didn’t think about the fact that if pregnancy could change her, why didn’t she change after the first 8?  But, clearly that never entered my mind.  She gave birth to my youngest sister.  She made my dad leave my other brothers and sisters home and take her, the baby and I to a hotel.  He bought her a ton of liquor.  She handed the baby to me and I was responsible for her that weekend until we came home, and eventually for the next 6 or so years.  We’d go places and everybody thought it was my kid.  Yuck, I’d think.  I’m just a kid. This would have been ok,  if she had stopped drinking.  But the complete opposite happened and I lost my confidence in God.  I was disappointed.  How did I get from there to here?  I’ll have to tell you that story another time.  But, just to make it clear, I am not disappointed in God anymore.