Towards a more tempered view of the past

I learned so many things this summer. Every time I speak to relatives and friends about the past, hearing their perspectives, I fill in the picture a little bit more... and it's more and more a greyscale picture. As a child, I "spoke like a child, and reasoned like a child" as the Bible says (1 Cor. 13:11) which is really, as I see in my own children, a very black-and-white view of the world. There's good, and there's evil, and the difference between them is clear cut.

In my child's world, my father (and his kin) was evil. My mother (and her kin) was good. Confusingly, my aunt was disturbingly both - rescuing us from our father, therefore good; terrorising and psychologically devastating us, therefore also evil. I grew up and left that place at 21, moving as far away as I could, and perhaps my understanding of my family didn't mature that much as an adult: I just wasn't there, and I wasn't really thinking about it. It's only now, as I have reconnected with old family friends and seek out deep conversation with my relatives when I'm in Vienna, that my black-and-white child's view on the people I grew up with is greying up, gaining depth.

My mother's best friend Erich, who also knew my father since he was 9 years old

Speaking to Erich, my mother's first love (and probably the only man she ever really loved) I learned more about my mother's young adult life, with him; but he also knew my father since he was nine years old. When I told him about my childhood experiences, Erich was horrified: "Why didn't she ever say anything? Couldn't I have helped?"

This made me see just how much my mother lived with what her life was like, she fled into music but she never reached out to see if things could be changed. She had grown up with a misogynistic father and in a dysfunctional family, and so that was what family and relationships were like for her: a trap, a place of suffering. Of course, my father's gaslighting didn't help: in his world, everyone else was always the perpetrator and he was the victim. Even us children, in his view we were being horrible to him by rejecting him; he never took responsibility for any of it.

When I became a Christian, I once wrote him a letter apologising for my part in things; that I had not honoured him as the fourth Commandment said. His response? "Finally."

My mother (left) with her best friend Hermi, who is still around and whom
I was able to meet and chat with this year too

Speaking to his sister, my other aunt, this year I learned that he had always been like this, always the victim. And that his views on women - his view of his family as possessions by rights, rather than love - didn't come out of nowhere either, but that his mother had a big part to play in this. I told this aunt about how he used to openly go to the brothel every Thursday throughout my childhood, blaming my mother because she was not giving him the intimacy he was entitled to! And that was the first time she had heard a different side of the story, having previously only been given his victim's view.

I also realised, in speaking to my sister who was somewhat closer to our father, as well as to his sister and my cousin on my mother's side, that the aunt where I spent my teenage years had very much hit my father where it hurt him most: in the money. He was always deeply about money and possessions; and she was incredibly wasteful. Thus demanding ever more from him, using us children as leverage: a perfect storm. What I had seen as a teenager as his unwillingness to support us financially, as he was required by law to do!, from his perspective he saw my aunt wasting money all over the place and asking for ever more. So he tried to tighten up and minimise his support for us in response. And of course he had a special hatred for this aunt too, so giving her anything at all (despite it being support for us kids) was a source of resentment.

Do I see my father as a good person now? Not at all. He made his choices. But I am beginning to see where these came from, what shaped him and what shaped the rest of my family. There is so much generational baggage there - and I'm so incredibly grateful that the trauma ends here, in this generation. Thank God.