In response to the blog entry, Tante Fanny, Pam responded:

[Reading your family stories] is like reading true-life Grimm’s Fairy Tales … the really scary ones!

I do see what Pam means! Particularly my mother’s stories, like the one about Tante Fanny — and the story of my father’s race against time to stop the doctor from aborting me. What kind of bedtime stories were these!

When I think about it, Pam is right. Many of my family stories are just like the original Grimm Fairy Tales or like tales from a horrific Gothic Novel. And there are more stories yet to tell that you may be too young for!

And then there were the real-life events where I was on my own, not in a jungle to be raised by wolves, but in a world where I was perhaps raised by the books I read and the ideals presented in elementary school.

Of course, I’m sure these dire family stories had an effect on me — difficulty in breathing, fear and all that, but wouldn’t you think I’d really be twisted and awful? I’m not — at least, I don’t think so.

Of course, the content of some of the stories seems so off the wall. Yet there are other people who grow up with really terrible terrible events, and they turn out reasonably in the realm of OK. Certainly, they had heartache and some damage, but they were not DAMAGED in capital letters.

I think I know why that is.

For example, to you and just about everyone, my family stories are so startling, so off the wall. They are in such contrast to all that you know. You perhaps grew up with Mary Had a Little Lamb. I also grew up with Mary Had a Little Lamb, but your life may have been mainly Mary had a little lamb. As a child, I must have taken things in context and dashed between different worlds as though there was nothing to it. My father loved animals, and yet he was a butcher who slaughtered little lambs. That’s just how it was.

At the time, for me and for my mother and father, my life, their lives, and the family stories were normal, every day, and not anything untoward. My life and the stories my life was made of — they were normal, every day, not anything dreadful.. I didn’t know life was supposed to be any different. I didn’t know I was supposed to be scarred.

I was brought up in a family culture. It was just like being brought up in any culture, the way some people are brought up in South Africa and others in Denmark, or on a farm or in the big city, or grow up speaking English instead of Russian or Spanish. It was just what was. Nothing remarkable at all.

But here’s the good thing. Look at it this way. My mother and father sat down and told me stories. It was a special time. To be told stories is even better than being read to. Certainly much better than being put away in front of the TV which, of itself, seems so Twilight Zone to me.