Mental Health Support

My parents had no idea what a "normal" happy childhood might look like but they knew they didn't want their children to suffer the same sort of feral childhoods they'd endured. Me and my siblings were only semi-feral.

My mom's parents both worked in the shipyards as welders during World War II. When they weren't working they'd hit the bars and nightclubs with their buddies, come home, pass out, and repeat. (My grandma was ferocious, she could hold her own with the men. She could out-drink most of them too.)

My mom was a latchkey kid. The nice ladies (prostitutes) who lived in the apartment upstairs looked after her, encouraging her to do well in school and go to college. Not to do as they had done, as the song goes.

As children me and my siblings always had food and shelter but we were expected to be self-sufficient at a very early age. My mom quit doing my laundry when I was eight, for example. If we wore dirty clothes to school that was on us. If we were hungry there was food in the pantry, most reliably bread in the freezer (bought in bulk from the day-old outlet), government commodity cheese and powdered milk, and giant bags of cornflakes. There was also fish my dad caught, and sometimes meat.

My mom had a fierce temper, usually not directed at us. If I got in trouble at school, school administrators were often afraid to call her because she might storm in raising hellfire.