The Drums Beating House

The purpose of this book is to provide an account-as accurately as I can-of events that happened through several generations of my relatives. It is also a guidebook for me; a manual of sorts that helps me remember what happened and allows me to live such that I concertedly and conscientiously not repeat the events of the past. 'They' say that abuse is cyclical and often manifests and repeats in subsequent generations within families. I wake up each day and, as my goal, I set about proving this theory wrong. I strive to exist as a polar opposite to what my parents were, still are and what their parents were (and still are, as in the case of my father and his mother) to them. As a second but equal goal, I raise my own children in an environment that is filled with love, warmth, patience, peace, acceptance, encouragement and empathy; traits that were, in a profound way, absent from the lifestyle in which I grew up. While I have a few amber memories from my childhood (the 1980's) and young adulthood (the 1990's) these few attempts at goodness and delight are dewdrops in what was otherwise a Category 5 hurricane. No parent is perfect. Everyone has faults and flaws that stem from a variety of genetic and environmental causes. Children are purportedly resilient creatures, always springing back and ready to give second chance after second chance because of that internal drive many of us are born with that requires us to please our parents. But if the value for the quality of parenting were a scalable, measurable number, and if a child's resiliency is also a measurable number, logic dictates that there are extremes for each of these scales. It is around these extremes that I found myself engulfed until I left Pennsylvania at the age of 20.