Life after Residential School

Canada
February 14, 2008 1:57pm CST
I am wondering if anyone out there has been to Native American Residential System, or if your Mom or Dad. My Mom was a Residential School victim for 11 years. She was taken away from her family when she was 6 years old. During her first year there, her mother passed away. The family had sent a letter to my Mom to the the school to let her know about her mom's death. A few months later my mom retuned after the school year, she immediately went looking around her house and then ran up the stairs, her family asked what she was doing? She said I am looking for mom, what had happened is that the Preacher and Nun's had opened the letter without even letting her know about her mom's death. During her first year back home, my mom, just revealed to me yesterday, she was probably 8 years old, one of her relative tried to rape her. She then asked to be sent back to the school where she stayed for 10 more years. There there was no physical attention whatsoever. So when we came into this world, my mom did not know how to hug us or to even tell us that she loved us. I saw my mom being beaten every weekend by my dad, thus in turn there we many occasions that we had to save my mom from taking her own life, to excape the beatings. She did not know that this was not normal. They were not taught any life skill or anything. Today I am an alcoholic, along with a few other members of my immediate family. I tend to get myself into the exact same kind of pattern that my mom was in. I became my mom's care taker, actually I played all the roles, blacksheep, lost child, clown you all that stuff. But I am trying to break that cycle, it's a hard one to break. I am happy to report that my son is not an alcoholic, however he does still have the ism workaholic.
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