broken home victims?
When Ronnie's parents split up she was 14. She was totally uprooted by a broken home - forced to leave her school, her home, her friends and her father and go to a new country where she ended up at 16 having to start work, live on her own and become an adult two years before she was legally acknowledged to be one. Despite all that, she has no victim mentality and cannot understand it in her adult children whose experience of a broken home was like a breeze compared to hers.
"Sure, I was thrown an eight-ball," says Ronnie, "but like most kids of the Baby Boom generation who are now over 50, like me, I didn't know about the blame game and the mentality of victim-hood that pervades today’s society. We just got on with life."
"I saw my parent's divorce as a good decision for them," explains Ronnie. "My father was away most of the time, thankfully, but when he came home it was non-stop arguments between them."
"Even though their divorce stuffed up my life in every conceivable respect I never even contemplated blaming either of them for my miserable marriage years later," says Ronnie. "What a grossly irresponsible thing to do! It would have been very convenient to dig down in my history, recount every abuse I suffered at my parents' hands and blame them for all of my adult miseries, but what good would that have done me?"
"Just because I remember these things does not mean that I harbor a 'victim' mentality," says Ronnie. "I am merely relating the facts of life - facts that you just have to wear when you are too little, or not yet adult enough, to be able to do anything about it."
"When my parents split up, they were both approaching 50 and the divorce affected them far more adversely than it did my sisters and I," explains Ronnie. "Selling the family home meant that my father had to live in a trailer and my mother had to become a housekeeper in a hotel - hence my having to live on my own at 16. I couldn't afford to pay for a hotel room where my mother worked and lived, so I just had to go out and find a cheaper place to live."
"I didn't like having to spend so much of my paltry wages on room rent," sighs Ronnie, "but I understood that my mother couldn't afford to give me a room in the hotel. She had to take care of herself - and so did I. Eventually, I had to take on two jobs in order to have any sort of worthwhile life."
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