Believing God

These past 5 weeks I have started to learn about my family history - a project that I looked at a couple of years ago but got nowhere fast with.

The gnawing thought that I ought to give this another chance wouldn't go away, and I again assumed the focus of understanding the ins and outs of the software I had tried to use previously.

There was one critical question that my grandmother raised that has torn at my heart and hers, being "who looked after me from birth until I was fostered?".

She'd posed this question to her mother shortly before her death and was told that "it is history" and not to concern herself with it. This, of course, didn't help Gran as not only does she want to know but has been asked on more than one occasion by her children too.

Learning how to research family history has been a real learning curve, or actually feels more like sinking under a sea of the unknown, while trying to tread water and only sporadically getting a glimpse of the shore as a bearing point.

I like research - I am good at it - but starting this was different. It is a case of you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what questions to ask, of whom to ask them, let alone where to go to find answers or what is going to jump out at you next.

To say it is a roller coaster of the mind, body and spirit is an understatement.

Today I burst into tears on my husbands shoulder as I had finished skim-reading a book I got from the library that I had hoped would help me get inside the culture of the country at the time of my grandmothers childhood.

The reality that the same atrocities that had befallen the author at the hands of Catholic orphanages and homes, could also have been thrust on my grandmother (and her sisters) was too much.

The only conclusion I could come to was that the nuns and priests had to have been mentally and psychologically brain-washed to have thought that what they were doing was permissible. Isn't that a trademark of a cult?

Here you have 'orders' of people taking vows of chastity, frugality, poverty etc, that they may appear to keep on the outside but which consumes them on the inside to the extent that they take others down with their sin.

What happened to the author of the book and others is despicable, abhorrent, disgusting, inhumane, revolting, degrading, dehumanising...I could go on.

I felt as if I oughtn't tread any further into my grandmothers past, as I didn't know that what I am yet to discover is going to be helpful to her. She is 83 years old and only wants an answer to her question about where she lived and who cared for her in her childhood. That's it. She doesn't deserve to have old wounds re-opened, anxieties re-fester - if that is the whole reason why she doesn't or can't remember.

I want to buy her the book, but I think it would be too much. As real as it is, and as honest we are as a family, it is NOT something I am going to let my eldest daughter read right now.

For anyone who reads this book and can identify with it, I am truly sorry. The tears I shed today are equally for you. My hope would be that you have someone that you can turn to, who will say "I believe you", "It wasn't your fault".