I've written here often about what it's like to be a war child and get PTSD for 6 years in the midst of close urban combat in a civil war as a missionary kid overseas.  I mean CLOSE urban combat.  Close enough that soldiers took over my house and stuck their rifles out of my own bedroom window.  Close enough, on the other hand, that a rebel combatant lost his head and hit my family's car with a homemade bomb he threw at us knowing we kids were inside.  And on and on for 6 years, from when I was 9 to when I was 15, and that last year to top it all of I was tortured by a military patrol that mistook me for a rebel near my house.

So it's not wonder that even though I also had a happy childhood in between war disasters on the mission field in South America and I love to remember them so much I became a Spanish professor these past 40 years, I passed on fatherhood.  Both of my parents were mentally ill before we lived that long in a war zone.  My father was an untreated bipolar who often nearly got us killed in manic episodes, and my mother had an untreated case of borderline personality disorder. 

Then on top of that, they both got PTSD from living in a war zone, and so did I along with them.  That meant that when I was a kid they began to beat violently on each other with their fists and household objects, breaking windows and breaking furniture weekly, and then they started beating on me, breaking bones.  When my dad brought a shotgun into the mix, I left home before graduating high school just to get out of there alive and came up 5,000 miles from South America to the USA all alone at 17.  

So I am the only one who got into therapy in my twenties, and there I learned both my parents had been abused badly as children themselves.  "Hurt people hurt people," my therapist taught me.  Learning that really helped me understand all of the madness and mayhem I survived both in the family war inside my home and the civil war out in the street growing up.  Forgiving them was hard still, though, and if I ever did that to kids of my own I had a hard time seeing how I could ever forgive myself.  "Hurt people hurt people," and I was hurt and wanted it to stop with me.  Therefore, quite young I had a vasectomy to keep from ever fathering children at all just in case my PTSD recovery didn't work well enough to keep me from hurting others because I'd been hurt.

Well, I'm 62 now, old enough not just to have been a father, but old enough to be a grandfather at this point.  I've worked so hard on my recovery that even though I've been marries and divorced twice, there NEVER was any violence in either case, ever.  I would have been a great dad.  

The beauty of it all is that I've got two students who are like children to me, and I'm so grateful to them both for how they stay loyal to me and in touch beyond anything I could expect.  I am grateful for T because it's amazing that he's kept up with me ever since he was my college advisee back in 1992.  After he was my college student, I got him into grad school where I myself had gone, and he made me proud when he became a college Spanish professor himself like me.  He recently did a long Zoom chat with me.  Talking to him helped me hear myself about my future retirement plans to translate a couple of Spanish novels to English, and they're sound.

Today it was A who got in touch.  I am grateful for A now because it's my last semester after 40 years of college and she's as smart as T was in 1992.  I've had a lot of good students over the decades, but these two are my pride and joy.  She keeps up with me, too, coming to have lunch with me to celebrate because she's graduating from university with honors soon.  She's going to go to grad school now to become a Spanish professor like me and T as well.  

I'm so blessed, I can't stop smiling.  Life's been hard, I can't live with anyone else in the same house because my startle response from PTSD is so high I'm jumpy all the time even if they're kind and supportive around me.  My divorces weren't because I cheated or argued, but because I was touchy and jumpy all the time and neither of my wives could get close to me without triggering me.  I took medication to calm my PTSD  hypervigilance and startle response symptoms for married life, but it took so much Seroquel to get any effect that it badly damaged my kidneys.  So I divorced each of my two wives and I live alone, but now I'm surprised at how I have a lot of love anyway from these two kids, these former students of mine.  I'm so grateful.

What a day I had today with A.   I'm still smiling.