In The Beginning....She threw boiling pots of soup at his face...

If I am really going to tell all the terrible secrets of my past, I really should begin at the start. But that really is irrelevant. Instead, I'll start with my families start of bipolar. Cuz I can trace this back three generations, four if you believe some of the stories. It all started with my Grandfather and Grandmother on my Mom's side. Dad is just a sperm donor, we'll say because he was never in the picture long enough to be anything more.
My Grandfather was 1 of seven children and his father was the poorest profession in the world at the time, bizarrely, a Chemist. They went sometimes days without eating and when his father did bring home food, the children would be awoken in the middle of the night even to eat. Sometimes it was only a loaf of bread, which later spawned the in a roundabout way our families most favored recipe, "meaties". Anyways, for some reason, my Grandfather was the only child to NOT be named after a family member, and was the only one to be phsyically and emotionall abused by his mother. She threw hot pots of soup at his face, came charging after him with a knife, and later on when he was in high school would tell him he could do something then wait til a few minutes before he was due to leave and say nonchalantly that he couldn't go. He grew up watching all his brothers and sisters being loved around him, but never knowing it himself. It made him crave it.
My grandmother was a child prodigy, she began the piano at age three, could play anything and everything put in front of her face. But she was forced into this because her mother was a mediocre pianist who married instead of following her dreams. My grandmother was homeschooled til Junior high and even then got up two hours before needing to get ready for class and praciced the piano, she went to school, came home, did her homework, and played the piano til dinner, then she went back for another hour of practice before bed. This was her life til she was sixteen.
She had two brothers, one seven years older and one seven years younger. Her mother loved them but criticized everything my grandmother did, "You played well, but on the third stanza of the second page you missed a note" something that no one, unless they knew the song intimately would ever be able to tell. When she was twelve, she went to a church picnic. And there her older brother introduced her to my grandfather. He was seventeen and joining the Navy the next day, he'd tricked his mom by telling her he'd gotten bad marks and needed her to sign off on the paper. But she signed him off to the military. Her brother explained that his girlfriend dumped him and he needed a pen pal, so they chatted for an hour and that was it.

They wrote letters for four years and fell in love, before he came back he asked her to marry him and she said yes. THey got married, got pregnant quickly and quietly, and she told her mom the news and never played a piano again for five years.

Now It was said that my Grandfathers' mother was "touched" but from what I've gleaned is that she was schizo-affective. and must've either been raped or had an affair she felt guilty about and took it out on my grandfather.
My grandmother had two generations back of her family that had drug addicts. She has now become engulfed in depression, and although she takes pills for it it does nothing for her, and she is in total denial.
That's the history of where it came from in the Early stages....