It is funny how memory and thought work sometimes. I had no real plans as to what I was going to write about today, but then this song came up on the old mp3 player, and suddenly, I knew, although I was not entirely happy about it.
In fact, I tried to talk myself out of it, because this is a large and very scary subject for me to deal with and the part of me, the very big part of me, that operates to keep me calm and comfortable and safe is screaming “No! Don’t do it! Why bother? It will make things worse!”
Maybe in the short term. But in the long term… it could help a lot.
So where to start? Well, at the risk of being trite, at the beginning. Of me. My life.
I am pretty sure I was a happy kid up until a certain point. My siblings were around (largely good, thought occasionally a pain), my mother was around more, I was friends with the girl next door and the girl across the street, and things were pretty decent.
And I was, I think, a popular and charming kid. I had no fear of adults, and I would strike up a conversation with anyone, usually bemusing and amusing the heck out of them with my verbality and volubility. A little freckle faced redheaded kid with more smarts than is good for him and a sunny and quirky personality. I was kind of a phenomenon, I imagine.
But then my father took me to The Spa, I nearly drowned in a pool accident, and after that, he molested me in the shower.
That broke me, I think. It’s hard to say, because these are memories of early childhood, well before school age, and a lot of other things changed for the worse in this general time period. My sweet, gentle mother went back to work, to be replaced by a babysitter for the day, and a busy, emotionally absent, depressed mother in the evenings and on weekends. My siblings went off to school, as did my friends, who were both a year older than me so they went off to kindergarten (unlike me) and then to school, leaving me alone with the babysitter.
All of this, molestation including, all happened when I was 2 or 3 years old.
After that, well, Daddy wasn’t there. He was never a big figure in my life after that. I feel sort of weird and sort of bad about that now. Part of me, despite how much I hate him now, kind of wishes I had tried harder to get to know him and to understand him and make him more of a part of the family, instead of this “abusive him versus the rest of us” isolating dynamic that evolved.
I don’t know. Maybe given his deep issues, that never would have worked. Perhaps this is part of the egotism my therapist mentioned, the one that makes me think I can fix things I can’t. I really am a heck of a negotiator. But who knows. Probably, there was nothing I could have done.
But that’s what it was like for the rest of my childhood. For the most part, I just kind of avoided my father because dealing with him was unpleasant because he was impatient and volatile and I was shy and sensitive and well, rather wimpy, and we just didn’t really get along.
We never argued or anything, though. We did not interact all that much at all, and when we did, I was always very wary and a little scared of him, and so without a basis for trust, and with the effects of his molestation of me (if not the memory) always there in my mind… there was really no relationship.
And his dinner time tirades didn’t help matters either, even though they were literally never directed at me. It was always Anne, the oldest, or David, the oldest boy, who bore the brunt of his verbal abuse over the dinner table.
And sad little me, I would try to mediate. As though it was all a big misunderstanding. I was a young teen before I figured it that he was an abuser and this was something he needed to do, it was how he dealt with all the stress of life outside the house, mostly his job. He took it out on us, usually at the dinner table. He could no more stop doing it than he could stop breathing.
Like most rage based abusers, he considered his tirades one hundred percent justified, and was completely incapable of ever admitting he was wrong about anything, ever. Imagine having to defend everything you have ever said, no matter how mad or upset you were, till the day you die. No wonder he was such an asshole.
Still, not a major factor in my life personally for a lot of my life. I occurs to me now that this was a bad thing… I had no real paternal influence in my life. I had a father, but not a father figure. That has to have had a lasting effect. For most of my life, having nothing to do with my father seemed like a good thing. Avoiding him was a full time occupation.
But, at the risk of sounding hopelessly poetic, who was there to teach me to be a man?
Nobody. And then, just to cap it all off, my father talks my mother into his cockamamie early retirement scheme, which just happens to mean yanking me and my brother out of university and essentially wrecking both of our lives.
I am a disabled recluse, and my brother works at Wal-Mart. (Sorry, bro… but we both could have been so much more, you know?)
That is the rough and sketchy outline of my relationship with my father. And the thing is, I didn’t really start to hate him until I had been away from him long enough to really get a grip on just how much he had destroyed me at the beginning and end of his influence.
Some day, I will write him that letter. I feel writing this diary entry has gotten me partway there.
Some day, Dad. Some day.