Yes, this again. Back to talking about my father.

I hate him.

I hate him for his short temper and abusive ways. I hate him because he could not learn to control his temper and therefore did so, so much damage to the whole family. I hate him because he refuses to even admit he has a problem except under extreme circumstances, and even then, only in a vague, meaningless way.

“Oh, I guess I was too hard on you kids sometimes. ”

Um, no. That’s not it at all. You weren’t a harsh parent, you were an abusive parent. If you had been interested and involved in our lives enough to give us a hard time over slacking off or not applying ourselves, that would have been a lot better.

Or at least different.

No, you abused us. You abuse anyone who gets close to you. Hence you ending up all alone and working some crap McJob after working all your life for the government.

Does that strike you as a success story? Is that how you pictured your golden years? All alone, far away from your family, living paycheck to paycheck?

Which reminds me of another reason I hate my father, and this one is far more discrete and specific. I hate you for convincing Mom to do this crazy-ass early retirement shit, even though it meant taking both me and Dave out of university with some vague thought that student loans would take up the slack.

Where was your pull yourself up by your bootstraps ethic then?

Then you take the severance pay t from the government and blow it on a patently ridiculous home based business helping people with their resumes.

People who need help with their resumes don’t have money, Dad. Because they are unemployed. It astounds me that I could not see that at the time. I guess I was still part of the social illusion of my home back then.

You know, the illusion where you are practical and sensible and good with money and thus deserving of your position as administrative head of household.

Well you sure blew that out of the water when you started a resume polishing business in a small town on PEI with a high unemployment rate and where anyone with any brains and/or education leaves as soon as they can.

Great business plan. Totally worth the squandering of your legacy.

But hey, you got what you wanted. You got your little office where you could sit and feel important and pretend you are contributing. You got to buy gadgets, like a computer, a printer/fax/copier, an electric pencil sharpener, and other office bric-a-brac. You got to boss me around and have me dependent on your approval.

You even got the best space heater in the house.

So you blew a bunch of future income when you took early retirement (see Dad, that’s why the government offers it. – it means they save money by paying you less) then blew a bunch of the rest of it on a home based business that never stood a chance of being even remotely profitable. That’s two strikes right there.

The final stroke was that you drove Mom away, resulting in a divorce in which you sold the family home to strangers in order to make splitting assets easier.

Remember that home, Dad? Good ol 135 Belmont Street, home of the Battling Bertrands? The front room where we had our Christmases, the kitchen where all our meals were cooked and then consumed on the kitchen table you built with your own hands? How about the back yard, where once a garden grew? Our cherry tree, our rhubarb patch, our summer savory and our chives? The front yard where your roses and lilacs grew, and where your four children played together? The bedrooms where your children spent so many years growing up?. Does this ring a bell yet?

All of that is gone, gone, gone. Because of you. Because of you, a stranger looks out the east facing window where I used to look up at the stars. Someone else’s things are sitting where my crib was, and where I would lay my head for many years after? Strangers are walking the hallway where your picture of the Queen hung. Strangers go up and down the stairway I used to bounce down on my butt when I was a toddler and where I would clip my head when I hadn’t quite adjusted to being six foot tall yet. Strangers are using the basement where we did all our laundry and where I used to watch Voltron on the black and white TV while Mom watched her soaps upstairs. Strangers use the back steps  where we used to wait for the cats to decide whether or not they really wanted to go outside. Strangers use the second basement where you had your workshop. There is not one place in that home that is still how it was when I was young.

Because that’s the thing about selling the house, Dad. When you did that, you sold three decades of memories, and the only place which ever felt like home to me.

Now new people are making new memories there. And God bless them. We weren’t the first owners of that house, and they won’t be the last. Things change. Life goes on.

But that’s the house where you promised me many times that there would always be a home for me.

Guess you fucked that up too, huh? Another promise broken to go with the promise that you would pay for a college degree for me just like you did for Anne and Catherine.

I hate you, Larry Donald Bertrand, because you actively failed me on every level. You weren’t a competent father figure. You weren’t a competent provider – all the debt that was revealed in the divorce proves that. Ditto for your skills as head of household, naturally.

I hate you because I can directly trace at least sixty percent of what’s fucked up in my life to you and your inability to act like a grownup.

So yeah. I hate your stinking guts, Larry Donald Bertrand.

But God help me, I love you too.

I will talk to you nice people (and not my Dad) tomorrow.

Warning, this song makes some people really angry.

Personally, I find it amusing as hell.

So. My father. Larry. My inner prosecutor. My terrible myself. .  The glowering eye in the sky eternally torturing the life out of me by holding me accountable to a systematically engineered to be  impossible standard and then punishing my noncompliance.

And the worst thing is that I have been believing everything it says about me.

It has to come from my father. He is the only abuser in my life. The only one who has perpetrated the classic abuser’s fraud of convincing you that it is possible to escape their wrath and that therefore everything they do to you is your fault.

After all, you could have spared yourself just by doing the right thing, right?

But there is no right thing. The abuse requires no justification because its purpose is not corrective, it’s sadistic. The abuser abuses because they need to abuse. It’s how they deal with stress. They take it out on others. That’s the very essence of sadism. Inflicting pain on others makes the sadist feel good because it externalizes their inner pressures.

At the expense of increasing the inner pressures in others.

It’s like a transfer of pain. Boss yells at Dad. Dad yells at Mom. Mom yells at Junior. Junior kicks the dog.

So it has to be him that is the killer inside me. I have not seen that before now because I thought the fact that his tirades were never directed at me, and that I not only saw through his bullshit. I called him on it and won,  somehow meant I was immune to him.

Seems silly when I put it like that.

After all, I still had to live with him. I was still afraid of him. He might not have focused his dinner table tirades at me but I could still bring his wrath down upon me with “wrong” action. I was walking on the same goddamned eggshells as everyone else.

And I bore witness to those dinner table tirades. I was there, I felt his anger, his insanity, his evil, and I saw the damage done to Ann and David by it. That’s why I interposed myself between father and child-victim when I was absurdly young.

I couldn’t just sit there and let it happen. And my illusion that it was all just a matter of poor communication and misunderstanding lasted a long time.

But then I saw through it all, and that’s when he and I did battle. And for what it’s worth, I won. I verbally kicked his ass so hard that he started eating his supper separately from the rest of us.

And we were much happier. Like I said at the time, if he can’t behave in a civilized manner at the dinner table, he doesn’t get to eat with the rest of us.

That was a pretty big step for me. developmentally speaking. I can see that now. It is the nature of fathers and sons that, at some point, there has to be some form of battle between them to sort out the hierarchy.

It can be as simple and innocent as the first time a boy beats his father at chess, or it can be as intense and dramatic as what I went through, or it can be as explosive and violent as someone storming out the door, never to return.

Most of the time, I imagine, it’s nothing more than a somewhat tense and awkward conversation where the father assures himself that his son still respects him even though the son has surpassed his father in some way, and/or the son gets reassurance that his father will always be a father to him no matter what.

See, this is the sort of insight I could bring to a family sitcom.

But that has nothing to do with me and my father. I really resent this new knowledge that he lurks within me still. I feel like it is yet another way that asshole is ruining my life. When I moved away from the Island, I foolishly convinced myself that because he was out of my life, he no longer had any effect on me.

And to seal the deal, I locked all my feelings toward him inside a deep vault made of acid bitterness and ice cold contempt.

That gave a sense of detachment, I suppose, but I see now that it was not a real solution. I still have a lot of his anger and the fear it generated and the long term stress of living around a fucking animal like him in me, and that is where my deadly pattern of being my own abuser came from.

I have not yet dreamed up a way to confront this about myself. Right now, when I contemplate this newly revealed truth about myself, all I see is a hard white void between me and it. Reaching out to it and integrating it back into my personality will be hard work.

I could write him that letter I have been meaning to write him. I feel more ready to do it now than I ever have before. I know that the process of doing so would un-can a very large can of worms and unlock all kinds of crazy shit in my mind, but it would be worth it if I could finally halt my inner persecution and feel comfortable being myself at last.

It might not happen soon. But I can feel this letter growing in my mind, and therefore it is only a matter of time before it is born unto the world.

Before now, I have been unable to even truly contemplate writing him because even the possibility of opening a line of communication to him made me so angry that all I could imagine doing is screaming at him incoherently for hours.

Once that was over, any letter I would write would be an act of aggression against him. An attempt to make him suffer for all he has done to his own goddamned family. Everyone he ever claimed to love. It would be an act of pure revenge.

And I am not saying he doesn’t deserve it. But that’s not the path I want to travel. If I write this letter, it will be an attempted not to hurt him but simply to make him understand.

That may well hurt him. But that would not be my intention.

I just want him to get that he fucked up big time with us.

After that, I can go back to having nothing whatsoever to do with him.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.