If GM were to read this blog he would claim that I was bashing his family. That I had no right to post any of what he would consider ‘these private family matters’ online for millions of anonymous people to read. Anyone who has grown up in an abusive relationship or been the victim of domestic violence would be able to recognize this. These are the Secrets That Must Be Kept. This is how domestic violence and abuse survive. Breeding in the shadows, unexposed like some virus waiting to be spread. There is an almost superstitious quality in this silence. Keep the silence and that makes the violence less. Keep the silence and it may stop. Keep the silence and it may not come to pass. Keep the silence and it may not be true. Keep the silence and it may go away. Keep the silence and take the reality out of it. Yet violence doesn’t go away. It is not forgotten and it is very real. Violence can fester in that dark place only to later come bursting forth in pustulant foulness, wreaking havoc and physical and emotional destruction.
My father was a man who worked very hard at his job. We had a middle class income. My father never wanted people to think he was cheap and did not believe in saving money. If I asked for a dollar he would tell me he was broke while opening a wallet full of twenty dollar bills. He was my cousin’s favorite uncle. He wanted a son, got three daughters and treated us as if we weren’t worth the flesh on our bones.
My mother was made to deal with the bill collectors. When my sister’s were small, she had to walk downtown with them in the wagon to do her grocery shopping because my father wanted to take the car to work and didn‘t want to car-pool. On the weekends he would drive the seventy-two miles down the lakeshore to stay with his mother and work with his brother. Not for pay, just to ‘help out J’. When we were smaller my mother, sisters and I were drug down there every weekend to stay at my grandmother’s house while my father either worked, or went out drinking with his brother.
My sisters left home as soon as they could so by the time I was five my mother and I stayed home alone, with no transportation, every weekend while Dad left for Uncle J’s. ( Eventually Uncle J, in appreciation for all Dad had done for him, paid off my parent’s house for them. )
We got to see my Mom’s mother and sisters once a year when we went down for the Fourth of July. My mother didn’t have a car of her own until I was ten.
When I was very small, Dad seemed to like my company. He tolerated me anyway. My parents were raised in the Depression era. Mom was forty-one when she had me and Dad was forty-eight. Usually, when I was small, if I did one of the many things kids do to get in trouble my mother would deal out the punishment. Mouth washed out with soap for calling her a Fucker, my favorite word at two, sitting in the chair for what seemed like hours for minor infractions and getting my ass whipped with either a belt, hand or metal spatula when I really pissed her off. I don’t really remember my Dad spanking me but maybe once or twice. I must have been about three or four years old when I met with the type of punishments my father could dish out that weren’t verbal in nature.
We were at the dinner table. My parents always seemed to dish up these huge adult sized portions of everything for me. We had green beans. Green beans were fat and slimy, reminded me of dead caterpillars with their legs hacked off and smelled like rotting vegetation the way my mother boiled them. I had gotten in trouble for trying to get the family dog, a fat beagle named Hilda to eat them. She had the same opinion of them as me. I was whiny. Didn’t want to eat them no way no how. My Father was sitting beside me. I was sitting on a piano stool. An antique one that’s seat unscrewed to get taller or shorter. My father was getting more and more angry at me and I was getting more and more stubborn. Out of the blue he backhanded me so hard in the mouth that both the piano stool and I went over backwards, cracking my head hard against the floor. I was surprised, scared and hurt and as I laid on the floor crying, no one did or said anything except my father who yelled at me that if I didn’t shut up and quit crying he would ‘give me something to cry about’.
Shut up or get something to cry about. So it began. His verbal abuse, name calling and put downs got worse and worse. I was ‘pig-headed’ had a ‘mean streak’ and was a ‘lazy shitass’. I wasn’t the only one who got cut down on a regular basis by my father. My sisters, before they moved out and my mother as well. My mother, who had graduated college was a ‘know it all’ and who was overweight and couldn’t ‘think of anything but her stomach’. Then there was me, who later began to have a weight problem I still have who always had ‘eyes bigger than your stomach’. As I began to get older, things were only worse. The fights my father and I had were always screaming matches. If I showed emotions like frustrated crying or anger I was always punished for it. Sarcastic cynicism grew in me and what started out as anger repressed again and again turned in me to this blinding destructive fury.
Even before my teens I lost all respect for not only my father but also my mother. I looked upon her as a spineless pathetic bitch for never standing up to my father either for me or for herself. When the screaming matches turned to physical blows and my father would punch me in the face my mother would stay in the kitchen and do nothing. I always thought it was because she was afraid for herself. She says it was because she didn’t want to ‘make it worse’ for me. She would never even see if I was alright afterwards and there is still a deep furious anger I have in me because of this. I have not been able to forgive her yet it seems.
At school I was the scary girl with the ‘Fuck You’ attitude dressed head to toe in black with black eyeliner and mascara. I hung out in the parking lot with the rest of the ‘Freaks ‘ smoking Marlboro reds in a box and cutting math class and study hall to go hang out down by the river or at the local coffee shop until it was time to go home.
Screaming matches between my father and myself were constant. During my junior high years he still had me cowed with his violent attacks. But my rage and fury only grew every year. If I cried I was punished more so I bottled it. Even now, the only time I can really let go and have a really good cleansing cry is if I smoke some weed first. I don’t cry much. It turns to anger instead.
He would always ask me, in anger, ‘Why do you gotta be so goddamned mean?’
‘Cuz I learned it all from you!!’ I would spit back.
I don’t know how many times I told him I wished he were dead. He would tell me, ‘When I’m dead you can come shit on my grave.’ I always told him I damned well would.
For some insane reason having to do with a kids self worth or some such shit, I passed eighth grade with straight Fs and was sent on to high school. My first two quarters went well enough in spite of having some upper-class girls spreading bullshit rumors throughout our whole small town school that I was pregnant the first two weeks of my freshman year. But it soon became apparent that school, especially math was not my forte and I knew by my Junior year there was no hope salvaging it unless I repeated a year and there was no way in hell I wanted to do that. Technically I am still on Christmas vacation from 1989.
This relationship with my father not only affected my feelings of self worth, but my ability to succeed in school and in some ways have a successful start in life as an adult. When you grow up being told constantly that you are lazy or can’t do something, when you grow up knowing your parents find you an annoyance and an irritating burden, the ability to become a self sufficient, confident adult becomes extremely difficult. Not only did this constant negative and sometimes violent relationship affect my ability to be healthy in my own emotions, its effects would carry through to every relationship I would attempt to have with men as well. The relationship I had with my father not only left me emotionally battered, it left me emotionally starved and open to victimization even before I left high school.
My first long term relationship was with a man six years older than me. I met him a month before my fifteenth birthday. I was supporting us both by the time I was seventeen. For my eighteenth birthday present to myself I broke up with him. Two weeks later he almost killed me.
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