I would like to start this by saying that I understand that my up front, tell all approach to life is not for everyone. All I can say is that I am sorry if I make you feel uncomfortable, but this is what works for me and it is what I believe is part of my journey.
I
am the daughter of a deeply disturbed, paranoid, alcoholic, and a perpetual
victim of a negative self -fulfilling prophecy.
I want to be clear that I am not vilifying my parents. I have grown to
understand that they were shaped by events and situations that were sometimes
out of their control, sometimes not. I haven’t lived their lives, and I can’t
say that in the same situations I wouldn’t be the same way. I can only speak
for myself and how I’ve coped, sometimes well, sometimes not so well, with
being their daughter. I can now openly
and honestly say that I have been abused (I hate that word) by both parents, in
one way or another. Yes they’ve hurt me and yes they’ve loved me. The truth is my family was sick
before I was ever even a possibility.
Being
a child in an environment of negativity and dysfunction is very complicated. As
children we model our behavior from those that raise us. I was raised in a
world where screaming, yelling, name calling, and door slamming were everyday
happenings. I remember being about six,
and my Mother was screaming her head off and growling at me that I was evil
just like my Father. She would tell me that I was stupid, and make fun of my physical
appearance. When you’re six, you believe
everything your parents tell you, because you haven’t learned to question them
yet. In that moment she put something
inside of me that would be there until my late twenties. I don’t know that any of them realized that
everything that was said to me or at me, buried itself in my identity. I began
to see myself the way I was described by them, this is something I still fight
today at thirty one years old.
I
experienced a loneliness and hopelessness when I was living with my Mother that
I can’t even put into words, reliving the feeling today brings me to
tears. I couldn’t figure out what I had
done to make her hate me the way she did. The way she looked at me was with
utter distaste, as if my existence was off putting to her. There were days that I wished someone would
just kill me so that I didn’t have to keep making her hate me. Truthfully I learned pretty early to hate her
too. My childhood in that house with her
was sad, confusing, and at times dangerous.
I never felt like she wanted me, or that she heard me. She taught me to scream and hurt others as a
way of getting my point across, and then she would punish me for it. I felt like I was always in trouble, mostly
just for waking up every morning. I don’t
know if it was really me she hated, or the position she put herself in having a
child as a teenager. I think in
hindsight she resented me. She has hit
me, hog tied me, pushed me, and slapped me in the face. Still, nothing hurt like
the way she hurt me inside. She left scars inside of my heart and my self-
esteem that I don’t know will every completely fade away. What I
can’t understand is how she could do these things, knowing first- hand what it
felt like. Her Mother hated her
too.
When
I was a teenager my Mom had a lot of boyfriends, who all ended up living with
us. These men were each disgusting and despicable
in their own way. There were about three
drug addicts, a narcissist asshole, and a sociopath. The worst of these men,
was oddly the best to me. He was a sociopath who having too much to drink one
night, ended up holding me, my Mother,
my Uncle and a family friend, hostage for over four hours, while he beat my
Mother mercilessly in front of us. I thought
she was going to die that night, I thought maybe I would too. Before this traumatizing event, he lived with
us for over a year. He defended me against my Mother multiple times, and couldn’t
understand why she would treat her own child the way she did. Even he, a
sociopathic monster couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
The
only place I have EVER felt safe was with my Grandparents. They saved me,
literally and figuratively. There was
yelling and screaming in their house too, just never at me. They yelled at each
other and called names, to me this was completely normal so as a kid I never
thought anything of it. They loved me. I
heard it, and I felt it, they loved me.
My Grandfather was my knight in shining armor, I don’t know that I have
ever felt as loved and as whole as I did in his presence. I was the absolute
most important person in the world to him and he made sure I knew it. There was
one night that my Mom was being abused by her boyfriend in the other room, I
was scared so I called my Grandpa and told him I was sick and needed to go to
the hospital, this wasn’t abnormal for me because I was really sick at that
point in my life. With tears in her eyes, my Mom told me she
knew what I was doing and it was ok, that it was better I left. I felt like a liar and a coward, leaving her
when I knew what was going to happen. I
got into Grandpa’s car and started to cry, I told him I lied and that I was
sorry. He brought me back to his house, made me some cookies and chocolate milk
and explained to me that what I had done was very smart, and very brave, and
that no one was going to be upset with me for it.
My
Grandmother, has been my acting Mother from the beginning, but particularly
when I was 16 and my Mom kicked me out of the house for stealing money from
her. I believe that my sheer will to not only survive, but strive comes from
her. When I was little I thought she didn’t like me, when really she cared for
me in ways I’ll never know. She has always been my advocate and she has always
had my best interest in the forefront of her mind and her heart. She is strong, and she is motivated and she
is a damn survivor if there ever was one. She is not without flaws, I have
always felt like she lacked compassion, or if not she lacked the ability to
express it. If you are ever looking for someone to feel sorry for you, she is
not the one. Sometimes I worry that I am that way too. Sometimes it feels like
she doesn’t care because of her “brush yourself off and get back up” kind of
attitude. There is no time to wallow in self-pity in her book. It is admirable,
but also comes across as cold at times. I
struggle with being cold too. It isn’t that I don’t feel, its that I feel so
much that I am afraid to let it out because it may swallow me whole. I think I have this fear because of my
Father. He has indeed been swallowed whole by his emotions.
My
Dad is a complicated man, with a mean streak in him like I’ve never seen in any
other human being. His life story is one of heartbreak, trauma, and terror. I
can’t imagine his pain, and truthfully I’ve tried just to gain some insight .
My Father is the most angry person I’ve ever known, and probably ever will. He
has no coping skills and absolutely cannot let anything go… ever. He is mean, and he is emotionally selfish. He
is irrational, paranoid, and totally unpredictable. I believe that he is dangerous. He’s also an alcoholic. My Father is highly
intelligent, which I think is to his detriment.
He obsesses and over analyzes and creates elaborate conflict in his
mind. The world is out to get him, and so am I depending on the day.
My
Father has abused me, but he has no idea how. He can’t see what he’s done
because he doesn’t understand how to view life from anyone’s perspective but
his own. He’s called me every name under
the sun, gone on and on about what an idiot I am, I am just like my Mother, I
am useless, I am a typical female, blah, blah, blah. He has had the power to reduce me to tears
for my entire life, and he uses it whenever he feels he needs to. He calls it “getting
my attention”. He is sick. I went to
live with him when I was nineteen after my first attempt at independent living
failed. I had no idea what was in store
for me. Living with him at nineteen through
twenty two were some of the most terrifying years of my life. There were nights that I would come home
after work to, windows broken out, writing on the walls and various smashed
objects strewn about the house. Of course, Dad was passed out drunk in
bed. On the unfortunate chance that I
came home too early and he was still drunk and awake, I was in for a long
night. If he laid eyes on me, I would become the object of his rage. He would rant, rave, scream, yell, cry, and
babble for hours until I either left again or was able to convince him to go to
bed. He terrorized me for three years.
My
relationship with my Dad before I was an adult was actually pretty great. I
only saw him once every few months, and he’d take me for the weekend. He would
feed me pancakes, take me to Toys R Us, play video games with me, take me to
Green Valley to see my Great Gram, and we’d have a great time. I think when I
was little he was able to keep his demons at bay when he was with me. I think
he genuinely wanted to save me from seeing that part of him. I always knew he
was an alcoholic (everybody knew) I just never had to see it until I was
older. My Dad tried his best to be good
to me, he always had my favorite shampoo at his house, and always gave me money
for the ice cream truck when it went by, he tried to teach me things that he
thought mattered and he always told me that it was his job to protect me from
the world. My Dad still protects me from the world and to be honest I still
feel like he is the strongest man alive. There was just a period of time that I
wish someone could have protected me from him.
Today,
my relationship with my Father is strong. I have created boundaries that he
cannot cross and we have figured out a balance in our lives. I tell him
literally everything and he understands me in a way that no other person on
this earth can. I think I inherited part of his tortured soul when I was born,
there is a part of me that is dark and it is a reflection of him. I trust my
Father, despite his own broken heart and shattered mind, he is always there for
me never wavering.
So,
I guess that’s a major part of my story. I think these people and these
situations have shaped me in ways I haven’t figured out yet, and in ways that I
have. No doubt, I still have a lot of work to do, to shed some of these heartaches
but I’ll never stop trying to be better.
I think if we decide to break the cycle, then we will, but first we must
break the silence.
