I was born into a comfortable, middle-class family. Mom stayed at home with us kids and dad had a white-collar job. I am the oldest of 3 children, I have a sister and a brother.
I guess the trouble first started brewing a couple of months before I was born. Apparently my parents had been playing cards at my maternal grandparents house one evening. They came home and started to drift off to sleep when the phone rang. My father’s parents had been in a car accident. My grandmother was killed instantly and my grandfather lingered for several months before he passed away. My mom tells me that my father changed after that. I only ever knew him the way he was after, and he was not a nice man.
I don’t remember much of my childhood. There are some memories that stand out in sharp contrast, but much of it is sort of dull and gray. I was always a quiet child and very nervous. Men, in particular, terrified me. When I was young, my mom would have to come with my on play dates if my friend’s father was home. Strange to be so fearful of men…I have asked my mom if there was any physical or sexual abuse that I might have repressed, and she has assured me that there wasn’t.
Round about 4th grade I realized that I was good at school – that I was smart. This was a mixed blessing. It gave me something to take pride in, but it left me open to many years of teasing by my classmates. I was always the fat kid, and a nerd to boot. My self-esteem took a bludgeoning from all sides it seems. I made a couple of close friends, but was pretty alienated from most of my peers.
At home things weren’t much better. My father started drinking, moderately at first and then more heavily as time went on. He was emotionally distant from all of us kids. I don’t have any really fond memories of him. He was always hypercritical of us. If I got a 95% on a test at school he would scoff and ask why I didn’t get a 100%. He seemed to get a lot of satisfaction out of putting his children down. It seemed as though we were more of an annoyance than a blessing to him. He yelled at us a lot, which often made me burst into tears. His normal reaction to that was ‘You wanna cry?! I’ll give you something to cry about!’ Thankfully it was an empty threat.
As my father advanced in his career he travelled more frequently on business. It got to be that I looked forward to his trips. I couldn’t wait for him to leave so we could have some peace. When he wasn’t travelling I used to wait in dread for him to come home from work and start drinking.
My father wasn’t an angry drunk, he actually became more pleasant after a few drinks. It was the only time he could show affection to us or to my mom. He used to disgust me when he would get drunk and act like he cared. Why couldn’t he care when he was sober? Why did he have to be such a bastard to be around when he wasn’t drinking?
My mom, bless her soul, tried to run interference as much as she could, but she had her own dark secrets. She was the victim of sexual abuse as a child and her mother was also an alcoholic. She was in a loveless marriage with a man who verbally and emotionally abused her. She essentially raised us kids on her own. Knowing what I know now, I’m actually amazed that I’m not more screwed up. I admire my mom’s courage – it can’t have been easy for her.
My father died when I was 20. His heart just stopped one morning when he was getting ready for work. He died on our kitchen floor with my neighbor performing CPR on him and my mother looking on. He was 49 years old. I was away at college and remember being called to the administrator’s office where I learned the news.
His funeral was something of a spectacle. I have never seen so many flowers in one place in my entire life. Crowds of strangers – his colleagues I later found out – came by to offer their condolences. Almost universally they would tell us how much our father loved us and how proud he was of us. The bile rises in my throat at the memory. Why did we have to hear this from strangers? Why couldn’t our father have just once told us that he loved us, that he was proud of us? Was this just something those people felt they had to say because they didn’t know what else to say to us?
Those memories are so vivid even 25 years later. It was my first experience with death and it was a hard one to swallow, although in retrospect I never really missed my father. I grieved more because my illusion of stability had been shattered than I did for him. After all, as far as I was concerned he was just a sperm donor who happened to make sure my physical needs (food, clothing, and shelter) were taken care of. I don’t know if I ever loved him, although I said I did daily like the obedient daughter I was raised to be.
It is only now, in my mid-40′s, that I can say my father was an alcoholic and an abuser. In retrospect his death was something of a blessing. In death he couldn’t hurt us anymore. What I have only recently come to realize is that his legacy of pain lives on. The emotional scars run deep. The hardest pill to swallow is that the least little thing that reminds me of him – even subconsciously – can trigger an episode of PTSD that can lead to a major depressive episode if I don’t get help fast enough. It’s like walking around with a time bomb in your psyche. You never know when you’re going to experience something that will set it off, and each time it goes off it gets harder and harder to pick up the pieces.
