Ninety Years

I will start by saying that the last several years I have come to peace with my dad and my relationship with him. I found forgiveness for what he did, and with that, it gave me the strength to sit in awareness and understand that there was not anything I could have done about the abuse I endured. Sometimes my thoughts and words about him may seem like anger, but they are not. They come from a place of trying to understand why he did what he did, and do so in the rawest, most honest way I can. 

My dad, if living, would have just turned ninety years old. Instead, he removed himself from dialysis when he was sixty-one and died within a week. I sometimes think my dad died of laziness. It was a lack of effort in living his life because he wanted to be waited on by my mother and sister. He wanted someone to change his colostomy bag. Help him with his home dialysis. He wanted a caretaker. My mother left him three-years prior to his death, finally she had enough and felt empowered to go, and my sister no longer cared to see him because she felt unsafe in his presence. He became more isolated. I also think my dad was ready to die because he was sad and lonely. He did not know how to handle his sadness, which may have been depression and bipolar if diagnosed correctly. However, I do think we are quick to label people with a diagnosis as an excuse for people’s behavior. Perhaps, we give them labels for it to make sense to us, the victims, because how else could someone be so cruel? It is sort of a way to justify his horrible actions, but labels are also excuses and harmful to people who actually do have depression and bipolar disorder. However, just because my dad had tendencies that did lean towards depression, I think the rest was pure meanness and he was possibly a sociopath. Here I go putting a label on him. 

Looking back, I think my father was mostly absent from me. Certainly, he was there, present physically, but emotionally neglectful. He had his normal routine of getting up in the morning, dressing in a suit and tie, putting his money clip deep into his pockets, drinking coffee and whatever breakfast my mom made for him, and then heading to work as an insurance agent. Then, he would come home from work, or maybe the bar where he had a card game, liquor on his breath, change his clothes, and sit on the couch smoking a cigarette, drinking more coffee or possibly more alcohol, and reading the newspaper from front to back. He would then wait for my mom to call him to the table for dinner, which was usually a five course meal, and I would try to sit in a chair that was near my mom. We would sit at the oval shaped table as a family and I would simply block out the conversations that took place, hoping like hell that everyone stayed calm. There were a few occasions where food may have been thrown across the table or my dad would pick up our dog and throw her against the couch if she begged too much. At least, those are the times that stayed with me. 

I still try to process some of the abuse I endured from him. Much of it I have never told anyone, and some of it I disclosed to my wife within the past year. I am not sure why I even attempt to speak of it, and on the other hand, I am not sure why I wouldn't. They are my experiences. I think there are times, most times, that people don’t want to hear sad stories. They don’t want to read or hear about the hard stuff. Instead, they want to slip away in their happy place and read their beach romances and watch their reality television shows to escape. Our world has become a reality television show in many ways, growing more shallow, a circus, and is losing meaning. Too harsh? Maybe, but I think there is also a lot of accuracy to that statement.

For me, I no longer get stuck in the past because I have come to a place in my life where I realize there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. The past is not within my control and I only have the present. Still, I find that by reflecting on the events that ultimately shaped me, it brings more self-awareness. With self-awareness, I can cope, heal, and grow. By sharing part of myself with others, I have been told it helps them as well. 

My dad had an impact on me. He was not a mentor, at least not in the way a son needs. He did not model for me how to be a good man, a man with virtue and character, or how to treat my wife. He did not model how I should conduct myself in the world. I came to understand in my mid-twenties that he modeled for me how not to be. The truth is, I believe for whatever reason, my dad tried to ruin his youngest son. He did his best to harm the life out of me. To disrupt my thoughts leaving me stifled in darkness and possibly be like him, live like him. 

His abuse towards me started subtle. It was slapping me in the head with his gold ring, often leaving a knot under my hair so no one could see it, giving me headaches. I cannot tell you how many days I started school with a sore head. Often, it was slapping me in the balls if I walked too close to him while he was reading his paper. Then, at the age of seven, it turned to the type of abuse I still struggle to admit. The type of abuse that seems dirty and embarrassing. Abuse that confused a young boy because I knew it was wrong but felt helpless. The threats that came with it, “If you tell anyone, I’ll hurt your momma,” or, “If you tell anyone, I’ll hurt your brother.” I loved them both and was afraid for them, so I stayed silent. I muddled through my day in fear, often feeling uncomfortable at school and not wanting to be around anyone. I would daydream often and there were many days when I worried about my mother. Even though she was at work, I knew from her black eyes or listening to her crying through thin walls, that she too was being hurt by this man. I hated going to school because I feared being away from my mom. I wanted to be with her because he mostly hit her when they were alone. I did walk in on him once when he had a shotgun barrel in her mouth. I remember looking up at him, his face seemed to shake in rage, red and clinched, and she looked over at me in desperation. She survived that incident but her teeth were chipped as a result. This is when I started to visualize killing him. I even loaded the exact shotgun he used on my mother and started the long walk up the stairs, ready to take aim and shoot him as he read his paper. The problem was that all we had was bird shot, and even from a young age, I realized this would not do the job, but pepper his thick skin a little and piss him off. It was fortunate for him, and me I suppose, that we did not have any slugs. 

My dad continued to randomly abuse me. He would take a shovel to my back, always the back because he knew I would cover it up. Plus, that is all I gave him to hit as I laid curled in a ball on the floor, knees tucked to my chest. I endured his beatings, understanding at an early age that he would eventually stop. Not shoveling the driveway before he got home as an excuse for him to beat me, or maybe not raking the leaves well enough. He never talked as he slapped my body with the shovel, standing over me. As I covered my face, blinding myself of the onslaught, all I ever heard was heavy breathing. He never was in very good shape and became winded easily. 

I remember when I was eight, the police came to our house because they found my dad’s little sports car high up in a tree. He was coming home from the bar drunk, and his car flew off the road as it inclined into a bridge that crossed the interstate below. He fell from the car, crawled up to the road, and a couple of young men brought him home before the police could arrive at the scene. I still remember looking out of the bedroom window at the cop cars and officers questioning my dad. One was a woman and part of me wished she would be able to sense what my mom was going through and help us. They couldn’t give him a drunk driving ticket because he was already home, but he did get other tickets. When I heard what happened, my young mind wished he would have died in the accident. I thought, with his death we would be free. I thought about that often. 

Some of the abuse, the abuse I struggle to say out loud, stopped by the time I entered middle school. Even the physical abuse stopped for a while. Mostly, he just ignored me or made sure I knew that I was nothing. Nothing to him and nothing to the world in general. Nothing to anyone is what he wanted me to think. A few times he even tried to convince me that my mom didn’t really love me and that I caused her problems. I knew that wasn’t true because my mom told me she loved me every single day of my fifty-three years with her. Her love was a shield to his arrows. 

I was often told that I was a burden. He cut down my athletic abilities, but always in private. And no matter how good I was doing, how many touchdowns or tackles I made, it was not good enough. Even after receiving the most valuable player award, I was told that I got it because the coach liked my mom. It sounds petty but he tried to take away my confidence and belief in myself. He did the same with my grades at school. I could hardly focus on school so my grades were not good and I often missed work. This was around the time that my dad gave me my last beating, and the worst one. I was working out in the basement as I often did. I was in seventh grade, twelve years old, and in that awkward age where I was trying to figure out what it meant to be a young man. I think my dad saw me growing strong and I’d like to think he thought I might one day become a threat to him, but I will never know. He opened the door to the tiny room and stood there. No one else was home. I knew this, which is why I went downstairs to lift weights instead of being around him. I thought he would do what he usually did, which was pretend I wasn’t there. As he stood there looking at me, I couldn’t tell what he wanted. I did not know if he’d been drinking or he wanted me to mow the lawn or something. I laid the bar back down on the bench and that is when he said, “Put the boxing gloves on and I’ll teach you a few things.” I did as he asked, and my young mind still had hope that maybe one day he would love me and want to be around me. Perhaps, he was actually about to teach me something. He did. He told me how to hold my hands up to protect my face and how to keep my elbows and arms close to my body to protect my kidneys, liver, and ribs. He showed me how to throw a jab and right cross, and how to turn my hips and shoulders to get more power from my punch. He showed me how to drop my chin so I would not get knocked out. Then, after his lesson, in a moment that I will never forget, he commenced to give me the worst beating I ever had in my life. I tried to stay on my feet as he punched me from every angle, covering my face like he said, but one after the other the punches landed. I kept my eyes open the entire time, looking at him and he punched me with rage and then with what seemed like glee because he smiled as my body started to break down. I fell to the hard floor and I covered up and put myself into a ball like I did when he hit me with the shovel. It was instinct to protect myself. He rolled me over and placed a knee in my belly, forcing my body open, holding my face against the cement, and slammed his fist into my stomach, ribs, back, and the top of my head. He rained down so many punches on me that I could not think about my ribs hurting, or my back, or my head. It was my entire body that hurt and the pain was so overwhelming that I expected to either pass out or die soon. Then, a strange thing happened. It was something that I have been able to do my entire life when dealing with pain, I went numb. I stopped feeling and my mind went into a different place that is still hard to explain, except maybe one could call it a trance or deep meditation. I did not cry but I was so scared. I hardly made a sound except the occasional gasping for air, and just took it all thinking that he was not going to stop this time and would eventually kill me. I remember there was peace with the thought that I may die. I would be done with all of this and hopefully everyone else would too. Then, as quickly as the beating started, it stopped. He stood above me, took the boxing gloves off, and then delivered one more blow, a kick to the lower back. He then walked out, looked back before closing the door and said, “If you tell anyone, I’ll hurt your momma.” He did what he always did, he used love against me, to silent me. I never told a soul, even a glimpse of what happened on this day, this beating, until I was fifty-three years old and my mom was now dead for a few months. It was my wife I shared a little bit more of myself with, and I am finding I let a little more out with the passing years. 

I walked around in a great deal of pain after that day. It was in the fall and my football coach thought I bruised my ribs in practice or a game, and told my mom the same. They gave me a rib protector to wear. I remember talking to my coach one day and he was telling me that if I kept playing the way I was, that one day he could see me playing college football. Here was a man who seemed to care about me, believe in me, so I almost told him my secrets. I was close to telling him what was happening to me, to my mom, but I stayed silent. Fear kept me silent. Love kept me silent, love for my mom and brother. Fear for them being hurt like I was. 

I buried my pain, the abuse, deep down and compartmentalized it to survive. I left it deep in a place of subdued memory, but through high school I raged inside with hate for my dad. I became depressed and often thought about killing myself. I took pills that I thought might kill me. I drank more alcohol, often in private, taking away the pain. There were many times I would fall to the floor as my back would tighten up, squeezing like a vice, and I didn’t really put it together that it was from the beating, not sports. I made it through these years but gave up much of myself. I didn’t have the desire or want to play sports anymore. I failed some classes at school and often skipped. I pretended to be okay around my friends. I goofed around, covering it all up, and sometimes becoming reckless. There were things I did that no one ever knew about, like shoplifting and driving drunk. There were times when I would walk to the rock quarry near our house and try to start the equipment that was left there, and then jump from the cliffs of the quarry into rock piles below to see if I would make it. I survived during this time because of love. Love from my mom and a girl who I was getting to know and she convinced me that I was worthwhile to be around. A girl that would one day become my wife and have to witness the darkness and panic that would come out to play every so often. A woman that I cannot thank enough because, as many of us feel who have depression and trauma, I am a burden to her. I know she does not think this or she would have left by now, but the dialogue that depression tells you is brutal. 

When my dad called me when he was sixty-one and I was twenty-five and he asked me, “I am thinking about taking myself off of dialysis and I’ll be dead within a week, what do you think I should do?” My reply to him was, “Go ahead.” My thought was that the monster will finally kill himself. He will not stalk my mom any more. He cannot hurt anyone. I will not have to visualize killing him each time I am in his presence. I will not have to worry about him growing old and some day wanting us to care for him because I was unsure if I could. His death brought relief. A type of relief that comes with a great deal of guilt. 

I am not reliving my past as if it is this horrible time of my life that controls me. These stories are not meant for sympathy or to make excuses for my own trauma, depression, anxiety, and panic. It is simply my way of making sense out of my own journey and who I am. It is to show others who have trauma that it does not have to define you or ruin you. You can break the cycle and live a good life. You can endure hard things and actually become better, stronger because of it. As I mentioned in a presentation I recently gave, “I never want anyone feeling sorry for me or thinking my life has been difficult. Certainly, like many of us, I have suffered in various ways, but I am grateful. I am happy.” 

I did not allow my dad to ruin me. He may have set out to do so, I will never know. The man never once told me he loved me. At least not that I can remember. Even my mother once told me as we sat on her patio talking, “Hon, your daddy never loved you and I’m sorry for that.” It was brutal to hear from my mom, as if she was confirming what I thought, but now I knew it was true. The man never told me he was proud of me, but he did not ruin me. I am too strong for that. I have established a way of being that he never was able to because he was weak. It is a way of being that he would not understand. I have developed resilience that he never could because he gave up on life. I have survived because I was loved deeply by two women in my life, my mother and wife. I have survived because I refused to be defeated. I refused to let my trauma define me or halt what I wanted to accomplish from life. The greatest revenge I could ever have on my father was to forgive him, not be like him, and live a good life. I have accomplished that. 

I choose to share my story and be vulnerable because I want to help people break the cycles they are in and not be ruined by the things that happened to them that they do not control. None of us have to travel this journey alone. We just have to make the decision to put the work in to change the path we are on. We have to do the tough work, the internal work, and face ourselves for who we truly are and accept fully what we’ve been through in order to heal.

I am seven years away from the age my dad was when he died. The age he killed himself, which is something that is hard for many to admit and understand. He did kill himself when he took himself off dialysis. I believe he wanted someone to tell him not to, but I think we all knew our lives would be better without him. My mom’s life would be better. If he would have lived, he would be ninety. I hope I can make it that long, but if I don’t, I have accomplished more in my life than he ever did. I have lived true to myself and my beliefs. I have overcome all that he did to me and turned the pain he caused into good. I use my experiences to help others. I became a teacher because I knew who I needed when I was young, and I have tried like hell to become that for my students. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Why did I choose to take the pain he caused and use it for good? Well, because fuck him, that’s why, and I mean that in the best, most sincere way possible. Fuck him but I do forgive him. 

I did not let the hard days win.