Daddy Dearest

I do not know how it happens that we learn to protect our selves from pain, and loss, and doubt. We freeze at a certain age and never really grow beyond it. We freeze at the moment of pain, unable to move, for fear of dislodging the knife in our soul, the thorn in our spirit.

I have mixed feelings about my dad. I remember him as a great dad, who worshipped me as a little boy. He was incredibly smart. He could explain anything to me. He could make the most wonderful things. He painted, sculpted, wrote, built his own stereo system. He built a black-and-white television! He knitted me booties! But he didn't know how to be a father to an adolescent boy.

Why do we feel such an intense desire to grow up when we are children and such an intense desire to return to childhood when we are grown? My life froze in the spring of 1976 when I was thirteen and my father was fifty-seven.

In 1975 and 1976 my dad was trying to get a veteran's disability pension. He had been in a M.A.S.H. unit in World War II and was involved in most of the big battles of Europe. He had been drafted and was over there for almost four years. He was traumatized by those years. He also had some nerve damage in one hand from a bad cut he got during the war. So now, thirty years later, he went out to the Veteran's Hospital and was supposed to check in to the Neurology Ward for tests. Yet for some reason never explained to me he was admitted to the Psych Ward. He proceeded to have a mid-life crisis and a nervous breakdown.

Dad was hospitalized in the Psych Ward for many weeks in the spring of 1976. He talked to his therapists, took tests, made little things out of clay. My mom, sister, and I went out to visit him daily. But he seemed to be able to take very little of us. He came home in early May for about a week. But on one Sunday, Mother's Day as it turned out, he ate a piece of my mom's Mother's Day candy, grabbed his side and passed out. He was taken back to the VA where we were told he had to have his gall bladder removed.

About two weeks after the surgery he was still in the hospital. We went out to visit him He seemed like a stranger. It was like he saw me, little David, as a thing to be conquered. Was my dawning adolescence a reminder to him of his getting older? Had his time in the Psych Ward aroused memories of his own abuse as a child? As we were getting in the car to go home I said or did something, I don't recall what. But Dad got a look in his eye and yelled, "You God-damn little ass-hole! You're not gonna do that to me! You're a little boy and you're not gonna forget it." He then jumped into the car and started slapping me across the face, his knees in my chest. I screamed and fought back, mostly just trying to push him out of the car. Mom was yelling, "Watch out for Dad's stitches!" fearing Dad would spill his guts in more ways than one. Mom got the now hyperventilating Dad off of me, out of the car, and into the hospital. I was in panicked hysteria in the back seat wanting an explanation for why I'd been hit for the first time in my then thirteen years of life.

When Dad came home about a week later nothing was the same and nothing ever would be again. It seemed like everything I did resulted in another beating. He said I was incorrigible. He said I was not going to make myself the man of the family. He acted like he was jealous of my relationship with my Mom. And as she would try to protect me from his violence, it seemed to irritate him even more.

A typical scenario would run thus: David doesn't finish his dinner. Dad says, "Eat your damn food!" David replies, "I don't have to eat it!" Dad, bellows: "Why you ungrateful little bastard, quit trying to one-up-me! You are NOT going to drive me out of this house! I'll put you in a boy's home before I let you ruin my marriage!" By this point I'd try to get up and run away; he'd chase me around the house, and he'd eventually tackle me. He'd straddle my chest, pinning my arms at my sides and he'd slap my face back and forth asking if I was ready to behave. Finally I'd give in. But as soon as I was loose I was filled with such anger that I'd yell something horrid like, "I wish you were dead you crazy old man!" And the chase would begin again.

I only wanted to grow up and run away. Or did I only want to be six years old again.

Once he broke my wrist. I was told to lie at the Emergency Room and say I'd stumbled on the driveway. Being a good son, I did. As I remember it the chasings, beatings, and captures occurred almost daily for about a year.

There is so much more to this story! How Dad fell in love with his therapist from the VA (who was also a practicing sex therapist on the side.) How I was threatened with being "committed" when I was the only sane person in the crazy family. How Dad introduced his therapist-darling to the family. My sister and I could tell she was the "other woman" Mom didn't catch-on. The therapist-darling wormed her way into the family, bringing her two little girls over to swim in our pool, play in our yard. Dad loved those little girls. He beat me up. My dad finally decided he wanted a divorce; which Mom reluctantly gave him. Before my parents divorced they tried a few months of couple's therapy. Their "marriage-counselor" was none other than the "other woman" herself, therapist-darling!

All right, dear readers, you can close your mouths now.

The divorce occurred fourteen months after I was first "punished." After we moved out Dad never struck me again. The year of terror passed, the beatings ceased, and the scars grew deep. Dad came over for dinner many nights a week; and we talked every day. Dad introduced us to his new friends as his "Ex-Family" an unusual appellation to say the least. But Dad was pretty-much back.

There is always balance, a love and a hate. I remember as a boy climbing into my father's lap, smelling his T-shirt, rubbing my face into the man-smelling cotton. His hands rough, his whiskers a torture of pinpricks. His breath smelling of cherry Kool-Aid and cigarettes. I knew I was loved. But the same smells and textures and memories are also tied to my Dad sitting on me, straddling my chest, my arms pinned to my sides. He slaps may face, my head is banged against the hard linoleum of the family room floor.

If we turn off our lives to dull the pain of tragedy, we sacrifice the present, the now, the living. And it is only with time that we begin to heal, to learn to feel again, to accept, and to love the past with all its delights, with all its blemishes, and all its horrors.

David

When you talk about this blog later, and you will - be kind.

Copyright 2007 D. H. Maxine.