A follow-up to an earlier email, showing justice taking place for a most deserving person. You’ll remember this story, I’m sure:
Warms my heart to see this.
You know, I could’ve benefited from witnesses ever since age nine or ten. The cop that hurt Sophie and I in the desert was just a kid, trigger happy and itching to make his mark on the world, as it’s said.
Still, nothing he could ever do or threaten me with could ever scare me, or terrify me like our own father did. He tried his darnedest, though.
My heart goes out to any of you survivors of brutality by someone you knew and shouId also have been able to trust. Something about it cuts so much deeper than a stranger’s hurt ever can.
I lived it almost on a daily basis as a kid, and it casts a pretty horrible shadow over my life still: Nightmares, trust issues, inability to maintain intimate relationships, eg with my wife and daughter and others.
Superficial friendships once were terrific, peachy-keen, okey-dokey because nobody knew what went on behind closed doors at my house. Smiling outwardly but too often crying inside.
Endless efforts at therapy and other potential long-term solutions, great people and terrific ideas, have worn me out.
Things I saw and heard no kids should ever experience at home. Perhaps you, too. But it wasn’t our fault.
In my case, “unplanned” is the term civil people use, while the generic, religious term in our house was and still is “ultimate shame,” mortal sin, etc.
My Catholic birth family made it into an art form, and it explained a wide variety of sins. Child abuse, it’s seems, was conspicuously absent from these.
You know your version of those terms because you may have heard them growing up, too. Some things never change, some people never are quite grown up, mature enough to have kids.
Adding insult to injury is how I felt and what I experienced one day long ago when confronting my childhood abusers.
Just as the guy in the White House can say and do something one moment, and then, right in front of you, deny it the next and completely believe his own lie, I was stonewalled, too.
The guy in the White House, merely by being his usual sneering and condescending self, can inexplicably direct his favor toward some folks one moment and the next issue scathing epithets toward others.
It hits very close to home, for I’ve been on the receiving end of the scorn probably hundreds of times.
It’s a home I tried, many times, to leave, first as a kid and then, as an adult, ever since.
In being unable to seek validation from my original abusers, I’ve found myself unable to find it elsewhere.
No amount of words like “We paid your college tuition,” or “You’ve always had a roof over your head” can ever take the place of words of contrition, offered voluntarily and without condition, from those who first caused the hurt.
I’m not just speaking for myself, but for anyone who’s ever had their trust violated by someone else.
In grade school it can be the “first crush who left me heartbroken.” But what I speak of here isn’t schoolboy puppy love. Rather, it’s a shocking, slap-in-the-face introduction to how violent grownups can be.
At home, behind closed doors and involving adults, all the name-calling and door-slamming, and the screaming and shouting and cussing, often escalated into domestic violence. It becomes criminal behavior, a crime, and it should have involved the police.
If kept behind those closed doors it becomes a hidden crime and an ugly secret that all who live within it must never tell.
Even when it comes time to standing in line outside the confessional, waiting your turn to kneel in the darkness and say “Forgive me father, for I have sinned,” you must never tell.
Add kids and it becomes child abuse, and yet more violent crime at home. It’s yet another secret that must be kept, especially among the kids now.
But what happens when the kids grow up? What becomes of their secret? How is it resolved in their mind? Can it be resolved?
One obvious answer is to take the wtres back to the source. You’re not a little kid anymore and, even though you may be scared, no one can hurt you now.
So you bring up the subject. There’s no pleasant way to do it, and it’s awkward for everyone, especially you.
“Why would you say these things now?” you are asked, “We always did our best for you kids. All we ever wanted you to do was to get with the program.”
In the face of my own abusers decades later I found my self doubt rearing it’s ugly head once again, as if it never left. That’s because it didn’t.
And even though I know I’ve truth on my side, the things I saw back then, the screams and the feel of his raging hands on you and the fury in his eyes were all real, it did happen no matter what they say today.
Now they’re telling you it’s not true, you’re making it up and, finally, the closest expression of guilt you’re likely to get from them, “You need to get over it.”
But you can’t. It was a lifetime in the making and, if it were that simple, you’d have done so long ago.
This denial of this on the parents’ part for whatever reason, such as “Good Catholics don’t do such things” places the weight of the knowledge of these crimes forever on the kids.
Though it was never our fault, it was blamed on us nonetheless.
We’ve become scapegoats, and some of us will even raise our own kids the same way. Or else break up the family first, as I did.
Either way, no one wins, everyone loses something we never should have in the first place. Still, we are scapegoated and this time it’s undeniably our own doing.
I’ve witnessed my share of this, and perhaps you have, too. To my credit, this way of life never permeated my home as an adult.
Having never learned the nuances of physical closeness with others through my parents despite the many chances they had to do so, I feared the unknown and repeatedly fled.
My recollections of dinnertime conversations between parents then were actually commiserations about the various people in our lives.
Usually a person was defined by their ethnicity or religion. My father was most vitriolic about this, but mother held her own:
“Those Jews/Jigaboos/Protestants always X, Y and/or Z,” they’d say. “I cannot understand what’s with those people? Shame on them!”
And somehow, because my mother didn’t cuss, I didn’t fear her like I did my father, who did. By default and in the absence of anyone else, she became the one I turned to for love and understanding.
But the people I relied upon weren’t even mature enough to be self-reliant yet. In many ways, they still aren’t, and never will be.
I’ve just described the American president and, given his ubiquitousness, it’s not a surprise that:
A. He can trigger these memories for many of us and
B. These insidious triggers can fire anytime.
I’m too tired to write more; going back over these things is draining.
But doing so is the only way I knew how to remain safe. I hope you’ve a healthy outlet, too.
Regardless, always remember that what happened then was not your fault.
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