Without a Father to Call My Own
Last night, while IMDBing how old Michael Keaton is (63), I realized my father is 65 years old as of last month. While that might qualify him for Medicare and Social Security, it’s nowhere near old enough for me. Especially since his family line has a penchant for living as close to forever as human beings can reasonably live.
My father is the worst human being I’ve had the misfortune to meet. If that sounds like an exaggeration, I assure you, it isn’t. Both my mother and my best friend’s mother (who unfortunately chose to date him for a time) have restraining orders against him to this day. My mother divorced him 24 years ago, and my best friend’s mother broke off their relationship 15 years afterward. He raped them both, and was physically violent to my mother on multiple occasions. She’s been in the hospital more than once as a result of his hand.
I’m lucky in that he only hit me once.
I was a senior in high school, and living with him at the time. I had been on the phone with a friend who had to hang up and call me back. It would be a matter of moments between hanging up and the phone ringing again. I was sitting on my father’s bed with the phone in front of me; he was putting away laundry nearby. When the phone rang, we both reached for it, but I made the ‘mistake’ of pushing his hand away, saying, “I got it. It’s for me.”
In response, he punched me above my left knee, on the outside of my lower thigh. It left a bruise for well over a week — I don’t remember how long exactly.
When I backed away from him and said that he would never touch me again, I remember his laugh, as if to say how ridiculous — over this? I left that afternoon, and went to my mother’s house to exchange music on my iPod — my father’s place didn’t have iTunes. I don’t remember how I mentioned it to her, but it was casual — our relationship then was strained, nothing like it was now, and I imagine I wanted to tell her so she would feel badly about making me leave her house.
She didn’t say much about it, and I left to see a movie with my best friend — Silent Hill. We were cowered in our seats at the sight of various creepily crawling monsters when my mother tapped me on the shoulder (not the best move) and told me I was never going back there again.
And I didn’t, save for the day after she got an emergency court order changing my custody — we went into his house during the day, when he wouldn’t be home, took everything that was mine, and left.
For whatever reason, my freeze-out didn’t last as long as I would have hoped. I’m ashamed to say it was probably due to convenience. My freshman year of college was a miserable experience, and I came home every weekend I could make plans with friends, which was often. I needed rides back and forth, and my mother could only do so much, so, eventually, I reached out to my father.
That ended one afternoon in April 2007.
I had spent the weekend talking with my mother about her history with my father, piecing together the history of violence committed by one whose genetics and awful temper I shared. She told me he’d held her in the air by her throat when they were long-distance dating, leaving her in terrible pain on the flight home.
She told me they’d had a puppy together — but he had grown sick of it, and so, one day, shot the dog instead of giving him to a shelter. She told me of the many, many cats he made her give away after promising they would be permanent pets.
She told me he had called her fat when she was pregnant, while making her pose sideways in a two-piece bathing suit to monitor her progress. She told me he had anally raped her, many times.
She told me that when she decided to leave him, we ran away in the middle of the day, while he was at work. We had to take the dog, for fear of her life, and, since the women’s shelter we stayed in didn’t allow pets, my mother had to beg and plead until a local vet agreed to kennel her until we found a permanent place to stay. We lived in that shelter for weeks. I was two years old, and they had been married for about as long.
She told me I hated going to see him on alternate weekends as a child. This I could remember. I remembered staying with him and his girlfriend in the house they shared, and being forced to sleep in the basement because the guest room shared a wall with the master bedroom. Presumably he couldn’t keep their sexual activities quiet the four nights per month I stayed with him, so I cried myself to sleep at night, scared of the furnace, the cold and dark. If I couldn’t sleep, he made me march around the room until I became exhausted, or stand in the corner without leaning against the wall.
He did take me rock climbing, to the science museum, the aquarium, and the children’s museum, but more often than not, I spent my father-weekends riding my bike to the local library, stocking up on books, and climbing the tree beside the driveway, reading away the time. I remember playing by myself in the woods for hours, going deeper and deeper into the wilderness, and never hearing my name called.
She told me these things because I had asked her, knowing he was going to drive me back to college on Sunday afternoon. It had been about a year since he’d hit me, and I was ready to confront him, scared as I was. He never drank, never did drugs, but worked out constantly and was strong, especially for a man in his mid-fifties. I had caught slants of his temper before of course — he would never yell, but his eyes would turn cold, and his voice would sharpen, and you would know to hold your breath and do as you were told, else —
I was in the car, calculating the time until we were to reach my dorm, on a busy street in Boston. I knew that once the car pulled up to the curb, I would have to fly out of it and away, and that it would be difficult for him to follow, especially since leaving his enormous Buick on a street that narrow would be almost impossible in the city.
So I confronted him.
I told him everything I knew, with anger and dismay. I told him that I knew what he was, that I was ashamed to be related to him. I repeated back to him the story of the time he had hit me, never asking him to apologize, but speaking in such a way that it was suggested. And then I asked him why.
“You had to know who was in control.”
At that point, the car was at the curb and I flung the door open, grabbed my bag from the back, and hurled my parting words into his face before slamming the door and racing up the stairs. Recalling it even now gives me a speeding heart. I don’t remember what I said to him, but it was intense — it was loathing — it dared him to take action.
There were no elevators to the dorms on the first floor — you had to walk up to the second first, then present your ID. I remember there were people in front of me, and I cursed them, sure I was about to feel a hand on my shoulder and fire in my face at any moment.
It never came.
Instead, I rode up to the eleventh floor, hid out in the laundry room, and—sobbing — called my mother. I told her I never wanted to see or speak to him again, and I haven’t since. It has been eight years.
He has tried to contact me since, calling me every so often until I changed my phone number. My mother told me that when we split from him, he hired a private detective to hunt her down, and wouldn’t be surprised if he’s done the same with me. He’s incredibly thrifty, and made quite a lot of money when I was a child.
What else would explain the sudden appearance of his mother in the restaurant I worked at in 2012? I pretended I didn’t know her, poor thing, with such fear and sadness in her eyes. She has since passed away. That was the last time I saw her, the first time since I was a child.
I dream of him often, nightmares all. He’s always hunting me, for violence or sex — though he never assaulted me that way, not that I can recall. I’m always afraid he’ll turn up somewhere, and thank my job for its lockdown approach to security — no one gets in without a badge, no exceptions. I thank my building for requiring a fob to swipe into the parking lot and building. I thank my husband for being a man that makes me feel safe.
And I wait for the call that will inevitably come, the one where some lawyer somewhere will tell me he’s died. That day, I will feel a great deal of relief.
Perhaps it sounds monstrous to think this way about your father, but then again — if you knew a man who had beaten and raped multiple women, who had hurt and neglected you, who savagely killed animals and never apologized for any of it — if such a man happened to be your father, even — wouldn’t you hate him, too?
The problem is that I’ve already forgiven him. Hate and forgiveness are not two sides of a coin — rather they are separate currencies.
I know that his father was in prison for a violent crime — assault, murder, I don’t know which. I know his mother would threaten his father with a shotgun in front of the children. I know he dreamed of cutting off his father’s penis — I read it in his diary.
What else can you expect from such an upbringing?
My mother has also told me she believes he’s repressing gay or bisexual thoughts. She believes this is why he chooses anal rape. She believes he’s angry with himself, and transfers it onto women.
He has no male friends.
He must have been taught that such a “lifestyle” is inherently wrong. Perverted. Sinful. He must have been taught to be the way he is.
But he was never taught how to be a father. And each Father’s Day, I send my mother a card, thanking her for taking on the role of both parents, for protecting me from the life I would have had if they’d stayed together.
The damage, then, would have been far worse.
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