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Thoughts on My Father

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Over the span of the holidays I’ve been thinking a lot about my father. Nothing good, unfortunately, but I’ve learned that when something is plaguing my thoughts, it’s best to usually come here and purge it.

I’m sure I know why he’s been on my mind. You see, my dad ruined pretty much every holiday of my life- unless of course my mother got to it first. My dad basically grew up in foster care. When he was 4 years old, his mother (who is still alive) bailed on her marriage and her children and started life completely over by converting to Mormonism, getting remarried and having children who didn’t learn until their adulthood that they had these older half-siblings. Shortly after that, his father ran away to join the circus (no kidding!) in order to evade prison, which he did rather poorly. My dad once told me the best piece of advice his dad ever gave him was “If you have to go [to jail], try to get into federal prison. The food’s better.” So my father and his sister spent their childhood being shuffled from relative to relative and in and out of homes for orphans, occasionally having their criminal father show up and spin tales of how he was going to come back and take them away, only to steal from them and whoever they were living with at the time. They were abused and neglected. Their childhood was likely even worse than mine- a point I heard over and over throughout my own childhood and even into my adulthood, because it was one of the big reasons why I should never complain about my life and the abuse I was enduring: Because he had it worse and that made my pain inconsequential. Also, I cost a lot of money to feed, clothe and house, thereby purchasing the right of my parents to treat me as they saw fit. But I digress.

I assume it’s because of the way he grew up that my father put so much pressure onto holidays, and by the time I was a teenager, I tried to be understanding of this and would do my best to make things perfect. Because they had to be perfect. The minute one thing went wrong for my father, he would lose it and the whole day was shot to hell, tearing away from the realm of holiday and morphing into complete and utter chaos.

Once, we had plans to meet my aunt (dad’s sister) and her family for a holiday brunch at a restaurant down the street from our house. Reservations were at something like 10am and the restaurant was 1/4 of a mile away- close enough that you could potentially crawl there on your hands and knees in under 15 minutes if you were so inclined. It was probably 6am when my father, always an early riser, started screaming that we were all still asleep and we’d be late! By 7am, he was near hysterics screaming about how the day was ruined. I was the last to get to the shower- but still, we had over an hour to get to a place that was quite literally a 2 minute drive away- and he decided I had ruined everything, I was a shitty daughter, I should stay home. He stormed out of the house, deciding to walk to the restaurant an hour before our reservation. I was staring blankly, thinking about getting back into bed, my brother was crying… This was one of the times my mom was the good guy, rolling her eyes and saying to ignore it. We go to the restaurant quite in time for the reservation and my aunt’s family was late- which of course was okay.

I was a vegetarian most of my life and still tend toward that type of a diet (a severe protein deficiency got me to start eating some meat again.) There was one Thanksgiving where I had bought myself the Tofurky Thanksgiving “Vegetarian Feast” and cooked it to eat alongside of everyone’s traditional meal. While I was getting my plate ready, my dad kept waving forkfuls of turkey skin under my nose- and I mean this quite literally as he had the fork within an inch or so of my face- all the while taunting me by saying things like, “Dead biiiiird, mmmmmm! You know you waaaaaannntt ittt!” Now here’s the thing, I don’t tend to eat meat because I think it tastes gross, not because I’m a member of PETA. I love animals and completely disapprove of the horrible conditions some places keep the animals and think that definitely some places are completely inhumane, but I grew up in farm country. My parents got meat from local farmers. These animals were prized and not treated poorly, so I don’t have any ethical compunctions against it. Anyway, I tried to ignore him, then I tried asking him to stop, which just seemed to incite him more. When I finally waved my hand in front of my face to brush the damned fork away, he thrust it harder and ended up stabbing me in the cheek with the fork tines. It wasn’t on purpose and it didn’t pierce the skin, but it did hurt. I yelled something like, “Goddamnit, knock it off!” and then I was the bad guy. My father lost his shit, throwing the fork onto the counter and railing about how I can’t ever take a joke and I ruin everything by being a little bitch. All because he stabbed me in the face with a fork.

When I was older and living on my own 3 hours away from them, my area was hit with an ice storm knocking out the power for over a week. I hadn’t planned to see them for the holidays, but I didn’t have lights or heat and the place I worked was closed for 3 days around Xmas. My boss at the time was roughly my age, he suggested I go stay with my family, he even came over and helped me get into my car, which was completely coated in 1/4″ of ice and took some serious effort to break off in order to open the door. The drive took about 5 hours because the roads were so bad, I got in late that night when everyone had already gone to bed. The next morning, I was up early, unused to the noise of my parents bustling around. I got up and went to the kitchen where my dad was making breakfast, excited about the perfection that the day would bring. I went to the refrigerator and pulled out a new gallon of milk, poured myself a glass and put it away. I walked back to the counter where my glass was, my back turned to the refrigerator, when suddenly I was being drenched in freezing cold milk. It seems my mom had made herself a cup of instant coffee, I was unaware of this since she hadn’t said anything and you can’t exactly hear instant coffee being made. In her crazy brain, though, I had purposefully ignored her need for  milk in her coffee, thereby forcing her to walk almost 7 feet to the refrigerator to pull it out herself! And so, she served up her revenge silent as a ninja, sneaked up behind me and dumped a nearly full gallon of ice-cold milk over my head. I was frozen to the spot, mouth gaping open in shock. My mother burst into dramatic tears behind me, screaming out, “No one loves me!” before turning tail and running to her bedroom to sob loudly before I’d even had the chance to react. As I turned around, there was my father at the stove, spatula in hand, staring at me in disgust. He tossed the spatula onto the counter, turned off the burner and said to me, “Now look what you’ve done. Clean this shit up.” and went after my mother.

I cleaned it up. Took a shower, changed into fresh clothes and drove 5 hours back home.

These are just 3 stories, but I have hundreds. I’ve ruined holidays by being there, I’ve ruined them by not being there. I’ve ruined holidays I don’t even celebrate (as evidenced by the Xmas Milk Story.) I could tell about the New Year’s Eve when I had an ear infection and my brother tried to kill me during a schizophrenic snap, my mother encouraging him to do it the whole while. My dad ushered me out of the house for a drive and once in the truck he asked me when I’d get it through my head that my mother didn’t love me, she loved my brother, and I shouldn’t do things to upset the 2 of them. I could tell about the birthday that I had plans with friends and my dad made me cancel them to take my mom shopping, when I got there my mom spent the day telling me about all of my flaws. Or the birthday my maternal grandmother (with whom I was living at the time) locked me in my room and made me write a list of all the reasons why I was a horrible person. The only time I went home for the holidays in college and no one said a word to me the entire time. Not one single word. The time my dad physically dragged me out of my bed because he wanted to have a special holiday breakfast and no one was up yet, then spent the rest of the day berating me for “whining” about being hurt. It’s no wonder I hate holidays. I fear them, I want to hide away for them, and usually I do just that.

Thinking about my father has led me to a decision, one I’ve made before and have now re-thought. One that may be irrelevant. One I may still re-think again if the situation ever happens. Last spring, I decided that when my parents die (which they inevitably will, though I’m not wishing it on them or anything, I don’t care that much), if I was to be contacted in regards to being a beneficiary of a will, I was going to turn any inheritance. But I’ve changed my mind. I will not go to a funeral. I won’t go there to sell off any physical object, like the house or anything in it, but I will accept any money offered to me or the monetary value of any physical object should someone be able to sell it for me without my having to go there. While I once felt that anything inherited from them would be dirty money, I feel now that I’ve earned it. They suggested that they had spent enough money on me to treat me as they wished, no matter how poorly, and be that the case, I have earned anything that may come in the future and I would put it toward a house. Now it’s not just possible, but probable that I have already been written out of any will, and should my father go first, it’s almost a guarantee. However, should my father survive my mother, he is likely to bequeath me something to make a show of being all-forgiving and all-loving, even though I was a bad daughter. He would be likely to leave a note in his will saying just that, too, something like, “Even after you left your poor old dad to die alone, I still loved you enough to leave you some money because after all, that’s all you ever wanted from me anyway.” Last year, I remember crying in my shrink’s office about how I wouldn’t let him have the last word, how I would refuse the money and he could go to hell. But now? If it happens, I’ll consider it reparation money.


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