Recovering from Dysfunction (Pt. 2)…
Secrets, Fear, Lies – Dysfunctional Family Life.
My life as a child was not at all happy. In fact, I can’t actually remember any happiness on my part. All potentially happy experiences were subdued because I was always expecting something bad to happen. I remember feeling no joy or excitement about things like birthdays or holidays – they were just another day except for the gifts and cake. I became hypervigilant, always watching for signs that the adults in my life were going to snap and always trying to prevent this.
The defining factors of a dysfunctional family are that there is continuous conflict in the family and neglect and/or abuse from the parents. The children learn to live this life because it is all they know. The children, too, understand that this is not a “good” situation from society’s perspective, so make every effort to pretend that their home life is completely normal.
Holding the secret of my home life taught me to be a very skilled liar and actor. I learned to keep a blank face at all times, to express false emotion where appropriate, and to respond correctly to all inquiries that might cause trouble for the family. My main goals were to keep my father out of jail because we depended on his income, and to avoid child protective services involvement and the potential removal of the children from the home.
Both parents were neglectful – my father because he was rarely home and my mother because she would withdraw to her room instead of dealing with her life. I tried my best to fill the role of “mother” wherever I could. As such, when police arrived after particularly brutal beatings or case workers came to the house after some neighbor’s report, I would always be there, at the forefront, telling elaborately believable stories about how it was all a misunderstanding and how there wasn’t really any trouble.
My father (the manipulative, philandering, abusive narcissist) had complete control and subservience of the family. One of his favorite coercion tactics was to say, “If you ever tell anyone about this, I’ll beat you right there in front of the police and you’ll never know what hit you when I get out of jail.” My mother (afflicted by severe and untreated depression) depended on him to a very unhealthy degree – she stayed with him because she had nowhere else to go and believed what he said about her ineptitude. To this day, some of my siblings revere him as admirable and despise her as weak.
My father, when he was angry, would roar and yell and start in pinching us with his fingernails while giving a tirade about all the stupid things we’d done. His eyes would get big and bloodshot, his words accented by spittle, and then he would beat us mercilessly until his anger subsided. My mother (sometimes suspiciously absent during his punishments, but who was an explosively angry taskmaster when doling out her own punishments) taught us that any type of sinful or obstinate behavior would be promptly punished by a beating from one or the other.
We were often called to “LINE UP!” in a row and bare our rumps to be whipped with a thick leather belt that left broad red (sometimes bleeding) stripes on our backsides. On other occasions, we were beat with whatever was handy – the most painful was a detachable shower head/hose assembly. I had a hard time sitting down for at least a week.
My father taught us that our mother was stupid, worthless, and lazy. He taught us that he was smart, important, industrious and that any of our good qualities had been inherited from him. He taught us that we didn’t deserve anything good, that we were just a drain on his wallet, and that our opinions and wishes were stupid and faulted. There was no choice, we obeyed because we were afraid not to. There was no privacy, we were not allowed to walk away from a painful situation, we were not allowed to express our preferences, and we were not allowed to question anything.
He taught us that he was right and we were wrong and everything he did was “for us”. He taught us to believe that he was the end-all, that his words were gospel, and that we must obey him or feel his wrath. My mother taught us to obey him because there was no other choice. Any time she attempted to disobey him (by leaving), he threatened to kill her and/or all of us children. So, we believed it was either obey or die.
Sometimes she’d get fed up, though, and fight him. I have a very vivid memory of them grappling dangerously close to a set of stairs and fully expecting to see my mother lying on the floor with a broken neck within seconds. (He later claimed in divorce court that she was the abusive one, that she beat him and that he was the victim.) They argued constantly, and we would just try to hide out and stay out of their way.
So, that’s how I gained my “black and white” thinking.
In a general sense, there were only two options – obey or die. Obeying, being good, being acceptable, gaining his approval were very important to me. I wanted his approval, no matter the cost. So, I learned to suffer silently because that was noble and that was how I could be acceptable. As long as he was happy, I could imagine that he loved me.
In a societal sense, my father is considered “black” and my mother is considered “white”. My father taught us to see the world as “black” and “white” – “all black people are good and excusable”, “all white people are bad and prejudiced”, “everyone else is probably bad because their skin is light enough that they might be considered white”. I was raised to be a bigot and to be proud of it.
In a religious sense, the old testament commandments and patriarchal words were law. Anything that our specific church told us was good, anything from any other church or source was bad. Dogma and pragmatism was good and holy, independence of thought or action was bad and evil. I am, according to this religion, an evil person by nature. From the age of three, I believed I was “evil” so always tried to make up for it, hoping that if I hid my strange notions and metaphysical understandings and mysticism long enough, it would go away and I’d suddenly become good.
In a familial sense, the kids were taught that we had to choose one parent over the other. If we showed allegiance to our mother, our father targeted us with angry words, random beatings, insults, and so on. If we showed allegiance to our father, we were rewarded with false compliments based on scholastic achievement or physical appearance and forced to kiss him on the mouth to show our love.
I was taught that there is no middle ground, despite the fact that I am an innate inhabitant of that middle ground in all respects. However, I learned to push aside my true thoughts and emotions and beliefs so that I might seem acceptable or “good”. I should note here that I always knew when something was false or hateful, but kept my “devilish” feelings buried deeply and allowed these misguided behaviors and beliefs to rule my existence because I had been told by many sources just how wrong I was. I believed I was inherently flawed because the identity I was born with was in direct conflict with the identity I was imbued with by my family of birth.
And so, this is where most of my confusion and conflict comes from. I am always struggling to overcome that brainwashing imbedded in me as an innocent. My true thoughts and beliefs have never actually gone away, and I have learned to speak out when I have the urge to. However, I still have a hard time presenting myself to relatives because I “know” that I can never be acceptable to them.
This is not to say that I have ever been acceptable, because I have not – many of my earliest memories involve family members criticizing me for liking classical music or reading the classics or being too smart or not joining in at activities that make me uncomfortable. They are very judgmental and critical and exclusive – this is to say, they fear anything outside of their limited sphere of belief. I realize now that the reason they criticized me was that my behavior heightened their personal insecurities. And yet, after all this time, I still wish they would like me and I still try to excuse their behavior as understandable.
My parents separated officially, finally, when I was fifteen and my mother assisted me with a car purchase because I had a job and would need reliable transportation for school and work and busing my siblings around. My father flew into a massive rage because he had no say in the matter (he had not been living in the home for years at that point, but would return when he felt like it). He threw all of her stuff off the balcony, onto the lawn, then told her to leave “his house”. He then gave her a completed set of divorce papers, which he handily had in his briefcase. When she refused to leave, he told her he was going to kill “his” kids one by one until she left. Then, he called the police to escort her from the property. They did, without any questions.
She was gone for a few days until he left again, and thus began their divorce proceedings and significant drama about visitation and so on. I tried to get out of visiting him as much as possible, often driving away in my vehicle to avoid him coming to pick me up from the house. At some point, I’d have to go home and then be forced to his crappy little apartment, where he would yell at me and hit me. This was a ridiculous situation, because he did not care about us kids and was actually hardly ever in the apartment – he just wanted us in his possession.
The last time I went there, he was angry at me for volunteering at a fundraiser so took me into his bedroom for punishment. My youngest sister (age two at the time) was sitting in there with various pornographic videos that he had left near the television. He yelled at her and was going to hit her, but I picked her up and pushed her out and so he turned on me. He told me to sit down, and stood over me, yelling insults at me. When I did not give him the expected response (pleading, weeping, grovelling), he began to punch my thighs. I sat there blankly while he did this, and then he told me to bend over the bed so he could whip me. That was the absolute last straw for me – the indignity and depravity and disgusting nature of this grown man beating me, a nearly grown female… I somehow suddenly realized that he had no right and that I did not have to allow this.
I stood up and pushed him as hard as I could against the door frame and asked him if he wanted ME to call the cops, because I wasn’t going to take it anymore. I then told him if he hit me again, I was going to do my best to kill him, even if I died or got arrested as a result.
I stood there, seeing red and waiting eagerly for him to hit me so that I could gouge out his eyes and then choke the life out of him with my bare hands. Instead, he ran away from me and left the apartment. He never beat me or tried to force me to go to his house again.
When I moved away to college, a couple of months later, he pulled up to the house and blocked the driveway with his car so I couldn’t leave. He stood there, yelling at my mother and me while we finished packing the car. She would stop intermittently to argue with him, but I just ignored him and got my stuff together. My tiny spitfire of a great-grandmother was living next door and heard the commotion. She came out to see what was going on and then said that she was going to go get her rifle and shoot him if he didn’t leave.
Somehow, the sheriff’s department got called (probably a neighbor), and they entered the fray. (I should mention here that police and lawyers and judges have always treated my father as if he walks on water – partly because he knows a lot of them from his youth, partly because he has a master’s degree, partly because he’s “black” and always casually slips a comment about prejudice into his commentary so they knew he’ll claim discrimination if they don’t side with him, and partly because he is an extremely skilled liar.) They began layering platitudes upon “the poor, misunderstood father just trying to look out for his daughter” and telling my mother that she was out of line (for taking me to college, I think? the uni I chose had a no-car rule for 1st semester freshmen, so I needed a ride) and acting crazy.
I was pulled aside by a deputy to give a statement, but part-way through the conversation, he received a call from his commanding officer about the situation. The deputy proceeded to lie to his CO, telling a completely ridiculous version of the story (a paraphrase of what my father told him) – directly in my hearing. The rage of this injustice and the rage of feeling so helpless and this deputy’s blatant patronizing air bubbled up in me and I started yelling that he was lying and demanding to speak to the CO. The CO heard everything I said and then spoke to me on the phone, wherein I explained the real situation. The deputies were then ordered to escort my father from the property. Thus, I left for college at age seventeen.
I returned to visit the kids, pick up my car, to participate in various court proceedings of their divorce, and go to family functions out of a sense of duty. I pretended to care about my father until I was nearly nineteen, wherein I separated myself from that identity and life, completely severing all ties with him and limiting contact with the rest of the world.