I talk about my father online, but I've never posted pictures. People have to come to my house to see those, and it's not like I'm whipping them out and showing them off. They're in the big cream, red, and brown photo albums tucked away in a back closet.
I've repressed a lot about my father over the past 22 years since his death, and I've been trying to work on it in therapy. There always seemed to be missing gaps, and I could never grasp what I was missing. What kept me so scarred? I remember the majority of his physical and emotional abuse to his wife with chronic multiple sclerosis and his little girl who learned to fear men and confrontation of all kinds from a very early age. But frankly, who wants to remember that stuff? Can't I just go on with my life? I'm married to the greatest man in the world who is the diametrical opposite of my father.
I reconnected last week with my mom's best friend since 1983. As I was born in 1980, I've never known life without her and her family. I'm so relieved that they're back in my life, and I'm never letting go again. But as we talked for nearly 6 hours, I begged to hear information about my father. I just had to know! It was the same old stuff for the most part, but there were some new bits of information. As grateful as I am to hear this information and have my memory start opening up again, I've been having restless sleep, nightmares, lashing out, and had a breakthrough in therapy that produced such a visceral, gutteral, harsh reaction that I wanted to vomit.
Quite simply, without hyperbole, my father was an evil man.
And while his abuse was never sexual, now I understand why Twin Peaks- my TV obsession- has scared the shit out of me to the point of having a hard time closing my eyes. He had the evil that lies within man and manifests itself in the most terrifying way possible. It was all in how his smile was fake and you could see the evil start to come out in his eyes. It's spine chilling to think about it.
So let's finally make him public! Let's call this fucker the fuck out. Why let him hide? He has been dead for over two decades. I don't want to give his name, as I don't need his family (who met me twice) to google and stumble across me. I don't need to open that Pandora's Box. They made it perfectly clear that despite feeling sorry for me and Mom that they had no need to take a chance on his genes. I can understand that in a way, but at the same time....I have half of Mom's genes and she was an excellent mother.
I pulled all the photos with him from those family albums and put them in a box to shelve in the back closet. This is not the Bree Van de Kamp method of boxing away your feelings; rather, it's pulling away bad memories and making sure I don't have to see them when I feel nostalgic. Face it, Mom was basically a single mother. I have removed pictures that even show his arm or leg. I don't need that pain. I refuse to throw them away because that was my past, and I don't want to be like those "family members" that denied me and Mom our childhood pictures. If we have a kid, I'm sure he/she will want to know who their family was, so I will show and gently explain then. Until then, consider our photo albums revamped.
Let's begin. I've shown a ton of pictures of my mother on Facebook, and everyone who reads this will mostly be coming from there or happen to know me outside the internet. She was beautiful and vibrant and the kindest lady. I can't say the same about him.
This is from 1979....this is also the happiest picture I've ever seen of the two of them. Notice how it was when they first met. I just found this less than a year ago, and I couldn't stop staring at it. I'd never seen them so happy. However, my grandparents and my mother's friends couldn't stand him. My grandmother is still ready to spit fire when he comes up in conversation.
This was from their wedding day, March 7, 1980. My father was drunk off his ass. The priest, Father Mike, hated him and adored Mom. I was a honeymoon baby.
I was born in late November, and this was right around Christmas. I know new parents are exhausted and still adjusting to life, but do ya think he could muster up some kind of smile? This was his pissy expression, not his angry expression....and I hate how I often have this as well.
I suppose that's a little better. He wasn't a big smiler, fine, but he was just barely there early on. I know he worked overnight shifts as a security guard, but my mom had to frantically keep me quiet so I wouldn't wake him when he was home. You know, even though I was a BABY. That's how awesome his temper was. I think I've had nervous agita before I could even hold my head up.
This is essentially one of two family pictures we had together. My mom took the majority of pix, and there are barely any of her and I together from ages 4-10. That really makes me sad. This was the time period that he was still ok. He got worse when I hit age 5-6, and it was all downhill from there.
He was 5'5 and stocky and a bodybuilder. He beat up on the two of us constantly. I just learned that my mother sometimes had to take a couple days to recover. She always tried to step in to take the blows meant for me. That was just fantastic for her MS. He always said to people, oh yeah, I take care of my girls....if by "take care of" he means beating a disabled woman and little girl who had no way to defend themselves, oh yeah....yeah, he took care of us just fine. You may wonder why Mom didn't take me and run. Well, she was disabled, unable to work as he had the car, and we were very poor. Also? He would have tracked us down and who knows what would have happened to us or the friends/family who might have taken us in. Mom refused to let anyone get the brunt of his anger.
I found out the real story from my mom's friend about how he hurt me when I was three. I thought he was just twisting my arm. Nope, he had me at an angle so no one could see what he was doing, and it looked like he just had me lifted into a hug. I must have made him angry, and he was twisting my leg behind me. As I cried, holding my face in my hands into his shoulder, he kept twisting it harder.
With a smile on his face. With a fucking smile on his face as he tortured his little girl.
My mom's friend stopped him and he just tried to brush it off, but she never saw him do that again. She witnessed tons of yelling, though. She so desperately wanted to help us, but Mom didn't want her to get hurt as well.
Here's a pic of me and him when I was three.
What a big man.
In this one below, apparently he was yelling at me at my great-aunt and uncle's (we spent every holiday with them). My uncle was ready to kill him. I was not a mouthy kid. What the hell could that cute punim have done wrong??
And yet, I still desperately wanted to have fun with my daddy since I was a little girl wanting love and approval. And there were some nice times. According to these upcoming pix, it looks like I had a great time with him, but looks can be very deceiving.
He picked me up sometimes from kindergarten (Loesche for you old school friends).
Petting zoo (maybe Great Adventure, I dunno).
This was definitely Great Adventure.
Sledding on the block. Hey NE Philly....
Getting to meet Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, and Pluto. This is one of the few really sweet pix.
My communion, and the other family picture. I looked so thrilled about religion even back then, bwahaha.
Just trying to love my daddy. I would walk on his back too, to crack it.
One of the few relaxed pictures of us. And those damn red shorts and tube socks. And why the fuck did I have to inherit the female equivalent of his shape. Or the way he sits. Sigh.
And this picture scares the everlovin crap out of me because he reminds me wayyyyy too much of someone from my past here. Father issues, much? Ugh. Don't worry, I'm still working hard in therapy.
This is Tommy Walters, the man who should have been my godfather, not that chickenshit Nick.
The problem was that Tommy got mugged and killed in....I want to say 1982. They were both security guards at the same place, and Tommy was such a dear friend. He was an artist, and we have two of his pieces proudly framed in the house. They have never left the walls no matter where we moved to or remodeled. Everyone who knew them said that Tommy would have never let my father get away with the shit he did. Well, it's a nice thought, but it's something that couldn't have been guaranteed. But we would have had more backup, that's for sure. Most everyone was scared of my father.
My father cheated on my mother and made me lie. Yeah, that put my 7-year-old brain into turmoil. He used to put everything on my mother's cards and she saw all the jewelry and concerts they would go to. He blatantly talked to her on the phone in the bedroom. My mother had to sleep on the couch for years even though he did a lot of overnight shifts....she couldn't take the risk. He bought that bitch a huge rock and proposed....she took it and told him to drop dead. A month later he did. Morbidly funny. Did I mention he was 38 when he died?
My mother thinks he was on crystal meth. He used to pay for drugs with a check. He was just.that.smart. My father was already manic, but he used to have straight up freakouts in the last few years. He'd leap out of bed talking crazy, running around in the small little duplex, turning the AC unit on and off....it was scary. But I knew to sit quietly in the corner and hope that it would end soon.
He hit me because I wanted to play Nintendo on my own. He repeatedly beat me upside the head as I quietly cried and endured it so it would be over faster. Mom came in the room screaming, and he started hitting her. He kept us in that room for hours, talking crazy and terrorizing us. He kept beating my baton against the closet door.
One day I walked in the living room and saw his 5'5'"self choking her 5'9" self with both hands. He stopped when he saw me and the look on my face, but I know he did that repeatedly. I just found out my grandmother would get frantic calls from my mom ("He's trying to strangle me, Mom- no, no cops, no, don't come over, no!), and my grandmother would speed from NJ to our house in NE Philly and sit in the car outside the house all night. She would bring a blanket and just stare at the window, waiting for a light to go on and then she would be prepared to spring into action. She never had to do anything because he had calmed down, but she was trying to be there for her babies any way she could.
He offered to take me to the circus one day. I said, great. Later, I asked him if we were going to go. He began hitting me and screaming at me for even daring to ask. I was flummoxed, as he was the one who offered! He then said about a half hour, hour later that we could go, and I agreed. First, you never disagreed with him, second, I was happy he did want to spend time with me after all.
My father was obsessed with his Nissan 280SX. It was practically a sports car, and he took care of it better than me. I said to him one day, "Daddy, do you love the car more than me?" He said, "Well, this has value, and...." blah blah blah blah, all a child wants to hear is that their father cares about them. He was also obsessed with bodybuilding and yo-yo'd quite frequently in his weight.
He was in the Army in the 1970s, and apparently he helped guard the Berlin Wall. I would like to pull up his records as I do have his social security number and some other info from an old resume I found. He lied about being in Vietnam for years. He talked about it often, and he was obsessed with movies like Platoon. When he told us in 1990 that he lied the whole time, he laughed like a crazy man. It made me wonder, how much could I believe of what he told us? And this notion also applies to someone from my past, but, once again, therapy's helping!
My father was kind of the black sheep in his family. He found out he was supposed to be an abortion when I was about 9 or 10, and drove around venting to me about how his mother didn't want him, and how would I feel if my parents felt that way about me? I just kind of answered in one, two word answers because what the hell was I supposed to say about that???
My father did have really good taste in movies, music, and TV, I will give him that much. I inherited a lot of similar pop culture tastes, and I refuse to let his memory keep me from watching Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, the Indy trilogy, etc. He was also obsessed with The Terminator, Lethal Weapon, Batman, and The Godfather. But his obsessions got out of control....I think he wanted to actually become Mel Gibson's manic cop or to actually join the mob or to immerse himself in grail lore. I think he hated himself so much that he wanted to be like what he watched in the movies or listened to in music (Jim Morrison was one of his favorites), but there was something completely off in his brain that couldn't separate fantasy from reality. Refer back to Vietnam!
He and my mother finally separated in 1990. They had a lawyer who was fresh out of law school and terrified of my father. My father moved to South Philly and took the car with him. My mom couldn't get anywhere without help, so I'm pretty sure he came back maybe once a week to do his laundry and take us to the necessary places. It's a little fuzzy. I remember he took her to the parent-teacher conferences and walked around outside with me. He had a new black cushy corduroy coat on, and the Oct-Nov weather was brisk. I just held onto his arm because as much as I knew he was crazy, I was still desperate for love.
He missed my birthday and gave a lame excuse. He stopped by for Christmas ranting and raving and ignoring me until my mom and grandmother screamed at him. He tried to feed me a bunch of bullshit as he had his arm around me, but I just kept my head down and nodded. I couldn't stop screaming when he left. He wrote letters to me....I have one, but I ditched the rest because he was dedicating poetry to famous people. I yelled about how he loved everyone but me. My mom said, "He doesn't love anyone but himself, but if he loves anyone else, it's you." Well, he had a hysterical way of showing it!
He disappeared for awhile, called once in early January 1991. "Yeah Chris, is Mom there?" "Yeah, hold on." Our last words to each other. We didn't hear anything. I came home one day in late February to see my mom, grandmother, and grandfather waiting for me. Something bad obviously happened if my divorced grandparents were in the same room. My grandmother told me that my father died of a heart attack while jogging on January 17, and I was shocked and in tears. As crazy as he was, he was still my father and I was still so young. And who dies of a heart attack before 40?! Someone who smoked like a chimney, yo-yo'd in weight, took drugs, and ate horribly, that's who. He was declared a John Doe since he was found without ID. They had to identify him with fingerprints. He was in the morgue freezer for so long that they didn't want my mother to identify him, but her father did that for her and verified it was definitely him.
My mom found out later that he was drawing up papers with the green lawyer to declare my mother unfit and steal me away to be with that bitch and her kid....you know, the one who told him to drop dead? He was crazy. My mom had a full on exacerbation after finding that information out and she had to start using a cane all the time, if not a scooter. Even from beyond, that sonofabitch still found ways to leave his mark.
My mom was relieved because he couldn't hurt us anymore. I was too, but I had so many feelings that took years to deal with. It was so confusing. I finally hit a point by the time middle school ended that I wasn't thinking much about him anymore. By that point, my beloved great-aunt and uncle had died, we had moved once, and my mother was about to marry my dear stepfather and move us again. It seemed silly to dwell a great deal on my father, and I started forgetting things.
As I'm learning, those things aren't ever fully forgotten. I'm trying very hard to lay everything out in the open so I can confront it, close the chapter, and move on with the rest of my life. I hate that he still managed to have such an impact on me for all these years. I wish I went through therapy sooner, before Mom died. Maybe this is the way that my life is supposed to go, I don't know.
I do feel that there is a weight lifted off my shoulders now. His actions are fully exposed and not just my childhood angst.
Up there, that is the face of a sonofabitch. That is the face of a true monster. That is the face of evil.
But there is still good in the world, as he left early and couldn't harm anybody anymore.
