COAPN Volume 45: Not Everyone Looks Forward to Father's Day
If you ask my father, he is chronically underappreciated. From having a mother who preferred his siblings to himself, to bosses whose jealousy drove them to invent reasons to fire him, to pastors too ignorant to see his superior interpretation of scripture, to the perennial bogey man of the liberal democrat disguised as a communist seeking to tax him into penury, no one understands or appreciates my father for his true worth.
Not once have I known him to take responsibility for a mistake. In any hardship, there was always an aggressor – careless drivers whose recklessness wrecked his knee, or college rivals who smashed the same knee Tonya Harding to his Nancy Kerrigan style. In his divorce, the aggressor was a cheating wife. His money troubles, debt from the first divorce. His diabetes and weight gain, my mother’s Southern cooking. The fact his son won’t speak to him, the biased lies of his ex-wife. The fact my sister won’t speak to him, she’s been tainted by a sinful, lesbian liaison with (initially) still married person. And as much as I would love to claim I alone stand in his mind as a being who made an independent choice not to speak to him, odds are he blames my silence on solidarity with my wayward sister. For a man who spouts impressive vitriol at "liberals" claiming to be "victims" and always "blaming society for their problems" the irony of his refusal to acknowledge his own faults is galling.
I can’t speak to events of the distant past and his childhood. For that I only have his word to go on, and given his penchant for exaggeration and contradiction, I tend to give his accounts less credence the longer I am removed from his expert gaslighting abilities. But I can say I remember that the last time I saw my brother, my father threatened to rip an earring out of my brother’s ear should the boy ever don one. I also remember that when the same twelve-year-old boy came to him for help because the kids his age at church were bullying him, my father’s advice to said twelve-year-old was to, “Be a man and take care of it.” I can say that while I know my father worked ungodly hours in two separate high profile and high paying careers, money was an ulcer inducing source of worry for my mother and would appear in windfall and vanish with such alarming irregularity that chronic money problems make little sense when stacked against divorce debt, no matter how steep the initial figure. I can say that my sister stopped speaking to my father for at least six months before she came out because he sent her a verbally abusive email in which he called her a Marxist who had decided her family was evil and threatened to "turn her in to the authorities" for spreading COVID, all because she politely and with the repeated refrain "I love you," declined to discuss her choice to place a Black Lives Matter sign in her front yard. I know that while I do stand in solidarity with my sister, I could not maintain both a relationship with my father, and my own sanity. I’ve spent too many years trying and failing to please the man and succumbing to perpetual manipulation meant (probably) to mold me into a capable adult whose thinking carbon copied his, but instead left me infantilized, self-loathing, and triggered by condescending male voices. If I continued in the cycle rather than cut contact, I guarantee I would now be dead by my own hand.
I would ask those of you who know or knew him and who might think I'm being too harsh, ask yourself if you “liked” my father or if you tolerated his domineering, awkward, rude, and offensive presence because you liked my mother or his children. Ask yourself if he ever struck you as arrogant, condescending, controlling, or unyielding in an argument. Ask yourself if his initial charm ever only seemed skin deep. Ask yourself if you ever find him overbearing? Ask yourself if his generosity felt smothering or covertly self-serving? Now imagine living with him rather than enduring him once a week on Sunday when he was obligated to behave.
And to the give-him-some-grace-be-the-bigger-person-forgive-and-forget-try-to-see-his-side-pray-about-it-pray-for-him crowd, I have. I've tried all the methods. I've tried discussion, the high road, enforcing boundaries, praying, calling my pastor, and even screaming my head off, all to the no avail. Unless I see evidence of changed behavior, anything else is pointless.
To my parents' generation, their millennial offspring falsely and hyperbolically cry abuse when nary a hand was laid to them and never a genital mentioned let alone fondled. But my father was and is a mentally and emotionally abusive man, and he has been for as long as I can remember. He only ever spanked me (a practice whose merits warrant its own post/article/book), but when the choice to continue a relationship with the man boiled down to literal life and death, I, at least, will give myself the grace to own my hyperbole.
Thank you for reading,
B
