Still got your hip-waders on? Because the shit gets even deeper...
When she found out, at 12 years old, that my father was not hers, she constantly thought up ways to kill him…after she found she couldn’t control me, she kissed up to my father and tried to turn him against me. Hell, even that didn’t work.
A long time ago, in a city far away, three girls sat at the base of a pine tree. One girl furtively informed the other two that she had heard an aunt say, in the very basement of her house just a few yards away, that their father wasn't really their father.
At this time, I don't remember the conversation after that. Later that night, I got out of bed and went to Mom, who was sitting in the dining room. Dad wasn't home. He often wasn't home. And when he was, things were bad.
I -- foreshadowing my later habit of brutal bluntness -- asked Mom if Dad was our dad.
You notice that, right? Our cousin had told us Dad was not
our dad.
Mom became furious, asking me who had told me. At any other time, she might have lied her ass off. But she and Dad must have been on the outs, because she saw it as an opportunity to cement a few "truths" into my young head. And make me her ally, crutch, and tool.
She told me she'd never wanted me to know, but that it was the reason Dad hated me. Why he beat me.
He was the other one's father, but not mine. Mom had had an affair while Dad had been in the Army in Germany. Again, I'm not going to fake memories of that conversation. I don't remember much else about it. She sent me off to bed.
I will admit this changed how I looked at Dad. He was a frightening, volatile presence, as likely to punch as to laugh. I remember feeling relief that he was not my dad, that his anger was not my heritage.
Well, I was wrong about that, wasn't I?
And I did not care or have any curiosity about the man who had fathered me. Not for many years. Oh, occasionally I had those normal teen fantasies that the faceless one would sweep in and save me from my abuse-filled life.
Back to her narrative... No, I never entertained any thoughts of killing
him. He was huge in my life, someone who could not be reasoned with. And certainly someone who could not be charmed. He doled out affection in his own way as often as he doled out abuse. I did, as I was told later, begin to distance myself from him. I'm certain everyone thought it was just teenage behavior. I was not aware of any of it at the time. I do know that he never hit me again. And I transformed from punching bag to china doll; he really saw me as fragile, and Psycho as a tough tomboy.
But I am very good at distancing myself now, so it stands to reason that I could do it then.
Controlling her... yes, I did my best to control her actions so she didn't walk right into a rapist's hands. I failed. Many times. The men who meandered through our lives, courtesy of Mom, saw both of us as easy targets. I will admit to screaming at her when she would not lock the door to keep a man who had raped his own daughters for years out of our house when our parents weren't home. I had to push her aside and do it myself, holding a baby (our little sister) in my arms.
I think it was the birth of that sister that released me from trying to "control" the Psycho. The Psycho has accused me in other posts of being possessive of that baby. Given how her own daughters turned out. and how well that child turned out, free of sexual abuse, I'd have to say I did rather well that second time around. Our little sister would likely be a wreck of a human being like her, or like me, if the Psycho had had her way.
Kissing up to Dad. That's hilarious. No, I
became Dad. A refined version of him, anyway. Tough, cynical, and unwilling to put up with lies. When our relationship mended many years after the revelation, I discovered that I scared him. Because I was him.
I never had to turn him against Psycho, because she did that all by herself, at least to a degree. He never turned his back on her, ever. He tried his best to set her on the right course, from getting angry about her smoking to getting angry about her and her friends being drunk (Mom supplied the beer, and Psycho was about fourteen) to tearing down a "clubhouse" that same year where she was... entertaining all the neighborhood boys. I mean
all of them. He was a hot, furious mess that night. He dragged her home, and she got out her bedroom window and ran away. For the first time. Certainly not the last. Years later, when she ran away from Mom after the divorce, he took her in. There was no turning him against her; she was his "little boy." He didn't even turn against her when he walked in to find her in the arms of a woman. She was, certainly, his little boy, he just hadn't known how much.
In posts past, she said I began trying to kill people at age sixteen. Now she's lowered the age to twelve. I suppose, eventually, I will have clawed my way out of the womb, dragging my mother's entrails behind me.
There really isn't any psych help that would be effective; God knows she's been in treatment since the age of six. That, of course, is also my fault.
It's a burden I must carry.
