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Comment today on *1962 November – The 5th Year Moose Hunt

“My belief is that my father was a sensitive man” You’ve got to be kidding? He allowed your mother to severely abuse you for 18 years! He lacks any kind of sensitivity at all.

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Reply

Well, as I say, I have to work my way through this regarding my father.  Unfortunately, I’m not kidding — yet at the same time I simply cannot yet look into my own self and KNOW anything about him.  Denial?  I don’t know.  Do I continue to ‘parent’ him in my feeling that he was nearly as much abused by her as I was, except not physically?

I don’t understand the fuller context of my father’s life.  All I know is that I remain completely STUCK in regard to the reality of my father in my life.  I must need to BELIEVE that my father was a good man caught in a terrible, terrible situation he did not have the mental or emotional resources to cope with.  There was no social context for understanding mental illness or child abuse during the years of my childhood.

I was talking to my sister last night about — *AGE 7 – MUD PUDDLE INCIDENT https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/the-devils-child-my-childhood/vignettes-from-my-abusive-childhood/age-7-mud-puddle-incident/ —-

Neither she nor I can YET understand what he could have done that night.  Stop the jeep and throw HER out?  Stop the jeep and throw himself out?  Throw me out?  Drive to the police shop?  They wouldn’t have cared?  If he had done anything else other than simply stare straight ahead and drive that jeep she would have turned that rage equally on him (except physically) and there would have been two equal hellfire rage attacks going on at the same time — instead of one.

Did he believe her actions toward me were justified?  Had she convinced him I was such a BAD child that I deserved everything I ‘got’?  Did he hate me?  Did he wish I’d never been born?  Did he agree with her actions every step down the road of my childhood?  Did he not care?

Or was he a good man caught in hell, in a situation he was helpless to understand or to cope with?  He never left us.  He never cheated on my mother.  He never raised a hand to her.  He seems to have done more than what was humanly possible in his efforts to meet her demands, to please her, to make her happy.  Nothing ever worked.  She was a seriously mentally ill woman.  Did he understand this?

What were the resources available to my father – both inner and outer?  Who was available to intervene from the outside?  Was I more a ‘burr under his saddle’ than a real live child – his child — who deserved a childhood that included protection and love?  THAT this was true I don’t seem to understand, either.  That’s what really matters to me.

Perhaps I share with him the inability to comprehend the reality of the situation.  Certainly my mother’s reality did not include loving Linda.  My identity was eroded and overwhelmed from the time I was born.  Did/do I love my father?  My mother, for that matter?  Is my love for them an issue?  What do I gain by not putting blame, responsibility, and culpability squarely onto the person that was my father?  Maybe, more importantly, what do I lose BY DOING so?

Can a person such as my father was actually be of two minds in the world?  Could he be one person toward me and a different person in relation to everything else in his life?  That’s the way it seems to me right now.  It seems that I can look at him and see the person he was regarding everyone and everything ELSE in his life – except me.

I don’t think I can just know either side of that man without looking at both.  Maybe he was really just like my mother was – like a doll with two completely different faces, one on either side of their head.  Well, that would make a hell of a conspiracy – and that might be exactly what I find.  Can a person legitimately be ‘BOTH’ – two or more different people in different situations?  Does either ‘side’ of them negate the other one?

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But I won’t know if I don’t have the willingness and courage to look.  Readers are welcome to comment as I move through my process.  This is an inside job.  Others can tell me how they feel, what they see, what they know from the outside.  That will help me.  Meanwhile I choose not to feel ashamed – or even for that matter at all bullied – into believing about my father what might SEEM to be true.

Innocent until proven guilty?  What are the clues?  What is the evidence, all the evidence I can find?  This work IS forensic autobiography.  Am I solving a crime?  Is this a mystery?  It still is to ME!

Was my father such a victim of abuse from my mother that he and I shared a platform of victimization in the home of my origin?  Can I stop excusing, defending and feeling as if I want to protect my father?  Are my ‘issues’ with my father as much at the root of my ‘terrible sadnesses’ – and damage done to me — as are the ones I have with my mother?  Can I fundamentally know that my father hurt me?  Do I need to know this?  Why?

Maybe down the road of this investigation I will draw upon ‘technical’ mumbo-jumbo-jargon.  Right now I want to simply put together a collection about my father and my current in-process responses to what I find.

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Right now I seem to have plenty of questions.  I need to let myself find and know answers.  This is a process.  The more specific and concrete readers’ comments are the better.  In the reality of the time frame I was raised in, of the social beliefs about the roles of fathers and mothers (including availability of information about parenting and mental illness), in the reality that law enforcement did not recognize either child or spousal abuse ‘back then’, what could and should my father have done differently?  Was he no different than a Nazi participating in the crimes of a Holocaust?

Given the facts as I best can lay them out – what were the alternatives?

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Was I like that cow moose that stood before my father that day, who did not even try to escape as he took her life?

I could not escape when I was a child.  He did not help me even as he provided for his family.

Was my father as guilty as my mother was?

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