I guess my parents fought a lot when I was little. I guess my dad was gone a lot. I learned that he had a major gambling problem. He was an alcoholic. My dad was always great with me and my brother, who was born when I was 2 and a half. He was never mean to us, he took good care of us. He played with us. I always watched Mork & Mindy and the Muppet Show curled up in his lap. There were some scary times though. i remember vividly one day my parents fighting, and my dad smeared a lemon meringue pie in her hair. She had a screaming tantrum that lasted a long time.
Another day, I will never forget. I walked into the apartment to see the Christmas tree knocked over, broken colored glass everywhere, and blood all over the floor. My dad was screaming because his foot was bleeding from having stepped on a broken Christmas ornament. My father had had a tantrum and apparently got combative with the Christmas tree.
The next sad memory I have is when I heard a gun go off in my parents room. I ran in, my mom was standing in front of a shattered mirror on the wall behind her. My dad, sitting on the bed facing her, holding his shotgun, told me he was cleaning his gun and it went off by accident. My mom looked really scared.
Then one day I heard my dad in his bedroom crying. I heard him say to my mother, "I'm going to fucking drive into a brick wall and kill myself so you won't ever have to look at me again." I had a vivid picture of him actually doing that. I froze in my footsteps.
Then one day I came home from the babysitter's with my mom. We walked in the door, and I went to the living room. I saw my bike in the middle of it, the one I had gotten for Christmas, but couldn't ride because it didn't have training wheels. I had been asking my dad to put training wheels on it for months. There it was, training wheels and all, with new streamers dangling from the handlebars. I ran as fast as I could, screaming gleefully, "Daddy, daddy, daddy, Thank you!" I ran into every room in the house. I couldn't find my daddy. I asked my mom, "Where's daddy?" She said, "He's not coming back. He left."
Suddenly that image of my father driving into a brick wall slammed itself into my brain.
Next chapter:
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/50483-yo-daddy-o#comment-286465
I realized the main reason I don't share these things, and that is that I don't allow this to dictate my life anymore, and I don't want to be identified with it. The truth is, every single part of it has affected me and my responses to it have changed over the course of my life.
Someone said something to me once about "spiritual DNA." That idea really stuck with me. Now my life is about victoriously breaking a deep-rooted cycle of abuse that began long before I was ever born. I am grateful that my daughter's experience will be completely different from mine.
It has not been an easy journey by any means, but I have never stopped fighting. In the end, that is what I hope to accomplish here. I want to materialize that process in my writing. Hopefully it will help someone else. If nothing else, I'm sure I'll gain even more insight during the process.
The things I still struggle with are my body and money. That is a very complex issue, but I am glad at least that I have healed emotionally, mentally and spiritually enough to be a good parent. These two small imperfections are not crucial to my daughter's well-being, but if I can conquer them, she will only have a stronger platform from which to launch into adulthood.
"Consistency is not a human trait" - Maude, from Harold and Maude