A Day When My World Shifted Five Degrees To The Left
Abuse will never be tolerated by me, family or not
It’s been a month. A month since my world shifted five degrees to the left, in one day.
I have found the stories we are most hesitant to write, are usually the ones which need writing.
I take a deep breath at this thought, stare at this little screen, and swipe slowly. Not the fast fingers of keys, not the skating of a pen across a page, but the deliberate, delicate swipe of letters on a small keyboard. As I muster up the courage to bring moments I must remember into reality.
I can forgive,
yet I must
remember
the memories
where I was unsafe.
I keep thinking about why we tolerate abuse. And abuse is subjective. If you were beaten with a belt, a hit to someone else will be seen as “light.”
“You got off easy, I had it more difficult than you,” kind of shit. It’s that competition of trauma. Why though?
“I hurt more than you. I went through more than you,” therefore your pain is invalid and mine takes precedence.
Why though?
We all have pain.
Every single one of us.
To deny you have pain is to deny you are a human.
To understand my hesitancy, you must understand my father is still alive. Perhaps even reading this, perhaps not. Because he did say once, “Why would I pay to read you, when you can just send them to me?”
I don't know, maybe because I'm not the only person writing?
Maybe because you can read other people's stories about what they've been through to help through your pain?
Maybe because it might free you from the past, you so love to dwell?
Maybe because you may actually find some peace before you "walk home?"
Ram Dass has this quote, "We are all walking each other home." I used to share with my father every spiritual word I came across. In the hopes a peace seed may be planted in his suffering angry brain. He is obviously suffering.
He has taken every spirtual quote I’ve given and twisted it to his own use and justification for his anger. Including this one.
“You’ll be sad if we’re not talking, and then I ‘walk’ home. You’ll miss me.”
Of course, I’ll fucking miss you.
I miss you now.
It’s how every time he could pull me back into communication with guilt, for the cycle of pain to begin again.
The last time I looked into his eyes, there was no more Dad there.
If you ever met my father, you’d see a warm, jolly man. A happy looking man. If you know the other side of my father, you know this jolly can turn on a dime.
My mother called him a “ ‘happy’ pessimist” (which he hated) and she’d call herself an “unhappy optimist.”
My father I once knew, is no longer here.
Perhaps his trauma has become him?
Perhaps his ego got so sick of his self centeredness it decided to push his spirit out?
Perhaps his brain is deteriorating because of his trauma?
Perhaps he’s just the asshole people have been trying to tell me about for decades?
I don’t even care, there’s no excuse for abuse, Dad.
To be face to face with the asshole, is what shifted my existence.
You see, I was born after four years of my mother expressing she wanted children, as she thought my father did. She always wanted to be a Mom.
A born mother, my mom had many children, about 700 or so of them! After 38 years of teaching she is beloved in our town. “Her kids” she’d call them. And I’d remind her in a huff, I was her only kid. But alas, this wasn’t true. They were her kids too.
My mother calls my father’s hindsight memories his “revisionist history.” So growing up I got the highlight reels of the memories I could not recollect with him.
The story of Clifford the red dog being brought home while I was warm in womb. I still have Clifford, he’s Miracle’s buddy. Him singing to me, reading me stories before I was born. The ask of my mother to not be loud, because I’d kick inside when he got too manic.
"But your mother didn’t know what you wanted, you wanted more songs, more!"
My mother knew what I needed. We were connected in body. We still are — the “belly button line” she calls it. Mom knew, well in advance, how this man would eventually cause me deep anxiety, just in his presence, even before birth.
My Dad would tell the story over and over again, of when he fought the nurse to hold me in the rocking chair. Because a father must bond with his daughter. Of how my mother was so exhausted from 72 hours of delivery, and a cesarean section so I’d survive, she couldn’t even hold me. I had to be held by him.
About the lone seagull who ushered in my day of birth, as we rocked into reality together with my conehead. He was the hero who I imprinted on at birth in his story.
The unconditional love in human form he never got from his mother. Why would I ever believe my father would skew the truth as a child?
I had thought my Mom never held me. Until I came across a polaroid photo, when I was in my thirties — my mother cradling me in her arms, us together in the bed after my birth.
My mother cannot remember a fine chunk of my childhood. Because her relationship was so scarred with my father, she has edited not only him out, but me too.
Perhaps it exists somewhere, but it’s far too painful to see the other sites to get to the beauty. This always saddens me, when I ask her, “Ma do you remember when” and she says, “I have forgotten much of my life with your father.”
She was married to my father on July 4th, 1976, the 200th anniversary of America. Every year, fireworks would go off on the day they married. Cook outs by the lake would celebrate their dysfunctional union.
Until one year, in 1991 where you can hear my mother behind the video camera, pointed at the firework show over the lake quietly saying, “These fireworks symbolize the end of marriage — going out with a bang.”
My mother got her independence.
I’d say my parents marriage was explosive. And not in the fun firework way. There was passion, but more like the old school latin root of passion, pati meaning to suffer.
My mother is likely one of the most compassionate human beings you will ever encounter. She has the patience of a saint. But some people bring out the worst in us.
I believe sometimes we choose people in our worlds so they trigger our raw, unrefined parts we’re too frightened to face.
Some of the curd gets turned into delicious cheese. And other times, we forget we were making cheese with this person, and spend years walking around like sour milk. People will tell us we reek, but we think we smell like buttermilk. And the only thing that’s churning anymore, is the steady ground we are walking upon.
My father is a firestarter. He always has been. His mother was a firestarter, and so, probably was her mother. Instead of pouring water on a crisis or conflict, this man will throw your personal stories, your vulnerabilities, the most sacred words you’ve shared into the fire to watch you burn.
I realized this past father’s day, after reading a quote by Thich Nhat Hahn about expressing our suffering, tell the one you love,
“I am suffering. I need your help.”
I said these words to him. Wicked fucking vulnerable to do. And he snapped back,
“The Buddha said I need to make you suffer so you can heal.”
He basically spoke his long held philosophy of life, in that one moment. Under the guise of Buddha, who of course never once said this. In his pompous I am "the curator of the cosmos” (yes, he calls himself this) “I-know-everything-do-not-question-Astronomy-Professor-Lane-you-must respect-me at all times” voice, or “God” voice, as he would refer to it at times.
My father has probably never been fully well. He sure did seem to enjoy causing people suffering with a savior’s cap on. I believe people — who have no idea of the damage they are causing, and refuse to take any responsibility in relationships, or for their well being — are just as dangerous to our lives as a person with a knife at the ready.
My father’s savior’s cap is like one of those cheap cowboy hats made of plastic with flashy lights on the brim. Eye catching, but utterly useless in the rain.
Perhaps he wears this because he couldn’t save his mother?
So everyone else became her effigy, he burned with incessant bulldozing bulldog-ed “help?”
I too followed this saving role. Rescuing injured animals as a child. I vividly remember pulling a frog out of a snake’s mouth by the lake. Tenderly laying blades of grass on the frog’s wounds on the dock in the cove. But only watching the frog die, and denying a snake a meal it was designed to eat.
I am gradually unweaving my savior’s cap. And knitting a special savior’s cap of the many colors I love. To save one soul I neglected for so many years, myself.
I am my own remover of darkness. I am my own savior. There is not healing in attempting to break someone’s spirit. I am no horse to be broken, bit in mouth. I need not be whipped by anger, or bloodied by spurs to know I am suffering. I don’t need someone else piling their suffering on mine, because of the hidden unexamined specters in the corners of their mind.
I will never forget the rage my father would make me feel, like no one else could do. And he seemed to derive glee from this. Perhaps, because he has no ability to emotionally regulate?
It made him feel more “normal” to watch someone else spin out if control by his hand?
To see someone else in the state his mind was in?
One thing my father was very good at was finding, kind, quiet, exceptionally loving, stoically controlled, patient, strong women, and turning them into his mother. He’d crack open their pain, even when they begged for it to stop. Until I watched the peaceful women turn out inner and outer anger worthy of being written in books.
When you’re used to someone flinging their shit out daily, it becomes regular chaos, and not so chaotic anymore. Because it’s somewhat predictable, even if it’s fucked up.
When your used to patience and peace, kindness and love and you see a hole in the wall and “your mother threw a mug at my head and missed,” — even as a little kid, the world shifts off balance five degrees to the left.
Until one day, it’s shifted so far off, the double exposure of what you thought you knew, and what it is, become unrecognizable.
My parents were highly affectionate to me. Never do I remember them affectionate to each other. No hugging, no kissing.
The only time I saw them holding hands was in the audience on a PBS special of a James Taylor concert played on tv. We taped it. I rewinded to that scene again and again. It was the only memory I have where it seemed like they loved one another.
My father, to put it bluntly, tossed my mother aside after I was born. He’d say differently. He’d say she was the one who fell out of love, she’s the one who left. But my Mom became the afterthought of a new potential unconditional love from a woman, me. As I too was tossed aside, after my mother left, and my step mother moved in a few months later. I didn’t even know they were dating.
My soon to be stepmother ambushing me at the top of my stairs, with hand out first, as if a pope’s ring to kiss, a shiny diamond engagement ring.
I was angry.
This woman just moved in. I don’t even know you, please get out of the stairwell. Where’s my father? Why didn’t he tell me any of this? Even at 12, I knew having a woman move in so shortly after my mother moved out, and not even mentioning any of this to me, was a fucked up thing to do.
They got married. I got forgotten. A shadow growing into my own being, besides a new potential unconditional love for him.
The rainbow, my Aunt had painted on my wall, backwards, purple first, got painted over one time I was at my mother’s.
I was moved back into the smaller bedroom I hadn’t been in since I was very small. A room I could handle being downgraded to. But being downgraded to the smaller chamber of my father’s heart, having been there for my whole life, felt like I had to find a new home entirely.
My abandonment issues were born. Along with a near crippling fear of being left. Something I have had to unlearn.
My father’s new wife slowly replaced any reminders of my mother and our family in the home. It became all her home. My childhood got swifty painted over. Items I cherished and stood and stared at as a child, got sold or donated, or thrown away even. Who knows? They may be at the bottom of a landfill now becoming Earth once again.
Slowly, it felt like I no longer existed. Like Marty McFly in Back to the Future when he starts to disappear in his picture after the past is altered. And his hand starts to fade.
First, it was my rainbow, and then it was whatever selfish- extension of- himself-love my father had given me in the beginning of my life.
“Love” gone in the first conversation he had with her at the school they both worked at. Gone was the chance of therapy with my mother. Was there ever a chance? I don’t think so.
Why untangle a big ball of yarn, when you can spin new yarn?
Throw it away, convince another with love bombing you’re their oxygen.
After three years of joint custody between parents — first half weeks, then one week on, one week off, then two weeks on, two weeks off — never wanting to choose between father or mother — a suitcase more home than either home. Or the intermediate homes, until my mother could buy again.
Once she bought the little house, I was with her full time. I chose her. No longer having to play second fiddle to a woman seemingly the opposite of both my parents stern, hyper neat, new head of household. My mother wasn’t even allowed to set foot in the home anymore.
Over the years, I watched my father slip away. Looking more like my manic depressive paternal Grandfather.
Grandpa Lane would only speak to bark out orders from his recliner, he seemed to have merged into, for disturbing his silent world.
There was this beautiful wooden carved whale at my grandfather’s, at eye level to little me, spouting fiber optic water. The water, all alternating in different colored lights. Oh, the lights!
His precious whale just so happened to be in the direct stare line of my grandfather, who didn’t speak. The first time I touched it, I heard his anger. I’m not sure we ever had an actual conversation, him and I. Whenever he’d rock out of the chair to use the restroom, I’d touch the whale, the water. Run my hand through the lights. Watch my skin glow.
I have always been a rebel.
Visting grandpa was much easier than visting Grandma. My father’s mother was a tyrant, who manipulated her way into love. And balanced her manic depressive with vodka. Grandpa had something called lithium, my little brain thought he sucked on metal to feel better. My grandmother sucked on a bottle.
By the time I came into existence, my grandmother “Lovey,” the name she forced everyone to call her, who was anything but — was a skeleton of a woman. Begging for hugs under a thick, warm blanket, the only warmth I think she had.
“Come here give me a kiss.”
“No way, you scare me,” my brain raced. But dutifully, I kissed the seemingly living corpse. The image of her I can still see in that bed. She was frightening.
It was the stories my father told me of her alcohol abuse. Stories he told me far too young. Of her locking them out in the snow in the dead of Winter. Or the beatings she inflicted with a piece of wood with cement in the middle of it. Why were we still visiting this woman after all she did? Even little Jenny wondered.
Did she keep the piece of wood with the cement in the middle of it in the house? Was this an exaggeration? Then it turned into wire coat hangers in the stories.
Her children were abused, all three of them agree, they were severely physically abused. But child Jenny never knew if that piece of wood was just waiting under the comforter, if I hadn’t given her a kiss. Would she jump out and strike? I wasn’t taking my chances.
My mother, I and my father would drive hours and hours up to Maine to see her and his step father. Who was a piece of work in an of himself. Even little me dreaded going.
But there were little doggies to pet. And a hotel with a tropical paradise we’d stay at. A pool surrounded by rooms in an almost greenhouse setting. Palmtrees, rivers, parrots in large cages, little wooden bridges, warmth, humidity in Maine cold. I’ve searched for that hotel online, and have yet to find it. Even if my parents forget where in Maine this oasis existed.
After fear, I’d have a winter paradise of swimming and parrot speak. Kissing a corpse was a fair trade.
Until my mother refused to join us anymore. It got harder. I didn’t quite know why until early adulthood. But even frailty cannot squash cruelty and my mother wasn’t having her abuse. She may have not found her boundries with my father yet, but she established them with his mother.
My father has this idealized version of his mother’s ending, which he never got. An imagination where him and her are holding hands and walking down a gravel road and she says she’s sorry.
He waited for this personal responsibility of an apology his whole life.
This I will not do.
For how will someone ever come to the epiphany that an apology is needed if nothing they have ever done was wrong?
It was always someone else to blame, or something— no responsibility for the pain.
My Aunt and Uncle did. They escaped “Lovey” (the actual name she angrily told people to call her) they left her “love” clutches, raised beautiful amazing human beings. Got professional help in therapy. Ended the cycle of abuse and dependency on drugs to “manage” the trauma.
My father didn’t. He was never physically abusive to these women, emotionally yes, to all of his three wives and eventually me. Never dependent on drugs. But physically, he had never. His drug was attention. An intense need to be loved at any cost.
At the cost of dropping one love that might be healed, for a new love. Like throwing away freshly picked wildflowers because you’ve seen unnaturally dyed white roses in colors which don’t exist in nature, that catch the eye to buy. Next destination happy. Love was replaceable to my father. Especially when you’ve decided it’s everyone else’s problems but your own. “Whose problem is it?”-- one of his mantras.
You cannot push and test someones love. Causing them deliberate suffering and expect they’ll stay. You cannot yell and scream when you disagree with how someone else needs to live their life. Or when someone disagrees in general. You cannot neglect, or replace attention with shiny things, or charming stories about how wonderful you are. You cannot dominate every conversation with monologues and think it’s okay.
Trauma repeats itself. It grows new medusa snake heads and will lash out at everyone who cares about you, in every direction, just when you think it’s coiled away deep into the mortal coil of you.
Emotional abuse, rage rarely gets better. It usually escalates to physical abuse, in my experience.
The hope, the potential of an abuser to change is detrimental to our well being.
Can people change?
Yes, maybe with drastic catalysts, near death experiences, or knowing they really do need help, and investing life in changing.
But how much abuse does one need to take in life from a family member before it’s enough?
Before you say, hey, fuck, I matter too?
But there comes a time, when one loves an abuser, when we realize that the expiration date is up. When self compassion becomes more important than hope or possibility. When the possible seemingly becomes impossible. When the hope is turned back on ourselves and an alternate future.
And then one looks at that picture of themselves faded, the soundtrack swells in the background, and our self comes back into the photo and reality, because of the choices we are making now.
The daily choice of the importance of our inner peace.
Does it suck to grieve a father who is still alive? Yes.
Does it suck to have to block a father from all forms of communication because he refuses to get help? There were some good times. He has been there for me. Yes.
But being yelled at daily, giving hours out of my day to hear about some other “injustice” created by his own chaos and irresponsibility for one’s own pain, yes it sucks.
I grieve.
I took this emotional abuse for years.
“But he’s my Dad.”
I hear this echoed by many adult children bonded in servitude and duty to abusive parents.
Parents whom were the ones planting the love debt guilt upon their children at birth.
I no longer have a guilt tree planted in my backyard. It has shed its guilted leaves, and in its place grows purple guilded flowers of relief.
My relief tree.
But I wonder after hearing this story, do you think I’m cruel? Leaving a poor man of abuse by the hand of his mother?
I no longer want to be cruel to myself, in allowing any forms of abuse into my world. Once only focusing on good, or possiblity of change, while dismissing abuse.
My father screamed at me to leave a man just like him. An abusive man who only cared about his own pain. My father, yelling like a manic gorilla, two thousand miles away, ordering me to leave a man just like he has become.
Well Dad, I have listened to you. And I have listened to your pain for years. I have been your emotional dumping ground, just like your ex wives.
Father, you have become Lovey.
I only feel sad that it took that car ride to your appointment for me to see how dangerous you are to my well being.
I now look at my relief tree being in the backyard, with the purple flowers.
I do not need your apology to forgive you, this is for myself. I do not need to walk hand in hand with you down this road. I do not need closure. I have created my own closure. I will remember the five year old me who was a loved wildflower. And be love along my path without you.
I will remember our memories.
Us playing in the leaves we raked up in piles.
Us making snowfamilies.
The short time when you were my best friend.
Those few years of my life, I will remember.
Of course I miss you. I miss you now. I grieve for you now.
But now, I will also remember the nearly forty years which have passed now, when your pain, your self, your being right, became more important than relationships, more important than love.
I will hold our memories dear, but the memory of being in that car with you after what you did, I must remember.
So I remember to protect myself from the pain you inflict. The pain which isn’t mine to carry.
This one day when the world shifted five degrees to the left, will become the memory of strength, of hope for my self, for my future, for my now. When I chose to leave the original version of every ex I searched for “love” in, when I hear your words.
“Leave. There are people out in the world who need you more than these jerks.”
Well I’ve left them all, including you. I have to let you go.
If only you had realized your pain. But if I had never drove you to that appointment, I would have never known — you, too, are one of them I must leave for my safety.
If only you had chosen to get help. Maybe someday you will. There is no “potential repair” of this which is worth my peace.
Truth be told, I did want to walk you home. But I know the worth of my inner peace now. Even if this means you will walk home on your own.
I choose self compassion.
Today, today, in this now, I will sit, cross legged in the freakishly warm November weather, and watch my guilded purple flowers of relief bloom with peace in every moment.
With love,
💜
I will eventually get the courage to publish the story of the day which shifted my whole world five degrees to the left. Am working on it right now. But here is something I wrote the day of this event.
Please remember, no potential hope, or how it used to be, is ever an excuse for abuse.
Forgive for yourself, yet remember, remember all of it for your inner peace today.
