What Do You Do When Abusive Parent Won’t Make Amends?
I stopped being afraid to live, moved on, and won’t look back
I have started to participate in Diana’s 50-day challenge.
Many may recall that I responded to each of the 30-day-poetry-challenge prompts with tanka. MDSHall, the owner of the poetry-centric publication, The Bazaar of the Bizarre, for “wonderous wanderers, weirdos and wordsmiths yielding words as [their] weapons of choice,” wrote about and prompted his writers to employ two syllabic forms of poetry which I had not yet encountered. To wit, dodoitsu, and American cinquain.
The former meets haiku and tanka midway between those two as it contains four lines with this syllabic structure: 7/7/7/5. The latter contains five lines employing a 2/4/6/8/2 structure and should present “intense physical imagery to communicate a mood or feeling.” You can read more details in MDSHall’s own words:
I have challenged myself to rise to Diana’s challenge while expanding my repertoire to these two formats.
Day-3 Prompt — How can you learn to forgive people for treating you poorly whilst continuing to uphold the boundaries you set in response to their poor treatment?
This prompt presents an interestingly difficult challenge for me because I need to find a way to distinguish my response here from that of my response to the day-1 prompt, as they both bring me to how I have faced and reacted to the same situation in my life — my relationship with and cancelation of my father.
Diana challenged respondents with this for day-1:
How can you have compassion for your own trauma history while also holding yourself accountable for the ways you’re harming yourself/others?
I wrote these two poems in response:
Dodoitsu:
Father programmed me to fail Responsibility mine Canceling hurt my mother Avoid I could not
Cinquain:
Mother I crushed your heart My heart oozes blood too Yet both our hearts still beat as one True love
As I wrote in my response published in SYNERGY:
My father [David], a covert malignant narcissist, possibly the rare male with borderline personality disorder, [as a result of his irrational jealousy] and thus life-long imagined need to put me down to make sure my mother would love him more than me, raised me to be a dependent weakling…shame on me for letting him fool me for so many years. I do not blame him. I accept responsibility for my actions. I also forgive him. … I shall not reconcile with him.
So now I need to write one or two poems emanating from the same situation that answer the day-3 question. I shall now draft them on the fly.
Dodoitsu
Dad waged guerilla warfare Saw Greg as rival not child Marcus agreed to challenge Not bear forever
Cinquain
Test me Line path with mines Heal wounds to re-inflict David plods towards death while I Choose Light
For more backstory and context you may read:
You may read my day-2 response in Claire Kelly’s wonderful Write Under the Moon
In Rama I create with Lindsey winding my sails,
