I had posted a rather vitriolic entry regarding my birth family. I read it and realized that it was not what I wanted this blog to be about and deleted it. It is true; I do not really consider that my birth family is a family to me. I’ve read some blogs where horrors are recounted beyond anything that I experienced. I will say this about my birth family: we did not want for anything material. My father did well financially. We lived in a neighborhood that I will never be able to afford. While my father may have been a poor businessman, he made a wise choice in buying where and when he did.
It was what went on behind the perfect walls of our perfect home that still vexes me: I was regularly beaten down with words and often with fists. There is no need to rehearse the details of my private hell; I was hated in school, isolated and alone, that disaffected kid that everybody picked on but could snap in a moment. I was ridiculed at home for being stupid, for never meeting the expectations that my family had of me, for never being good enough.
After a while my father took to beating me. My mother still denies that this happened. I still have nightmares about the violence, having my face smashed into the side of the house because I could not do algebra and then the snide comments about quadratic equations that he would make all the way through graduate school. One day he looked at me and told me that I had no idea what he lived through, as if to explain or justify his actions. At the time I was not sympathetic. I still am not. I knew what I lived through. I know the scars and the emotional handicap that I still carry to this day.
This brings me to the reason why I deleted the entry: I was blaming them for what I am and how I live. The one thing that they could not break – though it was damaged, bent and twisted – was my will. Personal responsibility is big in my world. I make my own choices of what I do and what I do not do. I am responsible, not my past, for the success that I have and the failures that I endure.
I had something of an epiphany today: I do not communicate well with others. I know that it is easy for me to become turtle like when threatened in any way. I draw deeply within. This is a long-term conditioned response. I don't ask for help. I would separate myself from the beatings, from the ridicule to endure them. Sad to say, it has marked my way in the world. There are things that I should have said and things that I should have been more forthright about that I chose not to say for fear of … (fill in the blank). This is a behavior that does not help me. It harms me. I have to overcome it.
This has marked the past year. One of the great joys of keeping this journal is that I can go back and look at what was happening and ask what I have learned. This, more than anything, has been my downfall. I have to become more verbal, stand up and speak to the people that hold power over circumstances that are only worsened by my silence. I have defaulted into passivity. This must change.
For what it’s worth, I do not consider that I have a family. A family is bound together by love and concern for one another. Ridicule and scorn do not fall into the equation. This is their way of being in the world. I will have nothing to do with it. These are the people that damn near drove me to suicide when I was younger. I do not consider that they are healthy for me. I wish them well, my parents and my sister, but want as little contact with them as possible.
I don’t know how to overcome the fear that I feel within me. It is like a toxic life-preserver that I clung to not to drown. It kept me afloat to live through the crisis, but the residual chemicals still course through my veins. I doubt that I will ever completely overcome the fear and anxiety that vexes me, forty-seven and a half years are a long time to live with this thing, this self-loathing.
I was in therapy for a while. I was asked to imagine myself as a child. I saw a foul, dirty, mean child that was afraid. My therapist told me to go to him and embrace him. I didn’t want to, he was too horrible. In my mind’s eye there was this grotesque child that seemed like one of the street kids that live somewhere in a third-world country. He told me that he is afraid and needs love. I said that he needed to be put out of his misery. That was my mother’s voice that said that. She was worst than he was. I tried so hard to protect her from my father’s wrath, all the while she played us off against each other.
But there is still that child. What to do? How can I begin to hold him and let him know that the nightmare is over? Is it too late?
