Love Shouldn't Hurt

I had a post in mind today about being poor and how tired I was of never having enough money. Then I read Granny's newest post and found this:


My father is friendly, charismatic, funny, helpful, and entertaining. He is also an abuser. People who have met him often can't believe that he could be capable of some of the things he has done. So often people believe that they would know an abusive person if they saw one. The sad truth is that no, you can't. People like that are very good at hiding that part of themselves from the outside world.

As he was a trucker, we didn't see him often until he hurt his back when I was about 10, so I think there was much less of it before then. I'm not sure whether it had to do with it being pre-accident, or just that we didn't live with him on a daily basis. I suspect it was a little of both. I think that I saved my brothers from a lot of it growing up. I was always trying to protect them. I was the oldest, I felt it was my responsibility to keep them safe. My mom had it much worse than we did, though. I probably don't know the half of it, but the things I do know make me sick.

He was both emotionally and physically abusive. Especially after he hurt his back. He was on medication that made him hallucinate and paranoid. He believed my mother was cheating on him with a multitude of other guys while she was at work. He saw phantom numbers written everywhere- on the walls, under the mattress, on his power tools, in chalk on the sidewalk. He would show my brothers and me the numbers he thought he saw, and threatened to punish us if we "lied" and said we didn't see them.

I was constantly telling him no, daddy, there were no numbers. He was imagining things. He didn't believe me and I would get in trouble. I tried so hard to protect my brothers from that, but I couldn't be there all the time. They weren't as strong as I was, and so he would get them alone, they would agree with whatever he said. They were too afraid not to.

Once, when I was about 11, I did something bad (I can't for the life of me remember what), and he instructed me to go out to one of the trees in the back yard and cut off a switch. Then he had me stand on a chair in front of the dinner table where my brothers were eating dinner, had me pull down my pants, and beat me with it until all the leaves came off. It's funny, even now I cringe at using the word "beat". I know I didn't deserve it, and I never felt as if the abuse was my fault, but I still feel some bizarre need to protect him, to make light of it.

There are other incidents that I can think of, but this is the one that always stands out in my mind. Not even so much for the pain, but the sheer humiliation. I couldn't look my brothers in the eye for days afterward. There was name calling, being belittled for mistakes, being told I was fat.

I so wanted to be perfect. I wanted to make my dad proud. I did the best I could in school because I knew I could and because it was one area where I excelled. I was daddy's little helper, I was always there to help him out. I wanted to be useful. It hurts, to think of the stark contrast between the man who beat me with the switch and the man who taught me to use power tools and let me design and help build an easel for my birthday present. How could they be the same person? How could that kind, funny, charming man that was my father turn into the raving, angry asshole who would hit his wife and his kids?

I hate that I have experienced this. The worst part of it all is that I know I am capable of it. I have a violent temper and when I'm angry my words are like daggers. I try so hard to avoid getting angry, because I hate the person I become. The meds have helped, but I still see the tendency and it comes out far too often for my liking. I have such a hard time talking about it, admitting that I could do something like this. I don't want my son to grow up ever knowing that kind of pain. Love shouldn't hurt. Mommy and daddy should be the embodiment of safety and happiness for a child. It's so hard to say something like that about yourself, though. When I am in public, talking to a stranger, even a counselor or psychiatrist, I change. I am suddenly happy, charming, friendly, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly. It's effortless. It's also why my bipolar went undiagnosed for so long. And digging beneath that, showing someone the black marks on my soul is just about the hardest thing I can imagine doing.

I have been a victim of domestic abuse. I don't really talk about it often, but occasionally something happens to remind me. Yesterday my brother and I were talking and he casually mentioned a time my dad beat him. It occurred to me that normal families don't have those kinds of conversations. It made me so sad to hear him say that. We need to find a way to stop this-- to protect those weaker than ourselves from those that would hurt them. Sometimes we even need to protect them from ourselves. We need to stop the cycle. Every victim is a potential future abuser-- how's that for irony?

--Dragon Read more!