I think I was a daddy's girl from the moment I entered the world. He was the strongest man I knew. His smile was the most handsome. He was always the funniest person in the room. He could do anything.....and I was his princess.
When I was a little girl, he would take my fingers and bend my wrist and kiss my hand. He did this so many times that I began to just go up to him with my hand extended for him to kiss it. He would smile his big dimpled smile and giggle but he would kiss it every single time.
My dad was DEFINITELY not a perfect parent. At the beginning of my life, my dad could hold a job about as well as you can hold air in your hand, so......not well. He was involved with terrible people as his friends. He made impulsive decisions regarding my parents' finances. He was a logistical train wreck, but that's not what I remember. I just remember love. I remember the kisses on the hand and on my cheek. I remember the laughter. I remember the strength.
My Nannie tells the story that her second born was "such a good baby". You could just sit him in the floor, and he wouldn't fuss or get into trouble. He would just stay right where you put him. When he was 18 months old, they discovered that his docile nature was actually because he couldn't see beyond his own nose to even explore anything. I also heard the story that, after my grandparents got his glasses, that my Grandpa John was holding him, and that baby boy just stared at his daddy - exploring every inch of his face. He reached up and touched all over that face. He was literally seeing it for the first time, and matching a face with the voice he'd heard all that time left him in a state nothing short of wonder.
My grandfather was not a warm parent to my dad and his older brother when they were little. Kind of absentee, but he would still take the boys on fishing trips or on errands and whatnot. Sometimes my dad would go on fishing trips just the two of them, and my Grandpa John would sing "Oh Danny Boy" to HIS Danny boy. Then came 2nd grade for my dad. The public school system in Arkansas started giving IQ tests to lower elementary school students. His family's financial limitations did not leave my dad with very updated glasses prescriptions. They had to drive from Forrest City, Arkansas to Memphis to get him glasses, and the glasses and the trips were a lot for their wallets to bear. My dad could not see well the questions on the IQ test, so the answers that he wrote earned him a qualification that he brought home to show his parents. "idiot". He was declared by the public school system of Arkansas in 1965 to be "an idiot". The fishing trips abruptly ended. The fun errands into town ended. Any shreds of affection that existed ended.....and my Grandpa John gave my dad a new name. No longer was he "Danny". From that day forward on into his adult life, when my Grandpa John would call my dad by his new name....."Dummy". "Git over here, Dummy!" "Go put that away, Dummy." "Go feed the dogs, Dummy". That was his new name.
The abuse my dad endured after that test in 2nd grade is beyond what I can imagine doing to a child. My dad was routinely beaten (not spanked - beaten). When he was 11, he committed a fairly minor infraction. The punishment for this was being locked in his room - for a year. My dad was allowed to leave his room to use the bathroom and to go to school and to do his chores on their property. When these tasks were complete, he was sent to his room....alone....away from his siblings....with the door locked.....for an entire year. He was given his meals to eat on his bed while everyone else ate their meals together at the table on the other side of the same wall. He would just lay in bed alone for hours and hours. To pass the time, he got ahold of a record. It was a recording of the opera Madame Butterfly. This musical enjoyment would not have been allowed to him, and he knew that, so his 11 year old self gathered materials and figured out how to build a headset - earphones - to connect to the record player he had. No one had taught him how to make something like that. He just looked around at what he had and fashioned something to meet the need he had. He needed to listen to Madame Butterfly. That was his escape. He would lay in bed, night after night, with tears streaming down his face and listen to the silken voices belt out the music.
Things got so much worse. The older my dad got, the more severe the abuse got. I even had a conversation a couple years ago with one of my uncles just to fact check, and I realized my dad had been very conservative in describing the things that happened. Beatings on the back or the back of the legs became punches to the face. There was blood. There were bruises. There were things that couldn't be hidden. There was an incident where my grandfather grabbed my dad by the neck and shoved him up against a wall. He was choking him. Just as his vision began to narrow and go black, my Nannie screamed out "JOHN STOP!!!! You're gonna KILL HIM!!!!". He released his grip, and my dad could breathe again. I asked my dad once why he didn't ever punch back when these things would occur. His answer "Because I was bigger than he was, and I knew I could kill him. I didn't want to hurt him." I just thought "What?! Why would you CARE to not hurt someone that repeatedly damaged you?!" I never asked the question because I knew the answer - he loved him.
My whole childhood I knew that my Grandpa John had been horrible to my dad. I never remember my dad saying anything disparaging about his own father, but, though I did not know all the ugly truths until I was older, things must have come up in my parents' conversations that left me with that conclusion. One day, when visiting my grandfather, I actually asked him, very matter of factly "So how come you used to always beat my dad?" I wasn't being combative or bratty. I was just confused. I guess I figured I'd just get it straight from the horse's mouth.
I will never forget the day that my grandfather died. My dad sat in the chair in his office and sobbed like a little kid. It was so weird to me. I had the thought again "Why are you sad?! Aren't you relieved? That jerk can't ever hurt you or anyone else again.", but it didn't matter. My dad had lost his daddy. He loved him. He had forgiven him, and he was going to miss him. He WAS sad.
I don't know the exact moment that forgiveness happened, but I do know this. After I was adult, my dad told me a story.
When I was in first grade, my mother had begun to have debilitating panic attacks while my brother and I were at school. My dad immediately found a therapy program for her. At one of her appointments, my dad sat in and started asking questions in regard to his own life. The therapist finished the conversation with my mom and then gave my dad some instructions. She told him to go home and write a letter to "Little Danny" and to tell him that he was safe - that "Big Danny" was a big strong man now, and he knew that "Little Danny" was being hurt but that he wasn't going to let it happen ever again. He was going to protect "Little Danny" from John no matter what. He was safe forever.
Sitting in my dad's office (which we shared together for the business we had), he told me that when he finished writing the letter, he looked down at the paper and noticed something startling.....his handwriting was not the handwriting he used as an adult. He had literally channeled his 11 year old self to the point that his hand wrote each letter in the note as he would have penned it as an 11 year old child. His healing began at that point. He had halted the damage of the abuse from that moment until the end of his life. The abuse itself didn't end until the day my grandfather died, but the damage ceased. My dad spent the rest of his life successfully protecting "Little Danny".
In the therapy of unearthing all of this trauma I have experienced in my life, I am having many conversations - talking out absolutely everything. Last night I broke down crying on Dan's shoulder over something that I'm dealing with, and I felt these words spill out of my lips, "I just miss my dad. He would know what to tell me to do. He would know what to say, and I don't get to ask him because he isn't here."
We spent the next 3 hours talking about what my dad did with his pain. He didn't deny it. He acknowledged within himself and to a select few the severity of the pain he had endured. His pain was greater than mine. I was never abused by a parent that should innately love me. He lived that pain every single day of his life, but he stopped letting it cripple him. He forgave. He loved.
I am making my best effort at bullying past all my pain - all my injustices. Whatever I'm doing is not working. I am at a loss. I have a few answers, but I'm still at the stage of unearthing a lot of things that I have repressed. I find myself in moments that should be nothing but happy getting lost in "old ghosts" as I call them to Dan. I have some reminder or revelation of traumas or depths of traumas that I hadn't ever realized before. They are rearing their ugly heads and stealing from me still. I don't know what to do with them.
Normally in my posts, I reach some sort of epiphany about the greater meaning of my writings, and I share that in my best poetic voice. Today I am not able to do that. I have no idea what my journey of healing is going to look like. I am at the beginning. I am at a place where I don't even know what to call certain things. They don't have names, some of them. I just know they were off. I am actively seeking help to sort through all of this, but I feel myself becoming very private. By nature I am an over-sharer, but at this time of my life, I feel like holding my soul very close to my chest. I arch my shoulders over it to protect it in its battered state. That's all I have right now is the instinct to protect and defend.
I look at myself in the mirror, and I wonder what I will look like in a year or two years or five. I wonder how many more lines will trace around my eyes or how much of the light of happiness will ever return to them. Right now they look a bit vacant to me.
More later.
No comments:
Post a Comment