Childhood shit
The thing was the shit.
I feel symptomatic, like some wrong balance sheet of all that he did.
But I know my brothers are the same.
All products of some family project gone toxic.
The tragedy is that I know my father meant it to be so wholesome.
He meant to do it right, this time.
I know that I was his superstar.
Cute and too outspoken.
Smart and wordy.
Answers to everything.
Then when I was 9 and Anna was 7, Mom bought us hot pink jean skirts from Esprit. Mine fit a little too tight. My father watched me walk to the van parked in front of our house and commented to my mother. He didn't say that the skirt was a nice color, or that it was getting too small for me, but that I was learning how to walk in it and that it was too tight for me. It came to the middle of my knees, but the meaning was clear from how he looked at me: it was too sexy:
"She's got just the right walk for it, too."
The oldest of four children, certain privileges and responsibilities fell to me. The privilege was that I was my father's pride and joy: his pretty, smart girl, in that order. After puberty, he made regular comments about the food I consumed, especially when I was out to lunch with him and office staff, drug reps, or other doctors. The responsibility I readily took on was to absorb his wrath. I craved and held his attention as well as his anger. I took the occasional blows or expulsion from the house. When he started talking about Patrick's being fat or when Anna or Quealy didn't respond quickly enough to his quizzing, I created a distraction. I learned to be a constant distraction, always talking, always creating conflict to stave off the conflict that was inevitable.
And when I was a young child, my father delighted in my intelligence, bragging about my test scores and telling me I could be whatever I wanted to be. But things changed when I got older. continued being smart and trying to show off my smarts to my father, but all of a sudden, that seemed to be a liability. He said I was too headstrong, that no man would want me because I had too many of my own ideasl He emphasized my looks and encouraged me to marry for money. He looked at me differently--checked out my boobs. One night (this was after the divorce, at about 24 years old,) when we were getting drunk together, he told me I had "really nice breasts" and leered at my chest like a hungry wolf.
After my parents separated, things got worse. My father had this grudge against my mother over the divorce decree. It was all he talked about, on the phone or when we visited him. It was as if he not longer thought of us as children, but as the weapons my mother used to punish him for his sins, his affairs. Our mother encouraged us to interact with him. I think that she couldn't imagine that her children's father could arrive at any other conclusion but that we were precious and deserved love. I think that she was always waiting for him to come around to this perspective, because she couldn't imagine any other possible conclusion. My mother is full of unquestioning and just love.
My father, however, was working with a more rigid value system. I have thought a lot about this and I think that he feels like his divorce was a huge personal failure. He takes it as a judgment on himself as a person. Looking back, I think that perhaps he and my mother were never really compatible. One might give him a free pass on that account. However, looking at his unsuccessful attempts with Ginger, Liz, and now Gracie might lead one to believe that he's pretty difficult to be with.
Anyway, he looked at the divorce as a huge betrayal, even though he was the one who had the initial affair and left my mother. Our early visits with him, the ones right after the separation, were dominated by two consistent themes. The first was: "Do you think Susan will get back together with me? We never should have broken up." Once we had toyed with or rejected this notion, the moved onto the second theme: "Well, you don't ever have to see me again. I can just write you a check every month. That's what your Mom wants. She set it up that way."
This started at eleven years old. It made us feel weird, to say the least.
Well that's all I have to say about any of this. I've been drinking all night, just like my Dad, and I want to keep drinking, even though the sun is up, but that's how it is.
I feel symptomatic, like some wrong balance sheet of all that he did.
But I know my brothers are the same.
All products of some family project gone toxic.
The tragedy is that I know my father meant it to be so wholesome.
He meant to do it right, this time.
I know that I was his superstar.
Cute and too outspoken.
Smart and wordy.
Answers to everything.
Then when I was 9 and Anna was 7, Mom bought us hot pink jean skirts from Esprit. Mine fit a little too tight. My father watched me walk to the van parked in front of our house and commented to my mother. He didn't say that the skirt was a nice color, or that it was getting too small for me, but that I was learning how to walk in it and that it was too tight for me. It came to the middle of my knees, but the meaning was clear from how he looked at me: it was too sexy:
"She's got just the right walk for it, too."
The oldest of four children, certain privileges and responsibilities fell to me. The privilege was that I was my father's pride and joy: his pretty, smart girl, in that order. After puberty, he made regular comments about the food I consumed, especially when I was out to lunch with him and office staff, drug reps, or other doctors. The responsibility I readily took on was to absorb his wrath. I craved and held his attention as well as his anger. I took the occasional blows or expulsion from the house. When he started talking about Patrick's being fat or when Anna or Quealy didn't respond quickly enough to his quizzing, I created a distraction. I learned to be a constant distraction, always talking, always creating conflict to stave off the conflict that was inevitable.
And when I was a young child, my father delighted in my intelligence, bragging about my test scores and telling me I could be whatever I wanted to be. But things changed when I got older. continued being smart and trying to show off my smarts to my father, but all of a sudden, that seemed to be a liability. He said I was too headstrong, that no man would want me because I had too many of my own ideasl He emphasized my looks and encouraged me to marry for money. He looked at me differently--checked out my boobs. One night (this was after the divorce, at about 24 years old,) when we were getting drunk together, he told me I had "really nice breasts" and leered at my chest like a hungry wolf.
After my parents separated, things got worse. My father had this grudge against my mother over the divorce decree. It was all he talked about, on the phone or when we visited him. It was as if he not longer thought of us as children, but as the weapons my mother used to punish him for his sins, his affairs. Our mother encouraged us to interact with him. I think that she couldn't imagine that her children's father could arrive at any other conclusion but that we were precious and deserved love. I think that she was always waiting for him to come around to this perspective, because she couldn't imagine any other possible conclusion. My mother is full of unquestioning and just love.
My father, however, was working with a more rigid value system. I have thought a lot about this and I think that he feels like his divorce was a huge personal failure. He takes it as a judgment on himself as a person. Looking back, I think that perhaps he and my mother were never really compatible. One might give him a free pass on that account. However, looking at his unsuccessful attempts with Ginger, Liz, and now Gracie might lead one to believe that he's pretty difficult to be with.
Anyway, he looked at the divorce as a huge betrayal, even though he was the one who had the initial affair and left my mother. Our early visits with him, the ones right after the separation, were dominated by two consistent themes. The first was: "Do you think Susan will get back together with me? We never should have broken up." Once we had toyed with or rejected this notion, the moved onto the second theme: "Well, you don't ever have to see me again. I can just write you a check every month. That's what your Mom wants. She set it up that way."
This started at eleven years old. It made us feel weird, to say the least.
Well that's all I have to say about any of this. I've been drinking all night, just like my Dad, and I want to keep drinking, even though the sun is up, but that's how it is.
posted by chavala at 6:38 AM
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