Part 27

I have thought before about whether or not any of my childhood was good. Before the memories of the sexual abuse, I knew I’d had difficult times, but I also could remember things that made me feel warm and happy.

Once I started remembering all of those really bad things, though, it seemed like all of the happy memories I had attached to my dad were actually bits from larger events in which something horrendous happened. It seemed every positive memory I had was actually connected to him hurting me.

It got to where I would try to remember anything good at all about my dad, and if he ever did anything nice for me. I began to look at all of my memories of him from the perspective that he never loved me and always wanted to hurt me. I don’t know if this was a way to protect myself from more pain or what, but that’s the way it happened.

Seemingly benign events became symbolic of his evil, regardless of whether or not I could concretely connect them to his evil. I can remember him just doing something fun, like taking me to eat breakfast at a diner and sitting at the counter and I would have raisin bran, because the initials of raisin bran were the same as my initials and as his initials.

Even now, I can think back warmly of that diner – I think it was called The Clock or something like that. But then I search my mind for something evil that had to be attached to it. I start to remember actually being there, and what I was feeling.

I remember that other people would talk to me, like the waitress or a cop who was also there more than once at the same time my dad and I were there. I was terribly uncomfortable when other adults tried to initiate any kind of conversation with me – I would freeze up and not say anything.

Sometimes I would manage a smile, and that usually got the grown up to be satisfied with the exchange, and then stop paying attention to me. Other times, though, the grown up would be like, “I asked you a question. Did you think I didn’t want to hear an answer from you? Are you going to answer the question?”

It would absolutely terrify me. Usually when I would come up with an answer, the grown up would laugh at me, probably because I was so cute and serious, but that’s not how I thought of it then. I hated being laughed at, especially when I was just honestly answering a question some person I didn’t even know had asked me.

I mean, how could responding “fine” to the question “how are you” be funny? But people would find that delightfully funny, and I would just shut down.

I didn’t understand when adults would speak to me like I was a baby. I understood adult tones and words and facial expressions, and I was not a baby, so why would adults treat me that way? I remember being at the zoo once, and I was really tired, so my mom let me sit in the stroller that she rented for my baby brother when we entered the place.

A kid holding an adult’s hand waddled by me and looked at me and pointed, and the adult said, “yes, look at the baby,” and I was befuddled and insulted. The kid was younger than I was at the time, and in my mind it was ridiculous that I could be referred to as a baby.

But I was in a stroller. And I fit comfortably – I distinctly remember because I was surprised at how easily my legs slid under the metal lap bar when I got in it. Granted, older kids do fit in strollers, but I would cap that out at around four or five years old.

Four and five year olds actually are, in many, many ways, still babies, and in retrospect, I can see how that person could think of me as baby. But at that time and in my mind, I wasn’t.

Another time I remember being surprised by how juvenile an adult considered me was when I got a Strawberry Shortcake doll for Christmas. I was five. I already knew my parents were Santa, and so I looked at the Strawberry Shortcake, and was like, “what was my mom thinking?”

And then I thought about how I was five years old, and that a Strawberry Shortcake doll probably would be an okay thing to give a five year old girl, so I just let it go. That thing really did smell good, though.

I was probably around the same age when that cop at the diner tried to talk to me, but I again didn’t make the connection that I was young enough to be spoken to that way.

Also, he was a cop. He really made me nervous.

I never did like cops – I was always afraid I would say or do something that would get my dad in trouble. I felt very protective of him, of how different he was than other people. I felt like I had to mediate between him and the general public, which was difficult because I simultaneously had the sense that I didn’t really know what was going on a lot of the time.

Once when I was seven, my dad was letting me drive the golf cart (we drive golf carts around town where I live, just in case you don’t know what I could be talking about). We drove right by City Hall, where there happened to be a cop.

The cop stopped us and said that I had to be at least 12 to drive the golf cart with a parent. My dad was like, “oh, okay, I didn’t know.” Then the cop asked him what his name was, and my dad refused to tell him, even though the cop insisted my dad tell him. I was very confused and quickly saw how I could help clear up the situation by telling the cop what my dad’s name was.

I knew the whole thing, first, middle, and last. So I told the cop my dad’s first, middle, and last names. The cop smiled. I felt like I had done a good job helping out my dad, and we were shortly thereafter waved along to go about our business.

Once we were out of earshot of the cop, my dad explained to me that he did not want the cop to know what his name was, and I was again very confused. I could not comprehend why he would not be okay telling a cop what his name was when he hadn’t done anything wrong, and he eventually just dropped it.

That was probably the only time during my childhood that I freely offered information to a cop, and that was only because I distinctly felt I was helping my dad out. That cop at the diner was not getting a word out of me. I instinctively felt that it would be bad to say things to him, because I might get in trouble, or my dad might get in trouble, so I just zipped it tight.

Another thing I distinctly remember not liking about that diner was that I really didn’t like raisin bran. They had an entire array of tiny boxes of sugary goodness that my mom would not even think of letting cross through the front door into our house. Then here I was in this diner with this grand opportunity to experience gloriously unhealthy cereal, and I was stuck with raisin bran.

How that happened was that the first time I was going to order something there, I was having a hard time choosing. They had all of the little boxes stacked on a shelf above the prep area, and all I could see were the initials of each type of cereal stamped in red on the bottom.

I was working my way through the boxes, working out what each different set of initials could mean, when my dad pointed out that the raisin bran boxes had capital red “RB”s stamped on each of them. He made a connection between the two of us and applied it to something in the real world.

How could I not have anything but raisin bran? So that’s what I had, and I didn’t want to disappoint my dad, so I kept having that each time we went there. Eventually, my mom started buying it because my dad told her my favorite cereal was raisin bran.

And so that is how the process works – I can find some warm, companionable memory in my mind about my dad, and then when I examine it more closely, it was not so good after all.

I don’t know why this happens, or why I do this to my good memories. Sometimes I think it is because there really were never any good experiences with my dad. Other times I think it is because it is harder for me to think of my dad in any good way, and so completely villainize him in my mind.

When I was growing up and would get to a point with my dad that I just couldn’t stand anything about him, I would think back about the memories I had categorized as good. The good and loving father I had associated with those memories always won out over the bad father.

For some reason, the only way I could accept that my dad could hurt me was to prove to myself that he was a completely bad person, through and through. I was consistently able to prove that he was not completely bad based on those memories I had assigned to “good.”

No matter what he did to me or to other people, I would cling to the goodness I could see in him.

The memories I had catalogued as “good” were the memories I first started to actively analyze once I again became aware of the sexual abuse. This was years after I’d had any contact with my dad, and it seems that allowed me to not only feel safer, but to be more objective about who he was as a person.

My standard cache of “good” memories ended up being whatever went on before and after something really, really bad. It was like I had extricated those moments of terror in order to make the moment as a whole be ok.

I don’t know – it just really fucking sucks. I had worked so hard to keep and maintain some way that my dad could have loved me, and now I can’t even find a single scrap in my past that would indicate there was any truth to it.

It amazes me the extremes I have gone through in order to hold on to the idea that someone loves me. It seems as long as there is some way to connect a person with love and acceptance, no matter how twisted, there is some innate need to overlook all of the bad things and continue to seek that love and acceptance.

For me, once it came down to looking beyond that façade, all of the things I had overlooked and had tried to cover with pleasantries became unbearably painful to lose. The longer I tried to keep that façade up, the harder it was to let it come down.

If my dad really didn’t love me, and really did hurt me just for his own sick and selfish reasons, then where the fuck does that leave me? After defining myself for my entire life based on how this man treated me, what does it mean when I finally accept that he most likely never saw anything good in me? Never saw anything worth fighting his bad compulsions to protect and to love?

I think back on all of the things I have done to hurt myself and to hurt people who love me, and conclude that’s where it left me. That is where what my dad did and how I reacted to it and adapted to it left me.

It is pretty fucking shitty.

But it is not who I have to be today. As long as I can keep sight of that, I know I will be just fine.