Part 28

I have been trying to engage in some sort of dialogue with my dad’s side of the family. It has not been going well.

My dad is the youngest of six kids. He was born about 18 years after his oldest brother. He describes his childhood with vague terms referencing extreme poverty, family violence, and lack of a feeling of being loved or wanted.

My dad told me several times during my childhood that he did not want to be his dad. He described his dad as cold and unloving and strict. My dad wanted to be a warm, loving, and kind dad. I truly believe that for some period of time in his life he sincerely wanted this for himself as much as for us kids.

My dad’s sexual abuse of me started when I was a baby – when I was maybe two or three or four years old. From what I lived and experienced growing up, his abuse and his insanity have consistently advanced throughout the years. I can’t say that he ever got close to his desire to be different from his father.

There were things he said he did in his role as a father differently than what his dad had done. There was no way of knowing if this was true or not – we (my siblings and I) obviously were not around to witness first hand our grandfather’s fathering, and my dad rarely went into anything specific about his childhood.

But he said he was different from his dad. He wanted us to be a close family, and he enforced regular family time, such as meals or trips to the lake. He said his father never hugged him, and my dad made a point of hugging us often.

The biggest issue I remember, though, is that my dad never heard his own dad say he loved him. My dad spoke of this many times throughout my childhood. It was one of the very few things he would say about either of his parents. He always insisted on telling us that he loved us, and also insisted on hearing it from us in return.

I don’t actually remember my dad ever saying anything at all about his mother. He told me his father was a house painter, and of course that he never said he loved him, and that he would put salt on all of his food, even ice cream.

But I don’t remember him saying anything at all about his mother. I can’t recall any interaction between the two of them, either. Of course my perception of the past could be skewed by other factors, or maybe my dad’s interaction with his mother is not something that was ever impressed on me.

After his mother died, and her affects sorted through, we had returned to us anything we had ever given her, which consisted mostly of greeting cards. A few years ago, my mom and I were going through old boxes of photos and things and came across the packet of birthday cards my dad had sent his mother over the years.

My mom opened each of them and noted that he did not once sign his own name to any of the cards. She was actually the only one who bought the cards, as well. In the cards from earlier years, my mom would just sign my dad’s name.

As time went on, though, she would sign them from the family and occasionally throw in a note that might explain my dad’s absence from every card every year. I wonder if she would have eventually just signed her own name to each card, had my grandmother lived longer.

My mom liked my dad’s mom. She said she could see a strength in her that I could not, though I did look for it as I got older, and eventually saw that my mom was right. My overall impression of my grandmother for most of my childhood, though, was of a strictly subservient wife who sometimes went along as a passenger on road trips with my grandfather. 


She scared the shit out of me once when she backed their car up a few feet to give us more room to play on the driveway – I had no idea she could even drive, and thought she was going to fly backwards into and through the neighbor’s house across the street.

I think back about what I know now about my grandmother, and my grandfather, and my dad, and myself. It is easy to see decades of pain in each of our lives, and the effects of it in our faces and personalities. My grandfather was the angry, sadistic control freak; my dad the angry, passive-aggressive sadistic pseudo deity; and I am the grown-up-with-a-ton-of-therapy version of the angry, screaming, bossy kid.

My grandmother, though, was more - I don’t know – still? Outside of occasionally reprimanding my siblings or I, or giving us a swat (but never with a switch from a tree like my dad said she did with him), I cannot think of a time when she moved very quickly or spoke very quickly. 


She was in her forties when my dad was born, and we did not know her when she was younger than about 70 years old. She sewed and cooked and cleaned, and she would play games with us when we visited their house in Ohio that had no television.

She taught me how to sew, both by hand and on her sewing machine. To this day, I am very adept at replacing buttons, sewing holes closed, and making bits of cloth stick together. I never took my sewing skills beyond basic, artless functionality. I guess for my grandmother, though, it was an art, a way she created.

Once while at my grandparents’ house, I was digging though some drawers and found a giant safety pin. It was about four inches long, and was made of metal that was proportionately thicker than a regular sized safety pin’s metal. I was delighted with it! I asked my grandmother if I could have it, and she said yes. She said it was for a horse blanket, or something like that.

I tried over and over and over again to unfasten that damn safety pin with absolutely no success, or even progress. I worked my hands red and raw, applying every ounce of my body and soul into moving that one metal bar in and then out and around the enclosure. I could not even budge it a single millimeter.

My grandmother said to give it to her. I was pretty dubious about her ability to do anything physical at all except shuffle along in her house coat, let alone move something that required that much strength. She was a little old lady, fragile and docile. I was a very strong kid, probably about 8 years old or so at the time, and I couldn’t budge it.

But she told me to give it to her, and so I did. I stood to her side with my hands on my hips watching her hands move efficiently and effectively to open that safety pin without so much as a whisper.

Needless to say, I was IMPRESSED. I thought she was awesome and super- strong, and I expressed as much with the appropriate guttural exclamations.

She just smiled.

My perception of her changed at that moment, and years later when my mom described that certain strength about my grandmother, it made sense to me. 


I think that is probably where I got my own strength and resilience from – my dad’s mom. My mom’s side of the family is very strong, too, but my dad’s side just has this additional component of pain and prolonged tragedy that would require a very vigorous type of resilience simply to survive.

I want to know more about my family on that side. Growing up, my siblings and I saw some of the aunts and uncles and cousins occasionally, and at my grandfather’s funeral, I met more relatives than I even knew existed.

It was never enough to establish any kind of relationship, though. And I want to know what the women in my family are like – are they as strong and smart and resilient as I believed my grandmother was? Are they self-destructive and incapable of managing their own lives? Can they sometimes scare people just by looking at them? Have they experienced hell and despair and come out the other side still able to smile?

I am unique among my cousins and aunts and siblings that I know (i.e., on my mom’s side of the family) in simultaneously possessing all of these characteristics. Needless to say, I have always felt like a bit of a freak show among the family I spent time with and got to know growing up.

It’s been lonely, especially as a kid. The idea that there may be an entire family of freak shows like me with the same blood and on the other side of the country is pretty exciting.

On the one hand, I can see where my dad’s side of the family would be hesitant to engage in any sort of open dialog with me. The things I have lived and am now sharing with the world are not pretty and are not easy to accept, even for people who are not related to me.

On the other hand, they are part of the half of me that I know nothing substantially good about. I know all about how evil and sick and twisted my dad’s blood is, but I don’t for a second believe it is inherent in being a part of this family. I would like some proof to back that theory up.

Maybe one day one of them will be okay engaging me back. Regardless, I have put myself out there, made myself and my experiences known to them, and I am proud of myself for doing that. It took a lot to get to this point, and that is more than good enough for now.