part 60

So now what?

I’ve done what I wanted to do with the neighbors – they know I’ve called them out. My goal was to get the truth out in the open, and I have done that.

Other than ostracizing my mom and claiming that they have hired an attorney (for what, I do not know, as I am telling the truth, and they would only look like complete idiots if they sued me), these men have done nothing.

No one else has really done anything either.

I don’t know what I was expecting to happen. I don’t know what I was wanting to happen. I just know that I wanted to tell people, and now that I have, I want to do something about what they did to me. I want to do something about what other children have to experience at the hands of predators. I want to change something, dammit, not say, “oh, okay – that happened, it’s shitty, we are all going on with our lives now.”

I was not able to go on with my life after these people hurt me. It is thirty years later, and I still have no concept of what “going on with my life” even means. I am still hurt, and I am still feeling pain.

I am also much stronger now, and much less fearful. I am more knowledgeable and confident. I am a grown-up – I have a voice. I have POWER.

Having power is pretty significant. It is something I never had, and never recognized as something I could have until very recently in my life. There is power in the truth – the thing about the truth is that it will always be true.

It doesn’t matter what anyone denies or threatens or sues over, it will never change the truth.

The truth is that I was passed around that goddamn neighborhood like some sort of toy. The truth is that no one believed me then. The truth is that a lot of people are choosing not to believe me now.

Where is the outrage? Where is the anger? Where are the emotions?

I am again puzzled at how I continue to be disappointed in the people in that neighborhood. I was not treated well growing up, why should I be treated well now? I guess I just have some sort of expectation of respect – I expect them to recognize and respect that I am an articulate, intelligent, sane adult. Even writing that sentence just now seems ridiculous, though.

Of course they are not going to do that. If they did that, they would have to acknowledge all of the other shit I’ve written about in previous posts.

An impression that I have been repeatedly getting is that showing emotion will somehow weaken my power. Emotion will take away from the respect I get. It will take away from the legitimacy of my argument.

One of my biggest and deeply-rooted psychological fears is that I will be dismissed as crazy if I show any emotion.

That is what I was taught growing up – one more thing shoved down my throat. Any expression of emotion was an immediate out for my dad in any argument.

I would be angry about something and confront him with it, and I would be expressing some sort of emotion, and he would tell me, “you’re being irrational,” and then shut me down and no longer even acknowledge that I was standing right in front of him.

He demanded that I be “rational” when addressing anything at all with him. In hindsight, it did not really matter what the actual definition of “rational” was (or is) – my dad made it fit his needs regardless of whether or not he was technically correct about the mechanics of the English language and human communication.

He was really good at doing that – at convincing other people that they were crazy or in some other way incapable of making sound judgments and conclusions. He was very happy and enthusiastic when other people touted his own judgments and conclusions.

He LOVED being idolized, seen as someone holy, as all-knowing. I really do believe that he believed he was god.

But he wasn’t.

When I found out my dad was dead, I tracked down the place where his body was and asked them to email me a picture of his face. They complied. The funeral director took pictures of my dad on a gurney wearing a hospital gown with his chest and neck covered with a towel and sent them to me via his Blackberry.

I looked and looked at those pictures of my dad. I tried to find any sign that he might still be alive, or that this dead person was not actually him. Then I looked at all the ways I knew his face, his skin, his hair, his nose, his mouth, his eyes, his forehead, his chin, his ears – they were all so familiar to me.

There was a smudge of blood coming from his nose. His ears were purple at the bottom. His hair was much thinner and it was obvious he had not aged well in the seven or so years since I had last seen him, but he was still so, so familiar.

It was weird.

It is weird to think of myself and to think that man was my dad. I was able to make my dad fit in my life where other kids’ dads fit into their lives. I was able to look at Father’s Day cards and relate my own feelings to the words composed on the pretty, masculinely-decorated paper.

I could watch commercials and TV shows and movies where a dad would act tough when a boy knocked on the door for the purposes of picking up that dad’s daughter for a date, and I could apply that concept easily to my own life, and to my own dad.

I made him normal. He was just my dad.

Accepting that he is also a monster – a dead monster – is tough. On the one hand, all I have to do is recall any incident at all involving him to know what a monster he was. It baffles me that people could be baffled by this description of him, or of any human being – are there really not that many monsters among us?

On the other hand, I can not really accept how I made him fit into my life. I cannot reconcile the manufactured normality of my dad’s role in my life with the monster he actually was.

I don’t understand how people did not see that in him. I absolutely do not believe people could look at him and think he was in any way normal. I do not believe anyone could get to know him even a little bit and not somehow sense he was a threat of some kind to some body.

I understand that I could be wrong in that belief, but I still believe it.

I believe my dad is a monster, and I believe the dad next door is a pedophile, and I believe the dad across the street is a sadistic rapist. I believe the dad who used to live on the corner is also a pedophile.

So now what?

My dad is dead and the pedophiles and sadistic rapist are still just sitting there doing what they want to do. I wonder about their children, those young people who were my contemporaries growing up. I wonder what those pedophiles did to their own kids. I wonder what they do to their grandchildren.

I know I was not the only girl molested and raped by any of those men.

I wonder if anyone would come forward with that information, especially after seeing that it doesn’t matter. The pain and fear of coming forward doesn’t matter because nothing happened to them, and almost no one believes me.

I don’t like that. I don’t like the idea that coming forward with this information about these specific people was for nothing.

I have all summer off – maybe I will make something of it.