In the coming weeks, I will be looking for an opening, upon which I will reach for a conscience that I'm not sure exists. My only confidence that it may even be worth the endeavor, is that a parent-child relationship must (should) supersede anything else. Stories I've read, suggests, that it's not a certainty, but I am prepared for that outcome... I think. Maybe, trying to articulate this while I have the flu and my brain soaks in a pool of fever, withdrawals, and emotion, isn't my best effort. I spent an hour telling someone what they mean to me last night while awash in tears. I'm not a crier - but I was last night.
The bones of this relationship, at least from my perspective, have been incapable of supporting the weight of a normalcy. The foot on my throat emerged before I was even in school. The first indication that I was not my parent's child arrived in racist overtones... a disparaging of strangers that made absolutely no sense in a world of so much diversity. I may have been three, but I understood being hated because of how you looked didn't align with anything I understood about morality, decency, or "being a good neighbor". The backseat, back-handed slaps ensured I understood that respect is fostered under an alignment of ideals. If any parental guilt existed as a result of the physical abuse my father inflicted upon me; it was never uttered. Ever.
Then the sexual abuse began at the whims of a "family friend" entrusted with my safety. A fact that wasn't shared with my parents until much later in life. In fact, it was something that I had buried so deep within my brain, I wouldn't come to face it until I was a young adult. Truly, I couldn't tell you how I said it, or more importantly, what the reaction was. My ex-wife is likely the only person who could tell that story with any clarity (and truth) - because I had fully left my body. One fact I did walk away with, was that my mom had also been abused as a child.
I'm sitting here writing these words, and I am reflecting on people that have fully cut parents out of their lives; and it does not feel so alien. It feels like strength... I don't have.
So, I, a young child, physically abused for lashing out at words like "nigger", sexually abused for being available to someone with predilections for young boys - somehow I developed into an empathetic nihilist, and coward. Unwilling to end my path, only accepting the machinations of fate to do it for me. How was I as a kid? To use my dad's succinct phrasing, "cautious". I lived inside myself, unattached to anyone that I believed only wanted me conditionally. I often wonder, how did adults perceive me as a kid - you know, the ones that maybe taught me, maybe met me - did they see me as fractured as I perceived myself? If they did, they did not intervene. Some, in fact, took it upon themselves to "toughen me up" - once fracturing my ribs, another time, dislocating both of my thumbs. That guy, he gave me one of those pressure bars that you hold straight out in front of your body and attempt to push the ends towards one another. One Sunday, that left my hands at terminal velocity through my bedroom window, and I was grounded for a month, no TV, no comics, no friends.
I tended to navigate around "nerds" - because being smart was maybe something I could do well? It was always a small group of probably equally insecure kids. I found a photo the other day of one of my rare birthday parties, and sitting on the floor was a collection of gangly children - my few friends - a Russian, a kid from Oman (Omanian?), Asian, black, and one other white kid. I hope somehow, I managed to make the adults in my house terribly uncomfortable that day. I doubt I had any sense of rebellion at that age, but I clearly felt free enough outside of my parent's confines to be who I wanted to be among people I wanted to be around.
Another odd fact about me, though I am a little embarrassed to admit - is that I was a very sexual child. I guess I know why. I was masturbating, probably by 5 - I didn't know why, or how it began, but it felt good. Maybe it was the only control I felt over my body without fully understanding the dynamics of sexuality. I was caught, often - and it went as one might think it went. It all came to a head (no pun intended) when my dad invited his friends over, and they brought their daughter along to play with me. I was likely 7-ish, and she was maybe 10? She didn't have much interest in comic books, or Hot Wheels - so all I had left to share was this thing I figured out - masturbation. Neither of us were naked, we did not touch one another, but the sensations were the same. And yes, my mom caught us. I never saw her again. I was also notoriously kissing classmates in the bushes outside our kitchen window - another thing I was terrible at hiding.
Life found a unique way to combat the notions of having friends, or someone to kiss, or stability. We'd move every couple of years. If not to a new state, at least to a new neighborhood. New school, new people, new stresses. It wasn't until I was older that I understood the circumstances precipitating these relocations - and it's not for reasons that everyone assumes whenever they ask me, "where are you from?" In a pre-internet world, it was one of the steps you take to evade law enforcement. Predicated on the assuming the identity of someone who died at birth. A masterclass in criminality for the so-inclined. Again, I was a child, all I understood was that the challenges of even making friends in the first place was increasingly, not worth the energy. A self-starter isolationist before I was 10.
None of us are so naïve or media-illiterate to understand what happens to an abused, isolated, fragile person upon granting of self-exploration. You can fabricate a tiny human to fear everything, to hate what your principles - but if you are unwilling to exert some sort of control over them as a teenager out of whatever misguided definition of love you cling to; you are likely to foster the type of person that has zero comprehension of manipulation, unconditional love, or measures of excess. You arrive at a broken human with an understanding of life pulled from media and books. A rinse and repeat of experiences both good and bad to shape and more importantly, mimic, "normalcy". You fuck all the wrong people; you ingest all the taboos, you become selfish, narcissistic, validated, incarcerated, dead then awake, married with the emotional awareness of a teenager, unmarried, poor as a result of all your "adult" life decisions, radicalized with beliefs, and then someone who writes all this on a blog that no one reads. Not as a cautionary tale, as someone that needs to package this to their parents in such a way to simply lead them to empathy towards hundreds of children that were victimized by adults via my own reality growing up as their child. To maybe understand why, their child doesn't understand why they would choose the abuser over the abused.
Why now? Simply because they are at the end of their lives. I will never get an apology or gain understanding of their choices... and I'm only starting to come to terms with that. They know the truth, or at least did at the time. They've been playing the game of revisionist history for the past decade like I wasn't there experiencing the same moments. All I have left to encapsulate this relationship of parent/child is the desire to approach their death with empathy. And unfortunately for them, they chose and support one of the cruelest humans that has ever existed; and has done things I will never forgive or forget. I am not asking them to change their beliefs, or have a come to Jesus moment with the religion they like to wear now - but I do need them to understand why I am the way I am and that my experience is nothing compared to what hundreds/thousands of children endured in the control of monsters. If I cannot connect to their empathy for these children by using my own abuse as their child to facilitate it - I cannot bury my parents with empathy. It's simply that. Period.
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