The first time I remember being snatched and viciously slapped, I was perhaps four years old. I am sure that it had happened countless times before, but this was my first conscious memory of it. I had just spent five minutes with my father who I had not seen in what must have been a long time to a little girl. As I reached up to hug him, I remember how rough the stubble on his cheek was against my face. He smelled of cigarettes and beer, but I didn't care. We lived in one of the old row homes in Philadelphia that was large and drafty. It was after all, the inner city in the sixties. I did not know where my father had been, only that he was in New York most of the time. Seeing him was rare but I knew he was my daddy. I had been told how much I looked like him; the same forehead and eyes. Our similarities did not stop there. According to my mother, we also shared the same degenerate tendencies as though the blood of mongrel dogs coursed through our veins.
I saw that he was getting ready to leave and I remember asking him to get a splinter out of my foot. I happily sat on his lap as he gently pulled the splinter out. It was only later as I made my way around a corner of the room that a violent hand reached out and grabbed me. It was my mother and even now I can still see the henious look on her face. It was twisted with fury as she crunched the bones in my little body. My sin: she was convinced that the splinter in my foot was only a ploy to get my father to look up my dress. How cunning and seductive I must have been at four years old!
This same scenario was to be played out countless times over the next twenty years and beyond. Her obsession with me as a insatiable sexual creature whose appetite knew no bounds. The sadistic beatings, the humiliation, the name-calling, the threats, and the shredding of mind, body and spirit. Throw in the abject poverty, the loss of the sense of self, of who and what you are and why, and I will tell you that sometimes I wonder how I walk upright.
I will say that there was a strength within me that I didn't know I had that kept me going, one foot in front of the other, day after day, year after year, until there came that glorious day that I was old enough to flee. And even though it took years to put myself back together, I often fall apart. I know that it wasn't all me; angels surely guided me in times of extreme chaos and kept me safe from serious danger. However, they could not save me from the horror that was my mother.
I am thankful to have done more than just survive; in some ways I have actually flourished.
Still here.
Showing posts with label absent father. Show all posts
Showing posts with label absent father. Show all posts
Friday, July 31, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Andrew
As much as I deal mentally and emotionally with the tragedy that is my mother, I now and then find myself thinking about the man who was driven from his home and never got to know his children: my father. It is no secret that he drank, or even the fact that he had a girlfriend who I got to know in later years and was very kind to me. She was a simple woman and what attracted me to her was that she was soft-spoken and sweet. She never made me feel moronic, never called me names or made me feel ill at ease. I was actually glad for my father to have a companion who treated him well, washed his clothes and cooked his food. My mother never did those things for him.
My mother never had a pleasant word for my father. As far as she was concerned, he was the singular cause of all her troubles. We were taught to hate this man and so we did, to please her as children are wont to do. It was his fault, she would lament to us and my grandmother, that she had just missed winning the Exacta at the OTB because he was too cheap to give her enough money to bet with. That's where she would be camped out for weeks at a time, finally coming home with nothing to show for her time away except filthy shopping bags filled with marked up racing forms. Frustrated, she would take out her anger on me for the alleged sexual trysts she and my grandmother perceived that I had committed in her absence. It took so little.
In spite of all the animosity and all the times she drove him from the house, my father never said a unfavorable word about her. The sad fact is he truly loved this exceedingly crude woman; no matter what he did to please her, it was never enough.
In the years before he became ill, he would often stop by my apartment in the early morning hours and ring my doorbell. I would rouse myself from sleep and run down the five flights of stairs. We would sit in his cab and talk for hours. Sometimes he brought me food; chickens wrapped in rough brown paper, packages of Vienna Fingers cookies. If he could not nourish me as a child, he would do it now. He told me things that I knew my mother would vehemently deny.
One of the stories he told me made me realize all over again how fortunate I was to have survived life with her.
During what might have been called a brief period of prosperity, my father was able to take out a few loans to buy a washer and dryer ( the cord of which she used to beat me with) and a few other household items. I remember a time where there were new sheets and pillows and cases, and at least on the outside, there appeared a degree of normalcy. But it was short lived and my mother insisted that he return to the loan company and take out yet another loan. My father told her it would be too much of a burden to repay yet another loan so it was something he could not do. All she knew was that she needed the extra money for gambling so she gave him a choice. Find a way to get some money or she would disfigure me (her words) and make me swear in a court of law that he had beat and raped me. I could see how much it hurt him to know that my mother was capable of such an ungodly act. My father found the extra cash.
Three years after I was married and he knew he was dying of cancer, he wanted to leave New York and return to the mountains he always loved even though he rarely got to be there. My mother would not allow it. He paid a friend to move him to my brother's house in South Carolina and there he died. I got the news and cried for him and for the daughter that would not know him.
Although he was my father, I never called him "Daddy". That was too personal for my mother He was Andrew. And that is how I will always remember him.
My mother never had a pleasant word for my father. As far as she was concerned, he was the singular cause of all her troubles. We were taught to hate this man and so we did, to please her as children are wont to do. It was his fault, she would lament to us and my grandmother, that she had just missed winning the Exacta at the OTB because he was too cheap to give her enough money to bet with. That's where she would be camped out for weeks at a time, finally coming home with nothing to show for her time away except filthy shopping bags filled with marked up racing forms. Frustrated, she would take out her anger on me for the alleged sexual trysts she and my grandmother perceived that I had committed in her absence. It took so little.
In spite of all the animosity and all the times she drove him from the house, my father never said a unfavorable word about her. The sad fact is he truly loved this exceedingly crude woman; no matter what he did to please her, it was never enough.
In the years before he became ill, he would often stop by my apartment in the early morning hours and ring my doorbell. I would rouse myself from sleep and run down the five flights of stairs. We would sit in his cab and talk for hours. Sometimes he brought me food; chickens wrapped in rough brown paper, packages of Vienna Fingers cookies. If he could not nourish me as a child, he would do it now. He told me things that I knew my mother would vehemently deny.
One of the stories he told me made me realize all over again how fortunate I was to have survived life with her.
During what might have been called a brief period of prosperity, my father was able to take out a few loans to buy a washer and dryer ( the cord of which she used to beat me with) and a few other household items. I remember a time where there were new sheets and pillows and cases, and at least on the outside, there appeared a degree of normalcy. But it was short lived and my mother insisted that he return to the loan company and take out yet another loan. My father told her it would be too much of a burden to repay yet another loan so it was something he could not do. All she knew was that she needed the extra money for gambling so she gave him a choice. Find a way to get some money or she would disfigure me (her words) and make me swear in a court of law that he had beat and raped me. I could see how much it hurt him to know that my mother was capable of such an ungodly act. My father found the extra cash.
Three years after I was married and he knew he was dying of cancer, he wanted to leave New York and return to the mountains he always loved even though he rarely got to be there. My mother would not allow it. He paid a friend to move him to my brother's house in South Carolina and there he died. I got the news and cried for him and for the daughter that would not know him.
Although he was my father, I never called him "Daddy". That was too personal for my mother He was Andrew. And that is how I will always remember him.
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