A Walk with God

When I visited this IMT recently, she indicated to me that there was physical evidence in my body that traumas occurred in my life at the ages of 12 and 16.  Don’t ask me how she knew that.  When she first asked me, I thought, no, there’s nothing really special about those ages.  Then I began to think back and realized that she was right. 

My parents divorced when I was twelve.  Most people would say that is a very traumatic event in a child’s life, but I have always seen it as the day I was freed from my dad’s oppression.  It was not sad to me; it was a relief.  I guess that’s why I didn’t immediately think of it when the therapist mentioned my twelfth year.  But as I began to recall all the events of that year, I realized that it was actually a very traumatic time for me. 

I was told my mother was having a hysterectomy and my parents sent my sister and me away for the entire summer.  We spent one month at our paternal grandmother’s home and one month at our maternal grandparent’s home. It was a long time to be away from my mom, especially since I was worried about her health.  It was hardest being with my father’s mother because she was so strange and was not very nuturing.  Once we went to my mother’s parents, it was much easier as they were very loving and comforting. 

I remember the day we came home and my mother was still in bed.  My father told us to come to their room because they wanted to talk to us.  My mother said that they were separating.  It was a surprise because my parents had kept their problems very private and we had no idea how unhappy my mother was.  My father started sobbing and so did my sister, who went to comfort him.  I just sat beside my mother feeling contempt for my father’s self-pity and thinking how happy I would be to see him go.  I didn’t shed one tear. 

Once my father moved out, I felt as if I had been released from a life sentence in prison.  I went a little wild with the new-found freedom I felt.   My friends and I started experimenting with cigarettes, alcohol and marijuana. My mother escaped her pain by keeping busy with work and social activities such as participating in a local theatre production, and she was rarely home.  I was on my own.  That’s when the trauma began.

First, my dog died - Timothy George O’Leary, we had named our beautiful Irish Setter.  We called him George and found out when he was still a puppy that he had epilepsy.  He was my best friend and would sit with me anytime I needed a shoulder to cry on, looking at me with those big, brown compassionate eyes.  He was my first dog and I loved him so much.  When my dad first moved out, my parents tried to work on restoring their relationship.  One day, they were on a date and we were home with a babysitter.  George was having seizures all day long and I couldn’t get his medicine down him.  We went for a bike ride and when we came home, I called George but he didn’t come.  I joked that he was probably dead, which was the last thing I really expected.  But when I went upstairs, I found him lying still in my parents room.  He was indeed dead, and the guilt I felt over my flippant comment was like salt in the wound. When my parents finally came home, my dad wanted to bury George but I begged him not to do it.  I couldn’t accept that George was dead and hoped that if we were patient, he would “wake up”.  He was only two years old.  My dad had to wait until I went to bed to bury him.  George’s death to me was symbolic of the death of our family.

My mother wanted her marriage to survive and tried to get my father to go to counseling with her.  He said the only thing wrong with their marriage was her “shitty” attitude.  But when he saw how serious she was, he put on all his charm to win her back.  He even started going to church with us.  I don’t know about my mother, but even at my young age, I could see through his guise of being a changed man. When efforts at reconciliation failed, my dad went psychotic and things got very ugly.  He wrote a letter to my mother’s parents, trying to win them to his side and convince them to straighten out their daughter.  To this day, he has never forgiven them for standing by her.  He began to harrass my mother at work, calling her constantly and vacillating between begging for another chance and threatening vengeance. 

I didn’t know about any of these things until I was much older, but I did know what he did to my sister and me.  He began a campaign that lasted for 25 years (until my mother’s death) to turn us against our mother.  He told us horrible things about her.  One day, we came home to find a butcher knife stuck into our kitchen floor - a sign from my father.  We were terrified.  I remember the creepy feeling he gave me when he told me that he had a private detective watching us.  I also recall the night my father came to our church to pick us up, though we knew our mother was supposed to get us.  He was acting very suspicious and sneaky, and we were afraid.  Apparently, it was his plan to kidnap us that night.  Fortunately, we refused to go with him.  When we went to visit him at his apartment, he would spend the whole time talking about what a bad person our mother was.  One night in particular, he scared us so bad that I called Mom and asked her to come pick us up, which she did.  He was trying to demonstrate to me how my mother was flirting with men at a party and behaving like a slut, using me to illustrate this.  I was so angry and scared of him that night; his behavior was crazy.  I locked myself in a bedroom until my mom arrived.  My sister was already locked in a bedroom, so terrified by whatever he had done to her before I came in the room that she blocked it all out from her memory.  It never seemed to matter to my father how much he traumatized and hurt his own children; we were just weapons to use against our mom.  This was not the temporary insanity of a jilted, heartbroken husband; this was the beginning of a lifelong pattern. 

We begged our mother not to make us visit Dad, but she insisted that we try to have a good relationship with our father.  I suppose she didn’t want to be accused of doing what he was doing - trying to turn us against our own parent.  And I’m sure that we didn’t tell her all that he did and said to us, in an attempt to protect her from being hurt further by him.  But my sister recently said that she thinks Mom was wrong to force us to have a relationship with an abusive, mentally disturbed father and I think she’s probably right.  I never thought of it before but, there again, our mother should have protected us from him.  Unfortunately, she was too busy trying to survive herself.  Finally, however, Mom decided that we had to move to Atlanta to get away from Dad.   I wish I could say that my mother, sister and I lived in peace after that, but my story isn’t over yet.