“He will die a very lonely man.” This is what I had told my husband when we found out my father was a pedophile.
With Father’s Day fast approaching, what do I write about him?
I have put him aside like a toy that is broken, no longer able to work like it should, discarded on a shelf in a box and out of sight.
Do I have to bring him back out, to look at him and to see just what our final relationship will be, will forgiveness make him right, will enough love on my side correct that which is broken inside, uncross the wires so damaged that he can hurt little girls and call it love?
A broken father, are there father’s day cards for men like him, for girls like us?
Memories of him are now tainted they too are damaged and broken beyond repair. What parts can I take forward and hold dear?
My earliest memories are spotty and limited, of games of shame and fear. I recall a game we (little girls of the neighborhood) played. Our home was large and had a kitchen that had 5 doors. We could run through our house and out the back door outside and back around. We did this chatting or singing our songs. We are very little younger than 6, I believe.
It is a summer evening, and around and around we run, until one little girl points out to me, my father’s penis is exposed, he is sitting in a chair by the door and we all are running by! His legs are crossed he is in his underwear it is hanging down below.
Shame and embarrassment flood my little being and I remember trying to stop the game, to direct them to play something else. Yet they giggled for a sight like that they had never seen! He sits.
What do you do with memories like that? Especially now when you know as a big adult girl that that is exactly the behavior of a pedophile, it matches like a perfect set!
Sunday dinners were his forte, he loved to put a roast going and have all his children come home. How special we all felt. Until, we find out that was the lure to bring in the little granddaughters. What do we do with those ones now?
I truly didn’t want to write about his deeds, and there are more, but that is who he is. If I don’t, I am like the rest, just pulling up files of him being a workingman working hard in the woods, and not speaking of his brokenness.
He too was a victim of abuse, he molested when very young, yet he was not able to find a spot where he could heal himself. He was left in the prison of abuse where he then became the predator.
A legacy that is spread far and wide! His wife my mother is also a victim of abuse, her brothers.
Abused victims they themselves are now the predators and ones to keep it silent, allowing the poison to flow.
What can I do now? He is on the sexual predator list, he has been brought before the court of land, he was given a light sentence and sent to the home of his daughters, the same ones he abused when they were young. They loved him so, and could not see the monster inside.
Madness for sure, insanity at best, ugliness and messes beyond what a person can hold.
The broken father I left on the shelf was put there, for I had to protect myself from the broken father.
A little girl with a broken father and she doesn’t know that it isn’t her fault, she did not break him, wreck him, destroy him, he came to her that way. She was hurt because he was broken, and no one told her not to play with him.
Still today, this many years later, I wish I had a fixed father, one who I could lean on, look up to, admire, hold in my heart, instead I have a broken father who no longer fits into my world.
My scars are many from playing with him, my battle wounds are huge and far reaching, my mind has been twisted and bent in directions no little girls should be.
But all little girls want the love of a dad, all little girls want to be loved and desired and admired.
I just didn’t know the cost. The cost to both of us!
Perhaps it was my inner desire for love that kept me going back perhaps I too couldn’t stop myself from being with my dad, wanting his attention, to be special!
Did I withstand the abuse for a morsel of attention? What did I experience? My memories are gone nothing lay there, no pictures, nothing. I have been spared.
Will I remember someday, do I want to know? What will they do to me when and if they flood in?
So on this Father’s Day weekend, sits a little girl in a big lady body, feeling a spot of emptiness, of wistfulness, of being in grief, she sits with a broken father in her heart.
Broken and unable to fix him, does she love him still?
Does she have any feelings left?
All that is there is broken, there was nothing to pick up and to hold, a body remains, but the relationship never had a chance to begin, for he was never able to be a dad.
If he can’t be a dad, then I can’t be his daughter.
We are just two abused kids.
One who is lost in the legacy and one who escaped!
An orphan I feel like and perhaps I am.
A child without a mom or a dad, one who had to leave them behind on the shelf of my childhood life!
On the shelf lay a broken man.
No father lay there, no hero or idol, nothing to love or hold dear. No relationship is there, nothing to talk to….
Empty but for a broken man, I close the door softly and turn away.
“There but for the Grace of God, go I.”
