My brother’s blog, www.messyguru.typepad.com spoke of his disappointment of my father, well our father.
How will a child ever be happy or content with a pedophile for a father, having a serial abuser for a parent, and feeling proud, is that possible?
There is such disappointment and such a falling of pride to discover that your father is a pedophile, that your father has ruined many a life, destroyed self-esteem, self love, stolen faith and love from many a small girl, not to mention the lack of being a father to his sons.
It is so huge to grab onto, to stand up against the volume of pain that one man caused, and we have to call him dad.
We have to call him dad and be related to a man who reigns terror upon little girls, the meanest of all men, the one who in prisons get killed, his crime is the worst of the worst, and we have to call him dad.
That is preposterous at best, insane and beyond what a child can hold no matter what his age.
We have a father, but a father that isn’t a father by definition, but we can’t exchange him for another, and that leaves us dirty by association.
In fact my brother was astonished that I used the term dad or father, for I haven’t really used that term much, I resorted to calling him by his first name, like he no longer was my dad.
What do you do with a pedophile for a father, you are left with something that has no hope of becoming better.
It seems like we were the winner of the worst father ever, a man that murderers feel justified in destroying, and the rest of the planet would cheer.
That is our dad.
And then it gets worse, for he had a wife, she is our mother, she stood by this man, well not only stood by, but protected and built him up into something he could never attain, never letting go of the image of her first love.
The two role models we have are tarnished, broken, shattered and a crumpled mess. That is what we have. We cannot change them, it is the hand we were dealt.
When you are standing before your family tree of insanity, seeing, really seeing what is standing there, what choice do we have but to then look down at where we stand.
Then who am I?
What you fear the most has been realized, what we hated most in them was lying deep inside of us. Our worst secrets lay bare.
It is a selfish response to take the focus off of them and instead shine the microscope inside, yet what courage that takes.
To shine a bright light and expose all the fears you overlooked, all the feelings left unfelt, all the places where you just never took the time or effort to think a new thought.
Inside of you lay years and years of places where you could have should have would have done better.
A vault of all your sins, a well of remorse, and now you have to pick up each morsel and correct where you were so wrong.
To hold up a father and find a pedophile, leaves you breathless and without center post. To then pick up a mother and find no love and comfort there leaves you weak and alone.
To then turn in the mirror and see yourself in all your glory leaves you empty and dead, it is then you get to rebirth your self, define your self, not by where you came from but instead by where it is you are going.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment is with the self to know that all your efforts were to support insanity.
I didn’t know if I could turn a 360, to take a sharp turn to get out of the rut, but I knew that who I was in the mirror was not someone I could be with.
I recall telling Paul, “at least you can walk away from me, but she is me, I can’t leave!”
I killed that girl with the mental mind, one step at a time, It was not a merciful death, but painfully slow, and it seemed she had a million lives, for just when I thought, whew that is the last mental mess I have to untangle, she would burst fourth and take hold of me once again.
Perhaps it was being witness to what would happen if we did nothing but stand in the forest of insanity that gave us the courage to at least try.
For like my brother said, his father didn’t even try. Nor do I think our mother made any attempt except to forgive his weakness.
So it was by their example of not trying that I found my willingness to at least try. I guess she taught me well to hold up the hopeless, in the end I held up me.
