My father passed away sixteen years ago on January 23, 2005, due to complications of Diabetes and Hepatitis C. Meaning, he made no effort to make changes to his lifestyle in order to manage either diagnosis. I didn’t even know he was sick, until I got the call that he went to the hospital days before his death. Polar opposite from my mother, who would have called me after a sneeze to let me know I was about to become motherless. My father’s style was more about avoidance and denial. Both leaned heavily on a good meal and a strong drink, which happened often throughout a day along with a lot of cigarettes. So many, in fact, that his middle and index finger were permanently stained a muddy yellow. A fact we found amusing instead of concerning. Just like the eating, just like the drinking and just like the Diabetes and Hepatitis C.
He preferred a slow and steady trickle of booze to hold him afloat for the duration of his wakefulness. I didn’t think of him as an alcoholic though and to me he rarely seemed drunk, perhaps that’s only because I didn’t really know him all that well. His habitual drinking was recited to me as hilarious stories by my family. It was a steady intake of liquid heat to keep his nerves calm, keep him feeling easy and always hovering in that space between now and then, here and there. The same luxurious space I’ve flirted with myself.
I bought a ticket to Serbia with the intention of being at his bedside while he recovered, but instead I boarded the plane with a suitcase full of funeral clothes.
But I’m not here to talk about my fathers drinking, my drinking or any kind of drinking really. I’m not here to shock you with stories of my dad, drunk and driving into neighbor’s fences – repeatedly, or falling asleep in the bathtub of a church bathroom. While those stories are plentiful and absolutely entertaining, this story has far less to do with how much he liked to eat and drink. Those were all just symptoms, mere coping mechanisms to survive everything else. An old learned and expected habit passed down from generation to generation.
Instead, the story I want to tell, is about his coping mechanisms and perhaps where they came from. How his ability to avoid and deny is absorbed as disappointment, shame, low self worth and failure to his children. The avoidance and denial become unhealed lacerations that strangle and taunt the future decisions and self esteem of the adult versions of those kids – of me.
When I was little, I was molested by the teenage son of my parent’s friends in the basement of their home, while our mothers sat smoking and gossiping just upstairs in the kitchen. They didn’t wonder what I was up to and they didn’t come looking for me, nor did they hear me quietly cry and plead for him to stop. They didn’t notice me, shaky and nervous, slither into the kitchen, to the seat nearest my mother. They didn’t feel the heat from my throat or how my eyes burned. They didn’t know how my stomach turned or how I hurt in places a child should never hurt. I sat quietly for what seemed like hours, praying for my mom to be ready to go.
Keeping my secret was hardest at night, alone in the dark. Bed times would send me into a silent internal hysteria, terrified of the massive black hole that was my bedroom. It was silent and without distractions, a safe place for panic attacks to erupt, where clutching to obsessive compulsive thoughts became absolutely necessary just to keep the terrible things away. I can still vividly remember laying in my bed and sweating as I was being terrorized by visions of an angry Jesus Christ that would hover over me, grimacing and wagging his finger at me.
I don’t know if it took days or weeks or months, but I eventually just couldn’t take it anymore. Ignoring the pissed off, disappointed Jesus and the burning in my throat, I worked up the nerve to stand at my bedroom door. I paused holding the doorknob in my pretty pink nightgown rehearsing the words I felt safest to use. I remember how my nightgown made me uncomfortable – it felt precious, sweet and soft, things I had already decided that I wasn’t. I opened the door. I blinked and fought with the bright lights to not take away my moment of bravery as I made my way to the dining room where my mother sat.
My mother erupted in anger and rage, my father recoiled in denial and avoidance. His eyes lacked any kind of acknowledgement. Not a single hug to spare between the both of them.
Memories flash through my mind like watching someone else’s life in pictures – Her shouting, stomping, aggressive jarring movements. Him quiet and deflated, eyes vacant and are you sure? Then, police station and bright lights, making X’s on the print out of a girls anatomy, lots of adults, questions and scared answers, anger, more shouting and frowning, a meeting between families, accusations and denial, more yelling, more anger and more frowns and then walking away. And then nothing. No charges filed. Silence. Everything stopped, nobody talked and wounds grew, softness was lost, self worth diminished, childhood broken, anxiety planted. Still no hugs.
I don’t remember ever talking about it again. Rumor has it that my father continued to be cordial with that family.
When I got a little older, my mom, overflowing with her own shitty choices and stuck in a difficult marriage, would repeatedly share with me how I was only born out of the hope that I might be a son. Exhausted by the three daughters she had already had, my dad talked her into staying pregnant a fourth time – surely this one was a boy! Well, I was another girl and grew into someone she could remind often about my fathers refusal to even come see me in the hospital when I was born. Mindlessly venting of her heartache, not realizing the one being created within me.
My father was 29 when he sent for my 16 year old mother to join him in America, with an offer of marriage, after having only seen her photograph. A mail order bride whose beauty stood out more than the others. They were the world’s most mismatched couple.
My grandmother has told me lots of stories of a stubborn, strong willed little boy that was hard to handle. Being the only son in a Serbian household with that mentality meant he was virtually untouchable, incapable of being parented. He spent the majority of his adolescence and young adulthood, alone with a house to himself in Serbia. Spoiled by parents who finally, no longer had to struggle or starve. My father was a perpetual bachelor who lived well off of his parents American made money. So many photographs and stories of my father racing motorcycles, throwing punches in a ring as a middle weight boxer, diving from exotic cliffs while vacationing with friends and touring Europe as a drummer or playing the trumpet with his band. Tables covered with ashtrays and booze surrounded by carefree smiles. He would eventually come to the United States to join his parents who were sent here after my grandfather fought in the Second World War.
My dad is famous for quietly losing his temper and calmly telling people to shut the fuck up. He could back hand my mother clear across the face while keeping his cool. He never yelled and you knew how angry he was by how low and measured his voice got. Things were very black and white for my dad – they were right or they were wrong and dear God, you did not ever try to tell that man what to do. We either got all A’s on our report cards and were ignored or we didn’t and we were spanked – with a belt. We either did as we were told and were ignored or we didn’t and were spanked – with a belt. It was that simple. My parents were constantly congratulated on having the most polite, well mannered and quiet little girls. Duh.
My parents finally followed through on divorce threats when I was about 11. I remember walking home from school to find a plume of smoke hovering over my home. I found my father, calm and muttering under his breath, stoking a fire in our front yard made entirely from their old wedding photos. He gave my mother the house in return for no longer having any responsibility for me. He left the city, then the state and then the country – putting an ocean between us. He was gone.
I received, maybe a total of two birthday cards from my dad and zero phone calls. As time passed, I got older and moved out of my mom’s house, my dad got older and gained the ability to decouple me from my mother and we talked a lot more. In the years before his death he would tell me often how much he loved me.
You see, I grew up hidden by the shadows of my parent’s own broken childhoods and got lost in their complicated adulthoods and unsatisfying marriage. Their self loathing was contagious. None of us could compete with all the injuries my parents sustained just trying to survive their own upbringing, adulthood and marriage. They were too scared to admit when they were wrong or hurting or needed help or needed a hug.
I spent my early adulthood making a similar muck of my life. Attracting partners and friends that treated me as shitty as I treated myself. I married a man I didn’t know and had kids I didn’t know what to do with.
If we don’t pay attention, history will repeat itself.
I was the woman smoking, drinking and partying, that you mistook for having a good time instead of desperately trying to avoid my feelings. I was the poised woman with resting bitch face that you mistook as confident, when in reality I was the anxious one, full of self doubt. I was the woman that gave you the finger that you mistook for fearless, when actually I was petrified.
It took me a very long time to forgive my father, and my mother. Years and years of my own avoidance, denial, rage and anger before I could even begin to understand that they loved me, the best way that they could love me. In the only way they could love me. In the only way they were shown love and in the only way they experienced life. I needed to understand and forgive them in order to understand and accept myself.
For the first time in my life I’m starting to feel whole, like I am not the pieced together shards of a broken childhood. I am not just the sum of misguided parents and traumatic experiences. The whole loved version of myself can look back into my fathers eyes on that night many years ago when he found out his youngest daughter had been hurt and I no longer see avoidance or denial. I see his self loathing, his feelings of failure and disappointment – in himself. I see him recoiling because he failed me and felt helpless. I believe he simply did not know what to do. That generation and that culture did not speak and worked hard to not feel – and that cycle died with him.
I know my father loved me, in fact I think I was his favorite.
