My head is all over the place with this one. Apologies. I was in the company of my dad this weekend. And…I’m just having some trouble with my feelings towards him. Shocker. I act like normal but inside I’m squirming. How am I supposed to feel about him? I never wanted to be the angry or dismissive of him, like my brother. I don’t like hating people for any reason, just doesn’t make me feel good. Am I disappointed? Frustrated? Angry? Sad? All of the above? I don’t know, mostly just broken-hearted. There’s no hope for a good outcome between him and Eddie (passed away recently) anymore, likely none between him and my other brother J, and now, probably not one for us either. It makes me feel foolish that I thought that would ever be the case. Like I wasted my time pining for something that was never going to work out. And that, sometimes makes me angry…and sad.
I re-read my “forgiveness” post the other day. And I realized a couple things. One, that my dad never struck my brothers in the same way that he did to me that night. He always came at them w/ a belt or just smacked them around bare handed, but never to the face as far as I saw. Which is weird, that the one time it happened to me, it was so brutal. Maybe he had pent up anger towards me, maybe he thought I deserved it after all those years (I know sometimes I feel that way), I don’t really know.
Secondly, during the apex of writing about my dad beating the ever loving crap out of me, I kinda made it sound like suddenly and consciously chose to give up. That’s true enough, but what directly preceded was that I was momentarily unconscious. Having never been knocked out at this point in my life, I didn’t actually process that until much later. In my early 20’s, I would be in the passenger’s side of a car without my seatbelt on (woops) and we got in a car accident which sent me flying into a deployed passenger airbag at around 35mph. And it felt somewhat similar, a quick fast blow and the world fades softly as your body involuntarily relaxes (very cinematic lol). And that’s what had happened back then. For a moment I got hit hard enough that all I saw was blackness. It was after that moment I decided to let go. And there’s a sort of peace to letting go. The world gets quiet. You no longer worry. No pain, everything’s okay.
And I wonder, years later, how my mom perceives that event. I’ve never asked her. After my dad was done, she meekly came over to my body lying on the floor, unmoving. I wonder if she thought my dad had done some real damage. Was I okay? I heard her sobbing and tugging at my limp arm. I remember seeing only black, hearing the far away soundtrack of my mom crying behind my closed lids. I was coming out of it I think, I’m not actually sure, but I know I was afraid to move for fear he would return. I remember wishing I was dead. I wonder what my body looked like? Did it look like a shell of myself? Did it look like my brother did, nothing but a husk, lying on his deathbed? Or my dad this weekend, sitting silently in a dark corner amongst all the commotion of kids playing – unsmiling, unmoving, sunken eyes, ready to let go?
Am I supposed to try and stop it? Or painfully watch him let go. If I do nothing, does that make me a bad person? Can I even do anything? Either way it hurts. Either way, I kind of hate him and that makes me hate myself.