Can You Hear Me In Hell?

The Veil is thin. Halloween or Samhain has come to pass.The membrane between our world and the ether has places where we and they can be more easily heard. It is at this time I often take a moment to honour those that came before me and express gratitude for their lessons and where has lead me here. All things considered I live an amazing life. I have a beautiful little family, I have cultivated some amazing friendships in the last while and there are moments in my life that are magically creative and grounded. These moments are often marred by pain and phantoms of the past. Today with the veil being at its thinnest I have something to say.

Fuck you – this is aimed at my father, where ever he may be. FUCK YOU!! I hope you hear me and I hope it stings. Do you have any guilt or remorse for what you did to the children in your family? Do you understand the far reaching damage?

It could be easy with a bird’s eye view to create some forgiveness for you. You grew up in an abusive house. To mask that you used alcohol. In your time of living there wasn’t much help or encouragement to seek it for mental health issues. And for a long time I chose to use this understanding to cultivate some peace for myself about why you were so cruel. But the last few years have taught me that isn’t enough. 

I have been digging, floundering and clawing my way through my own scars and disease that was my inheritance to try to become the parent my daughter deserves, the parent I deserved. All of this work has shown me it is possible if you want it. If you treasure another life so much that you see the sacred gift that a child is. If you truly wanted to preserve that hope and innocence that we are born with. You made the choice to make your family pay for the pain you had suffered. 

You were an alcoholic, verbally abusive, suicidal, murderous/mad rantings and a pedophile. Did we have moments of calm? Of course, like most families marked by trauma it appears not to be 24/7. When he didn’t drink, it was ok. I never called him dad, until I was 8, he was my ‘buddy’. When the realization hit that we were in danger I called him father or by his name. 

I have written about this before. In that piece (The Sins of the Father) I wrote about my father repeatedly threatening us with guns. That essay was more in reference to gun control and and the dangers to just anyone being able to get a gun and what happens with lax gun laws. 

I remember my mother telling me that if my father had his friends over I was not to leave my room if I was in my night gown. I was to stay in my room, door blocked (we had no locking bedrooms) no matter what. On the few occasions I did venture out, it was uncomfortable. My father would comment on my weight- once while demanding I sit on his knee, he loosely covered my ears and in front of his friends he professed that if I kept sitting there he would need to re-weld the base of the chair. These comments were a regular thing, and this went on for years with my family. Other times I would be turned into a bar maid for the late night shenanigans. Then subject to inappropriate comments and ‘accidental’ touches. My first memories of this were around the age of 6. To this day, the smell of rye and coke makes me want to vomit.

I was 8 the first time I remember my father telling me that our blood line should end with me. The drunken rage, tears, telling me how we should not carry on because we were poison. He would threaten to kill himself with his guns, he said it was a kindness to take me with him. I would talk calmly through the tears and offer to make him soup, that always seemed to be the key. It could take hours. Sometimes if my mom could sense my dad was going to go on a bender we would get in the car and just drive. I remember times having to duck down in the car because he’d be out driving around looking for us. 

I was the only child my parents had. They had other children from previous relationships. My mother had two daughters that are 11 and 9 years older than me respectively. My father had three, two sons and a daughter. 

My mothers daughters lived with us when I was really young and we were raised as siblings. However the oldest often went to live with her paternal grandmother for periods of time, due to what I believed was a tumultuous relationship with my mother. I would find out later that much of their fractious relationship had to do with my father and the horrors he brought to her and that she was not protected from.

Only two of my fathers kids came to live with us for a period of time. His oldest is a girl, I have vague memories of her being in our house when I was a toddler. One of the boys came and lived with us periodically. 

I loved my brother, even though he would steal from me, and on occasion take his temper out on me. I have a scar on either side of my knee for him running a sharpened stick straight through. I have shoulder disfunction from having my arm reefed behind me and not properly treated then, leading to functional weakness now. That happened when I was really little and I remember just flashes. The second time he came to live with us he was in his late teens and I had not quite hit double digits. He was a seasoned criminal and drug addict by then. During that period I received one of my first concussions that I am aware of, being hit in the head with a billiard ball that was thrown at me.

The last incident I recall of being in his physical presence was when I was about 10, my mom was already ill and my fathers drinking was off the rails. We had an 80’s ‘cool’ finished basement with a fireplace, pooI table and wet bar. I had been up watching TV in my parents room with my puppy Princess. My parents and his son were in our basement playing pool. Suddenly there was a lot of screaming and yelling and crashing. I went running down the stairs and the sight that greeted me at the bottom was my mother standing there covered in blood yelling for me to run up the stairs and hide. It looked like something out of a horror movie. I began screaming, my mother tried hard to explain it was not her blood but his son’s. As I looked over from the landing I watched my father pick his son up and toss him into the pool table and move it against the wall. The boy had crushed a glass in his hand and cut the main artery, when my mother had begun to scream he had tried to calm her down, which is how her upper body had been coated in his blood. To taunt my father he ran around the basement dragging his bloody hand up and down over the white walls. He was eventually thrown out of the house, I remember him being stuffed in the back of a police car, grinning and covered in his own blood and my father screaming that he was never welcome back. After a blow out between them, my mother went to lay down, my father locked himself in the garage to drink more. I filled a bucket with hot soapy water and spent the rest of the night until early hours washing blood off of the basement walls and picking up smashed glass.

One of the times my mother had to go to the hospital overnight, I had only been told that she had back pain and needed an operation. This was one of the last times that I was left alone in the house with my father. He got ragingly drunk. I was about 9 years old and scared that my mom was in pain, but blissfully unaware of the cancer that grew inside of her. My father started screaming at me about leaving my little wallet on the kitchen island. As he took it and threw it against the wall he began to cry and told me that my mother was going to die. He then defaulted to things I had already heard and would hear a few more times when I would be a hostage at the end of his gun. That his bloodline needed to die with me. That we were poison and I would only grow up to be useful as a whore until I was used up. That he should have never had children as we were all poison. That when he was finally going to end it, he would be sure to take me with him. 

When my mother knew she was very sick she finally had him removed from the home, there was protection orders, my mother fighting for sole custody and trying to get a divorce. Sadly while the custody did get arranged the divorce was never finalized and he was able to take everything from me and my sisters. This is when he went from just driving by our house and my school to having his friends follow me. They had me assessed so many times to try to figure out if my father molested me, not just the obvious abuse that I had suffered at the hands of him and his son. I honestly don’t know the conclusion that they came to, I don’t recall my father ever raping me or trying to get into bed with me. I had told the therapist that one of my cousins had been molesting me when we were at my Nan’s house, I also admitted that the teen boy my parents would let babysit me had kissed, fondled me and made me touch him. But this was not the information they wanted, they were looking for things to file against my father and I was just making it complicated. Nothing ever came of these things, the drama in our family stopped us from big family gatherings at my Nan’s and the boy moved away. 

My parents had always told me that they got married the year before they had me. When I was 11 I found their marriage certificate, they got married in ’74, I was born in ’73. 

Not long before my mother died she had decided to confess a few things to me. I was not planned. She had not wanted to have another child, but had gotten pregnant with me after having a fling with my father. She loved me but was sorry that this was what she was leaving me with. I was 12 when I found out I was not wanted. 

I got confirmation of this many years later. After my mom died, my sisters did what they could to keep me out of the system, that will be an essay for another time. For now I am focusing on my father and the monster voices that live in my head because of him. 

My father sued my sister and I for the house after my mom died. He went so far that lawsuit included any hangers and Tupperware we may have taken out of the house. He moved back in and we left, that began my constant moving that did not end until my 20s. 

During my teen years my father continued to have me followed and reported on. I tried to reconnect with him a little in my mid teens. He was the only parent I had left. It was hard for me to go back to that house to see him. It always felt so dark and oppressive. 

For my 17th birthday he let me have a party there. He showed up, got drunk or was drunk when he showed up I will never know. But I remember walking into the kitchen and my father was pouring shots for some of my friends- we were all underage. He had taken his teeth out and told a bunch of them that I had punched him. He then asked all the boys there, which were the ones I may have slept with or at the very least blown because I am worse off than a whore as I don’t charge. I was humiliated, and a few of them took it seriously. I do believe that it was those comments that had helped pave the way for a later sexual assault I endured. It was another couple of years before I tried to connect yet again. 

You may be asking why, after all of this, I kept trying to connect with someone who was so toxic and ill. When you grow up being told you are worthless, your instinct is to prove them wrong. He was my father, and parents are supposed to love their children. 

As a teen I was in an off and on again relationship that was dangerous and abusive. I had found myself to be pregnant at 19. I had no money, no place to live and a crappy little job. We had been broken up for a while and I was unsure what to do. By this point in time my father had sold the house and was only coming back to town for a few months at a time. I had contacted him to let him know I had no place to live, but I did not initially tell him I was pregnant as I had not decided what I was going to do. With much guilt from my father he opted to buy a mobile home. It seemed so fitting that I was unwed, pregnant and living with my alcoholic father in a trailer park. 

I had decided to give my child over for adoption, that too is another story that I will tell. Sufficed to say, I had a moment where I knew if I had kept the child, that where I was, would then become a prison we would be stuck in for a very long time and I knew that this was not fair to the child or to me. I had not planned to tell my father, I was not sure how I was going to do the whole birth yet, but I did not want to have him involved. I thought I had a friend I could rely on to drive me when the time came. The joys of being quite large by that point in my life, the pregnancy was pretty easy to hide. 

Right near the due date, the person I was counting on, got a job that would not allow for them to be available to take me to the hospital. So I had to tell him.

There was a passing thought that I might have actually died that night. I timed it so he had only had a couple of drinks before I told him. Those of you with alcoholics in your family know that with lifelong ones, there is a certain amount of alcohol that allows for ‘normal’ function. This is what I needed in order to tell him. I assured him I was not keeping the child, and I think that was the only reason me and the baby survived that night. After explaining to him that I was only telling him because I will need a ride to the hospital. He agreed, but wanted me to swear to tell no one what I was doing. As soon as we had this conversation I locked myself in my room and listened as he got drunker and drunker and louder and louder about how I should not be allowing the bloodline to continue, that I was a whore who could not keep my legs closed, that I was like my mother. He had imparted upon me that my mother had a child in between my sister and I that she had given up for a closed adoption. He passed out before he got his guns out of the cold room.

A few months after the adoption, was the last time I had seen him. I had started dating someone that was so different from any of the males I had been raised around or dating prior to having my son. He was nice and he was quiet and gentle. He also did not turn tail and run after a disastrous meeting with my father. 

I was 20 by this time, we were still in the trailer park. 

After giving my child up I had resorted to partying again. This was the time before cel phones were such a common thing. I was out at a bar and using a pay phone, called my boyfriend to come and join me, he very calmly told me I need to go home. I asked why and he told me that he had stopped by the trailer to see if I was home and was met with my drunk father. He quietly said into the phone that something was terribly wrong, my dad had shaved off half of his moustache. As trauma survivors we cultivate humour so we can survive, to this day, the thought of him with only half a moustache on his bloated face makes me giggle in a very macabre way. This was his tell that big shit is going to hit the fan. Initially fear rocked my belly and I was again that same 8 year old girl that had begged for her life so many times. 

I headed home. It was raining, I was drunk and by the time I got home I was full of rage. I knew going in, this was going to be the end. As I entered that trailer, I noticed an empty bottle of rye and many beer cans, and his two shotguns laid across the table. His eyes were red and full of rage. As soon as I came in he was in my face screaming about how ungrateful and gross I was. How I never would bring anything but poison to the world. How I should have never procreated and how he was going to end it all. 

The rage that boiled out of me was astounding, so much anger and hurt. With the amount of screaming and yelling happening I am still surprised that the police were not called. As I screamed at him about all the shit he had put me and the rest of my family through he raged back with ’How dare you speak to your father that way!’ I remember pausing in my fury, only to feel it rise up fast like bile ‘How dare I?! How dare you do this to me! I am your fucking daughter, you have tormented me and my mother and sisters for ever! How dare you, I deserved so much better.’  The last thing I had said to him as I was madly trying to pack some clothes and my beloved cat was that ‘I would load the guns for him if he would just finally do it, but to lay plastic down because I’d have to resell the place and blood was hard to clean’.

The last thing he said to me was to take my fucking cat or he’d kill it and me, exactly what he should have done years ago.

That was 30 years ago. We spoke once after that by phone 23 years ago, it was short and ugly. He died, from what I heard not long after that. I don’t know how, where or exactly when. 

A few years back I had found an old audio tape in an old box of stuff that had a couple of recordings of my mother. Initially I was excited that I could hear her again and my daughter would be able to hear her grandma. When I listened to it, I opted to listen to it by myself first. I was gutted by what I heard and have decided that for the time being I would be the only one to have listened. On that audio she was telling the story to a friend about my birth, about my father being hunted by the RCMP that night, about how she left me at 6 weeks to take off, regretting that she had gotten involved with him. That she had in fact agreed to have me and marry him because he could provide a home financially for her and her other kids to move out of my Nan’s house. In conversations with my sister it was confirmed that my father not only harmed them, he tried to force himself on my Nan. 

What have I been left with? Even though I have done so much work in therapy and on my own over the years, the ugliest of the monster voices that live in my head are his. The voices that tell me I will never be enough. The voices, when they get loud enough, that tell me I should not be here, that I am bad luck and poison. A combined chorus will remind me that my value is commerce based. And sometimes it tells me that I am invisible and only deserve to be acknowledged when I can be used. It is the voice of shame in my head. 

I binge drank until my 40s. My weight fluctuates. I have used self harm as a coping mechanism. I get attached and I panic. I have been told I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I have tried medications when I was younger and suffered more set backs than it helped. It had made me medication shy. The voices that mimic his, can become so loud and dark I am sure they can be heard if you are standing next to me. The chronic pain, muscle twitches and tightness that comes with this, can feel unbearable. Sleep is not always restful. Some days it feels like my brain is coated in oatmeal, thoughts seem to take forever, being able to complete a task feels impossible. I lose words and it can at times affect my memory.

I can not kill it. Sometimes it is quiet and I feel ‘normal’. Sometimes it is like having a mosquito buzzing in my ear and other times it is deafening and brings intrusive thoughts that create so much pain I am numb. I have learned things to ‘manage’ it, they work sometimes. There is short term medications that give relief, but come with side effects. I use CBD/Cannabis to be calm and relieve physical pain . I know that too much alcohol or sugar will send my brain (not so fondly called my squirrel) into twitches and throw my coping off. Meaningful tattoos have for the most part replaced the self harm. Each symbol chosen as a ward or sigil against the demons that can plague me. Spells of protection and armour permanently placed over old scars and vulnerabilities. Regular movement and workouts, time in nature are all important to maintain balance. Keeping my self in check and being honest about needs and boundaries are all helpful too, but not always possible. Body work like massage has been a life saver for helping to decrease the stress in my physical body and helping my connect the body and mind. One of the hardest is practicing truthfulness in how I am feeling and communicating this. I can’t always say what I need, I am seldom asking for a fix as these are impossible most times. Allowing myself to be vulnerable in front of someone is near impossible, I will default to being the supporter rather than getting the support. That loop reenforces the core belief that I am not worthy unless I am giving, it can become a dangerous, draining slope. 

The biggest catalyst for battling this openly is my kids. Both have inherited brains that lean toward disordered thinking and anxiety. This is where I see traces of generational trauma and skewed wiring. They are in a better position to rework some of these things moving forward but I need to be honest with them and my battle to give them hope and understanding that these are not flaws or faults that take away from who they are. That these things are not their fault but that they can participate in the healing of themselves to change, that these ‘glitches’ are from a warning system that spent so much time in high alert it knows no other way of communicating and it helped to lead to the creation of this in the dna passed along to them.

I can also take away from this that I am compassionate for those that feel unseen and unsupported. I have a keen ability to allow people to feel safe. I treasure people who bring kindness and inspiration to me. I strive to make the world a better place. 

It is a dichotomy, somedays I am more in the light, somedays I am swallowed by the shadows. I don’t really know where we go when we die. I don’t know if those that came before me can hear what I am saying. But if you can hear this, know that you may have caused damage and scars but you did not crush me that way you twisted and crushed others in our family. I forgive myself when the shadows swallow me. I do not carry the anger I have the forefront of my life. There is a deep root there of disgust, pain and anger. I will not let you win by reenacting your heinous behaviour. I will not let you win by self destructing. If you can hear me FUCK YOU and what you have done. I will make it better for those that come next and draw the strength and healing from this bloodline and not let your curse continue.