I like to think I can cheat it all

Oy…yet another lovely morning discussion with my mother turned to hell.

Here’s the thing…I don’t dwell on my past. Most of you know I had horrible childhood issues with my father being emotionally and mentally abusive. My mother, for some reason, either doesn’t know how bad things were or just chooses to deny it. When I was little, my father was a controlling, raging bastard. He used to back me up against a wall with a finger in my face, screaming at me over something stupid, like tripping over a rug and dropping a glass of milk on the carpet. Not ideal, no, but it’s not the end of the world. But of course, I used to get blamed that the carpet would stink like spoiled milk because I “couldn’t be bothered to clean it up right” and things like that. I did the best I could for the age I was. It was always, ALWAYS things like that which caused me to get into trouble. I was never a bad kid. I was too afraid to be a bad kid. I got good grades, I went to school, I read constantly, had a lot of friends, came home on time, never smoked, never drank, never touched drugs…you know…straight laced kid. But somehow, I was always getting mentally and emotionally beaten down at home by my father because I, quite literally, wasn’t perfect. I don’t know that he ever expected me to be perfect, but any time I had any kind of minor slip-up, it was grounds for berating and humiliating me until I couldn’t think of anything else to do but cry. I was sad, frustrated, humiliated…just…everything, and I had no way of expressing that. I couldn’t cry because he’d yell at me for that and then he’d tell me to get out of his ‘fucking face’ before he ‘gave me something to cry about’. Then he told me I was ‘showboating’ and at age 6, I remember asking him what that meant, while crying, because after hearing it 50 times, I wanted to know. He laughed at me and told me to get away from him. I remember I used to call my grandmother often, all upset, because I had apparently done something to piss him off, but I didn’t know what it was and he wouldn’t tell me. But after a few minutes on the phone, he would unplug the phone jack so I couldn’t talk to her anymore. I felt SO isolated and SO alone that I learned to just deal with it on my own. If I talked to my mother, she would tell me that I was exaggerating and that things couldn’t be as bad as I was saying in any given situation. She was usually never around to witness this stuff, but I don’t feel that I was a dramatic kid. At least, not for what I felt I was going through. I wasn’t prone to temper tantrums over not getting my way or things like that. I was only ever upset when something bad happened to me. So the fact that my father was cutting me off from the only person I could talk to who would listen and help me really got to me. So I eventually learned to deal with it on my own. I stomped down emotions. I became angry instead of sad. I was a horribly depressed, angry, rage-filled teenager who, once again, had nowhere to turn because I was too afraid to act out, because I was already getting in trouble at home and I was a GOOD KID. What would happen if I was a bad kid? At age 16, my father and I got into a horrific fight around midnight over the fact that I tried to wake up my younger brother to help me catch our 6 month old puppy who needed to go outside, and I couldn’t get her back in the house. He stormed out of the house at midnight after that and I didn’t see or talk to him for several months. Mom says he was still living here, but I saw nothing of him, which was perfectly fine by me, because he had threatened to “end me” three different times during that argument. So the day after, I was resigned to killing myself. I had a knife. I was ready. I was completely finished. I was spent. I had nothing left to give. I was drained emotionally, I was numb, I didn’t care anymore. I was tired. I had just had it with everything. I sat there running the knife over my wrist, just toying with the idea and mentally writing a suicide note blaming my father for being an asshole and my mother for having her head in the sand and not believing me. I wanted both of them to live with knowing that they were the ones who did me in.

Needless to say, I didn’t go through with it. But in my teenage years, I stopped talking to people about what was going on at home. I closed myself off. The people who were supposed to protect me were the ones causing the issues and/or making me feel crazy for feeling the way I did, so I blocked off that part of my life and I carried on as if nothing was wrong.

But over the last few years, I’ve very, VERY slowly started to bring up things with my mom that I felt was against me when I was younger. Every time I do, she rolls her eyes, tells me I’m exaggerating and tells me to stop dwelling in the past. I don’t dwell. It’s not like I live my daily life thinking ‘woe is me, everything is horrible’. Not by a long shot. It IS, however, a very big part of me that I continually try to share with my mother now and again, and I’ll admit that it still hurts that she doesn’t believe me or want to hear it.

This morning, she got all irritated when we were watching a home improvement gardening show on tv and I said, “oh, if Joey (my younger brother) and I ever did that to the lawn and put holes in it, we would have gotten into trouble.” It was a simple passing comment and mom got all offended, looked at me and said, “Why do you DO that? I feel sorry for you. You constantly talk about what bad childhood memories you have.” I may bring something up once every six months, tops. If a situation comes up when I find an opportunity to try to share the things that made me feel bad as a kid, sometimes I’ll take it, just to try to let my mother in on things. But I see nothing has changed. So from now on, everything was peachy keen. Roses and unicorns. Fluffy kittens and bunnies.

I’m thoroughly annoyed that I’m 30 years old and still can’t talk about these things without STILL being made to feel like I’m a terrible person for feeling like my father overreacted in a very negative way towards me when I was younger.

Keep an eye out for the next entry coming…someday. This entry gave me an idea.

Anyway, that’s that.