My grandpa had died recently. I found out via a Facebook post and I’m proud of myself for demonstrating some grace as I wasn’t too thrilled to have discovered this information second hand through an electronic social media platform.
I was successfully able to control my emotions (ended up having a severe unanticipated reaction to Wellbutrin back in May 2021) and it was refreshing. I didn’t let that Monkey Mind get the upper hand this time. #Accomplishments
A lot has happened in my personal life—again—dear readers and albeit I really prefer to actually type, I may start to resort to writing/posting in my blog via my thumbs. Which isn’t ideal at all but wasting pointless hours on Facebook doesn’t really sound appealing anymore either. Nor being seated in front of my tv, or hell, seated at all period. But I apologize, my life seemed to completely go haywire even independent of covid. I fell off, and in all sorts of ways at that.
As I feel sleepiness arriving I must get to the point of my disclosure immediately. But as a quick aside, please know, any beloved or faithful readers, how much I have been absorbing information over these last several months. How many blogs I wish I had just posted on an assortment of topics. Instead of on Facebook where everyone I know in real life probably thinks I’m crazy, sans the few knowledgeable and sympathetic eyes that pay rapt attention.
I was perhaps 6 or 7 when this particular event happened and was triggered when trying to explain to my one cousin how much a monster his beloved Uncle Denny could be in preparing to see my father and his family for the first time in about five years due to my grandfather's funeral.
I was laying on the ground of our living room coloring and drawing with the television on in the background. Our TV was black and white with knobs and weeks prior, I believe that I had encountered for the first time the truly dark character of whom which is my father. He never liked paying bills, we were never well off and poverty combined with an inability to do math confidently would always enrage him. So by this particular juncture in time I knew it would be pointless to intervene. As the first time I originally saw my father exhibit this less than savory side to himself he had been paying bills. His character was so incredibly different I was just staring at him, while he mumbled angrily looking over pieces of paper. But after a moment he snapped up straight, looking directly at me, demanding in a snarl, “What the fuck are you looking at?”
But this is a different time.
We were both in the living room. I was drawing and coloring on the ground in front of the television, he was sitting in a chair paying bills spread out on a TV tray. Abruptly the tray along with all the papers spread on the top of it flipped over but the paper drifted slowly down like over-sized confetti.
I'm sure I've mentioned this before but when it comes to C-PTSD events, especially in childhood, one doesn't always get to flee or fight, so instead, you freeze and flop. While I would freeze and flop, my flopping was more so a dissociative mental check-out. I just realized that it's probably the real reason why I'm so terrible with time management to this day.
So at this point I freeze and make myself very quiet and small to evade detection and to just ride this out for as long, as best, as possible. My father goes on a tirade rant to God Himself primarily about how God owes him money and proceeded to stalk every single framed item in our apartment that had been hanging up and punched through every glass pane. Shattering each pane with one purposeful strike. In retrospect and especially unfortunately having some temper outbursts of my own on the extremely rare occasion, I don't know how he didn't slice his knuckles and hands to bits, he wasn't even cut.
There was so much glass. This is not an exaggeration and writ more so to extract this bad memory from my psyche, along with the hopes that this tale could somehow prove a comfort or insight to another. The glass rained down. It would not stop. It would have perhaps been comical if not so terrifying. Dad looked like some irrational demonic ninja methodically punching and smashing every single framed item encountered on the walls all in a row. I could only compare it to a drive-by shooting, it was that explosively intense. Glass rained down upon me, bouncing off my hair, my head, my face, my arms, my legs, my hands, my feet, my sketch book, my crayons and colored pencils. I do not know how I was not cut.
I do not remember him calming down nor how he managed to do so, but I recall the aftermath. Bits of glass, both shards and dust were everywhere, seemingly coating ever square inch of the apartment where a framed item had decorated the walls.
He had ended up calling his ex-girlfriend's sister Donna to come pick me up and take me in for a few days, blaming all this physical destruction on an impending job loss and her needing to take me so he could clean it all up, this woman saw all of this immediate aftermath and also had the audacity to tell me during my pseudo high school graduation party that despite all of my abuse I had turned out more than fine, as Donna had known. Donna had known far more than I had ever given her credit for and had permitted my abuse to happen to me for close to two decades. Despite having two adopted children in addition to her other two biological children, perhaps a fifth would have been an overburden, and I and the youngest had fought greatly. But her two adopted had been present for the murder-suicide of their parents so you would've thought Donna would have had more of a bleeding heart, but I digress. I just want to briefly document the horror and embarrassment that came out hushed in a back bedroom of Donna's house when she presented me with a card and this knowledge and how it corrupted my mind and soul, in a more litigious way, than the abuse ever did.
I was especially devastated by the breaking of a framed picture of myself, a recent grade-school picture. The frame absolutely busted and the broken metal from the frame coupled with shards of glass had torn my photograph. Which my father had recently applauded in his own weird way, as one day, after its framing, the sun had shined into the living room upon the glass and really did somehow make a golden glowing cross across its face over my own. My dad acted like it had been a sign from God, that I had been blessed. Chosen. Acknowledged and empowered by God. I didn't believe him on this of course, I thought my father was being silly and it was the way the light refracted. But I also recall something strange about it, how the cross of light didn't leave my face briefly even when the picture was moved, bent, flipped over, or the light-source obstructed for a few minutes which is the only way my father had even remotely convinced me.
But to see this picture of which he had been so hard pressed to demonstrate to me as being special and so significant to claim I was "chosen by God" to see it a mangled unfixable mess was truly heartbreaking for me. I was convinced on some level that his love was a lie and that I wasn't actually special to him or God. His apologies insincere, false, and wee. Then I was sent away for a week.
Donna returned me to my father and the only thing he ever went on to bemoan about that day was how he had smashed the two pictures in the hallway that had belonged to her sister, his ex-girlfriend.
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