Cost

"I think your mother and I have more than paid for what we did when you kids were younger"

That is the latest from my dad, said to little brother T on the heels of T's latest meth mess. Of course, the latest meth mess was very near to the previous meth mess. I sometimes feel like I should be counting in between to know when the storm will be above me.

During the meth messes, there's a sliver of semi-lucid but totally dysphoric thinking before a descent into full psychosis. That sliver tends to involve excruciatingly critical thought where T focuses on whatever he's done which he thinks might have made his life right now wrong or bad enough that it is so impossible for him to live without meth. He doesn't put it like that but this seems to be what is going on. This time, his demon driven inner critic picked living with parents as "what needs to change".

My sister and I couldn't agree more that living with them is horrible. But this is not because of the unseemliness of a 34 year old living with mom (and dad). I think some slack could be cut for someone who turned HIV positive when he was only 24 and supposed to be starting out feeling fearless over confidence in his own ability. I'd argue that this kind of arrogance is common in 24 year olds and is necessary to get us through the transition from adolescence to adulthood. To be given what at the time was a certain death sentence, and one with still quite large stigma in the larger social context, has got to take some of the wind out of that sail.

My sister and I don't like the living with mom and dad thing because mom and dad are abusive fucked up people and like many abusive parents, they continue inappropriate, hurtful behavior even with their grown children. Although the hitting stopped as soon as we were old enough to potentially hit back (with my dad, with my mom it's a different story), they have no regard for boundaries and continue a pattern of emotionally abusive behavior. One example of their continuing and intolerable behavior is the chronic attempts to exonerate themselves for what they did when we were kids. This is a large part of why my sister and I won't have dealings with them. It is dangerous to our health. Personally I feel it risks my freedom as well since my interactions with them in my late twenties often ended with nearly violent fights. I decided it was better for me to stay away from them after hearing my father snarling at my 30 year old sister and then kicking the dogs. I was angered to a frighteningly severe point and it was all I could do not come after him with whatever was around. My mother was intentionally antagonistic, setting up times for us to have mother daughter moments together then sabotaging them, then using the failed "moment" to have a tantrum where she would say things like "you're dead to me!"

My sister made the same kind of decision a short time after I did. My brother noticed my parents' continuing horrible behavior, how it stifled our adult identities in very damaging ways. He talked about it, had nightmares about it, and then lost himself in meth and k.

My mother's a pro at the exoneration game. She can work in a plea for extenuating circumstances or co-victim status masterfully as if she were expressing guilt or remorse for her failings as a parent, prompting you to say things like "it's ok" when you know it's really not. My father is either less skilled at or less comfortable with the subtle approach. He chooses a more direct tactic, like the example at the start of this post. This is odd because he was the more physically abusive one. You'd think it would be harder for him to reconcile a desire to believe he did nothing wrong with years of memories of assaulting his own children. However, it seems he has convinced himself that we owe him some sort of absolution.

Even if he had spent the last 15 years being the best dad ever, what he wants is not an option. It is just not possible in this case. The guilt he feels he has paid off was not placed on him by a court. His (and my mother's) "guilt" is a natural guilt. It is a simple and direct consequence of repeatedly harming children who were in their care and who therefore had no hope of avoiding them, no other recourse, no one else to tell them they did not suck or did not deserve to be ground down emotionally and physically. The guilt they have is a consequence of destroying lives they charged themselves to foster. And because the guilt here is not an artifact of a legal system, it is not debatable. It is consequence. Hurt someone over and over and you are guilty of hurting someone over and over. They might move past it, replace it with something good later, but the history is still there. Hurt someone over and over as they are becoming a person and you will have written the act and your part in it into their existence completely and inextricably.

If we keep up with the analogy, it is fair to say my father admits some guilt but believes he has paid his debt and is arguing that he has served his time in guilt prison. See, he thinks the sentence and the guilt are separate things. He's wrong. The guilt is the sentence. There's not a debt, there's a mark, an unhealing wound that each of his children can at best bandage and treat gently. For my father, the sentence is what he created - hate, distrust, anxiety, pain, damaged people who will measure their success not in terms of living a good rewarding life but in terms of not harming others as they were harmed and not letting fear of being harmed again limit and color every aspect of their existence.

My point is that no matter what my parents may have convinced themselves of, there's no getting off the hook on this one. There's only pretense and denial, and that seems to be exactly what my father is pleading right now. Because my sister and I won't speak to our parents, and because our brother lives with them, my father is making his case to my brother. You'd think if he were convinced that such a wrong thing to do were somehow a legitimate and plausible option, he'd have tried to make the plea to me. I'm the one he didn't hit much. I'm the one who inherited his temper. I'm the one who is most like him. I'm also the one who most recently and directly called him on his shit, reminding him that if you intimidate and push people they just might push back, and that bullies who live in old man bodies shouldn't antagonize the very people they damaged. Could be this is why dad's not asking me, that and convenience. My brother is conveniently located, right there in the same house. So dad is pimping his "debt paid" shit to my brother.

Even if my brother were inclined to accept my father's logic, my brother cannot choose to ignore the damage done by what we were raised in. As with all of us, it is part of him. He can choose to find ways to channel it, to address and express it in safe areas and with safe people. He can try to find the social equivalent of a bomb squad to help him defuse the explosive devices his trauma will occasionally build in his soul. He can choose to subject it to attempts at emotional alchemy. He can do any number of things, but he cannot refuse that it is there, which is essentially what my father is asking. To attempt to do that risks my brother's soundness of mind, and that is already something in short supply these days.

Which brings me to the next point. Whether my father consciously intends it or not, this strategy of his can only serve to further the abuse. It is abusive to try to coerce my brother into declaring my father's time served. There is no way my brother can do that without assuming some of the guilt himself.

So what is it that dad thinks he and my mother paid for?
Let's make a list.
For inviting my mother's adopted father who was an unconvicted, untreated pedophile to live with us when we were 3, 4, and 5.
For using my mother's father as a babysitter, thus giving him access to us and putting us into a position where we were expected to recognize him as an authority.
For failing to respond appropriately when my sister informed them (hey big surprise) that he was sexually abusing her.
My father: For letting my mother "handle it"
My mother: For "handling it" by alerting her father to the accusation, the result of which was that her father stopped trying for my sister and redoubled his efforts with me and my brother.
My father: For beating the shit out of my brother and sister over and over and over and over and over......
For making me a witness to it.
For abusing my brother and sister in violent but not battery ways, like locking my brother in a small laundry hamper in the basement, then leaving him down there in the dark for what seemed like hours.
For force feeding my sister a piece of cheese that she tried to feed the dog. The dog licked it a few times, decided she didn't want it, then walked away and left it on the floor. My father grabbed it, grabbed my sister with his fist balled up in her hair, pulled her head back and literally stuffed it down her throat. She gagged and cried and choked on it. How many years of guilt do you serve for that? How fucking many?
For behaving in every interaction with us as if we were the most loathsome and criminally reprehensible of beings because we did things like NOT PICK UP ALL OUR TOYS or DIDN'T IMMEDIATELY STOP LAUGHING AT SOMETHING or WATCHED A TV SHOW THAT STUPID PEOPLE LIKE or WANTED TO DRINK TANG AND EAT WONDER BREAD or ACTED "CUTE" or any number of things kids just do.
For more often than not storming into a room and when he wasn't hurting people breaking stuff like the tv (kicked, thrown out window) and the phone (ripped out of the wall).
For calling my sister stupid, retarded, moron, ditzy, empty headed, a space cadet, dipshit, maggot, little bitch, ungrateful little shit, selfish pieceof shit....
For mocking my brother when he cried after being beaten.
For becoming enraged at hearing any of us cry when he scared us.
My mother: For letting it happen even though she knew (and I knew she knew because I wrote her notes telling her).
For letting it happen.
For letting it happen.
For letting it happen.
For facilitating it.
For being drunk and inappropriate (she once open mouth kissed my brother then laughed about it, made jokes about masturbation a lot).
For leaving.
For systematically invalidating my anger at my parents' horrible behavior.
For confiding in my sister with her personal marital problems with my dad, thus robbing my sister of a genuine mother figure.
For acting as if our love was never good enough.
For flipping out and beating the shit out of at least my sister and me in public places.
For writing stories where characters which strongly resemble her own children fantasize about having sex with their parents...and asking us to read them.
For getting drunk at parties and sobbing to strangers that she shouldn't have ever had children because we were so horrible.
For gettting drunk at home and sobbing to her mother that she shouldn't have ever had children because we were so horrible.
For violating each and every boundary we so desperately needed in that house.
For threatening us with foster homes when DSS came in (finally) to investigate the claims about her father's sexual abuse of us.
For lying at family therapy.
For attacking me, occasionally physically and always with unwarranted spite, repeatedly the summer before I started college and was out of the house more than I was in (but never in any trouble).
For her tantrums at christmas, birthdays, and many other holidays which usually involved booze and were often in public.

I know there's more but these are the ones that occur off the top of my head. If I were to count each and every instance of only the most horrible and concrete of this list, their guilt is worth at least three lifetimes of regret, one for each of their children. Neither of them has the right to ask for absolution from any of us for their acts or for the outcome of their acts. To speak of having "paid for" any of this is absurd, and I'm pissed off enough that I'm thinking of finding a public and punitive way of telling them so. If only I had free time and some money...I'd sue their asses. Not because I'm a fan of litigious solutions but since my father has chosen to wrap his inappropriate desire in that framework, it strikes me as just to consider a very public accounting of the crime and the cost.

Addendum: I just found this. So it seems my parents are in fact still open for a lawsuit, at least civil if not also criminal. I just might look into this, seriously. I don't have a lot of free time and I have even less money, but maybe the inquiry will make me feel better.