I don’t remember when my Father last told me, “I love you.” But I do know it was years before he died. It was definitely after he sat me down and explained that the law didn’t require him to love me. He only needed to feed me, shelter me, and provide for my education; if I wanted his love, I would have to earn it every day. But it must’ve been before our final conversation. That consisted of him announcing he regretted being my father because of how much of a failure I turned out to be. He clarified that it was now impossible for me to earn his love.

This piece has been a hard one to write. Its conception predates this blog by many years. But until recently, I wasn’t brave enough to see it through to completion, much less publication. I was scared of how my Father would react when he was still alive. Then, after his death, I was afraid of how my family would react. I decided this essay wasn’t worth writing, that I wasn’t abused (or if I was, it wasn’t bad enough to warrant mention.)

Time doesn’t heal all wounds but teaches us how to accommodate the lingering pain. It has taught me how to accept what happened to me. This is a partial record of how my Father abused me.

My Father often told me his proudest accomplishment was not abusing me, which is what his father did to him. This is true: his father was a notable child abuser in 1960s Boston, where parents never spared the rod. But my Father had other ways to hurt me. His words were his whippin’ stick, and my psyche was his target. 

He had many ways to hurt me, and he often displayed a sense of gleeful joy when he thought he had discovered a new tactic. Listing all his rhetorical tools would be a waste of time and too hard to be worthwhile. My mind doesn’t like to remember the things he said. It will take me to the precipice of various moments. Still, then I get a headache if I push on to the moment of emotional injury. But I’ll try to give some illustrative examples.

When I was young, my father would describe his fantasies of abandoning me. He never had a chance to live the life he wanted: chronic and crippling health problems left him a shell of himself. He saw his family as emblematic of his failure and wished he could be rid of us. He would tell me how he’d go about abandoning us. He had everything figured out; he just needed a miracle cure for his ailments.

When I was in second grade, I was diagnosed with ADHD and Autism. This was a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it opened up avenues for treatment that I needed if I was ever to integrate into society. But, on the other hand, it vindicated my Father’s belief that I was his inferior. No matter what I accomplished, he would never admit I was smarter than him or even intelligent. When my grades slipped in middle school for various reasons, my Father labeled me a “retard.” He had kept some of his old report cards from before he got sick and would love to compare his grades to mine. Over time, “retard” turned to “useless,” then words turned into slaps and smacks. I began throwing away my report cards so my Father would find ways to get them directly from the school.  

I first attempted suicide in my junior year of high school. My Father – as far as I know – never knew what happened to me was intentional. But, of course, he learned about my mental health issues. He had to pay for my therapy, after all, a fact which irked him to no end. He grew increasingly paranoid about what I was telling my therapist. So my Father threatened to murder my therapist if he felt I was sharing things ‘best kept in the family.” My therapists were also Jewish, which further intensified his paranoia. He grew more anti-Semitic. This culminated in outbursts calling Jesus “a Jew who deserved to die.” Of course, when he found out I was an atheist – which he learned from reading my journal – he was very hurt.

In my senior year of high school, I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder. During my college years, my Father grew bitter at how much it cost me to attend. So he would try and guilt-trip me into killing myself. At first, I thought this was just some dark humor on his part. But as the years went on, he would grow more insistent, and his mockery grew even more venomous. This is when I first realized he stopped saying he loved me. 

Did my Father actually stop loving me? Did he even love me in the first place? I don’t know the answer to these questions, and I don’t know if I want to know. My Father was not instructed in how to love people by his parents. Though they might’ve thought they did, I don’t think they loved him. My father described some of what they did to him, and people who love you don’t treat you that way. But I also know that people don’t tell people they love that, “I wish you’d just kill yourself already.”

Yet I remember other times when he’d show me great warmth. These happened too often to all be faked. Maybe I am giving him too much credit, but I believe he loved or wanted to love me. That’s what hurts the most about his abuse: he wanted to be a good father, and what resulted was the best he could do. The rage and resentment inside him ate all that was good in his soul until it rotted.

It’s at this point in my reflections on my childhood and my Father that I grow both sad and angry. I am sorry because I wish my Father never had to suffer the way he did. I am angry because I hate that I still think about him as much as I do. So much of my abuse was my Father resenting that I didn’t fixate on his needs, his problems, his wants. I never helped him enough, no matter how much I tried to. Even now, years after his death, I’m incapable of dwelling on the hurt he inflicted on me. I always end up focusing on the hurt he suffered. 

Why am I writing this now? I am in my thirties; my Father has been dead for almost a decade. These things that I have described happened in the past. Why can’t I move on? 

I only cried once in the immediate aftermath of my Father’s death. It came a few days after his passing and a couple of days before the funeral. I wasn’t sad that he died, so much as I was sorry we didn’t reconcile before it happened. Before his death, I had always held up hope that I would be able to patch things up with him. Now, this was impossible, and the last thing he said to me was that he didn’t love me. To make matters worse, I was expected to give the eulogy. 

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth at my Father’s funeral. He was a popular and beloved man, with many people appreciating his kindness and sense of humor. Most people didn’t know what he was like in private. They didn’t know how much he resented everyone around him and assumed they were plotting against him. A German phrase – isn’t there always – refers to people like my father: Strass-Engel, Haus-Teufel. “Street Angel, House Devil.” My Father was a people-pleaser as long as he thought those people were outside his control. I was the one person he knew he controlled, and he enjoyed that power to its maximum extent. 

Control was what my Father wanted most out of life. He felt beholden and inferior to everyone around him, including my mother, who was both his nurse and wife. Before he died, he clarified his feelings towards her by calling her “an investment.” Perhaps that was all anyone around him was: investments. He would pay them in kindness; they would help him as needed. But he didn’t have to repay me in kindness; I was somebody he had control over and had the right to dominate as he saw fit.

My Father still controls me. Even now, his words ring in my mind. Whenever I make a mistake, I can hear him calling me “useless,” “stupid,” or “retarded.” Many of the phrases I use when suffering from a bout of suicide ideation originate from him. Hell, many of my intrusive thoughts – especially the offensive ones – started as things he said when alone. I keep my pain bottled up: I haven’t seen a therapist in years. The full extent of his abuse was always our little secret, something “best kept in the family.” I’ve continued to respect his wishes long after he was around to enforce them. 

My Father comes to me in my nightmares. He appears to remind me how disappointed he is in me and to tell me how it should’ve been me who died, not him. Sometimes, I try to fight back, but it’s no use. There is nothing I can do to hurt him, and he simply laughs at me when I try. He is beyond life’s sufferings; he just gets to inflict it now. I suppose that is what he always wanted.

I don’t know if writing this will help me. Posting it probably won’t. If this gets back to my family, I doubt they’ll appreciate why I’m saying these things. The last time I tried to bring up my Father’s abuse to my Mother, she shut it down by saying, “Your father did nothing wrong.”  She doesn’t understand. The only people who do are a few of my friends. They know the pain I went through. Maybe now I do, too.

For my first thirty-one years, I spoke to myself with my Father’s voice. I hated myself for the reasons he wanted me to. I’ve sabotaged myself the ways he tried to sabotage me. I’ve tried to live according to impossible standards. As a child, I wanted to be perfect because I thought my Father would compliment me if I were perfect. I now see that this has brought me only pain and suffering. I think I’ve suffered enough according to my Father’s demands; I know I’ve suffered enough to satisfy myself. It’s time I start living my life better and healthier. Do I know what that looks like? Absolutely not. But it’ll be too late to turn things around if I don’t start figuring them out now. I’m too old to be an abused child. I’m too old to speak in my father’s voice. It’s time I spoke with my voice, both to myself and others. It’s time I was who I wanted to be.