Just like dear old dad
Does any child really love their father, or are they just afraid? My earliest memories of my dad are his booming voice, his tendency to hit, his very short temper. His wedding to marry my (evil) stepmother when I was not quite 4 years old, being told to sit quietly, to be good, to listen to my sister.
My last memory of him is my brother and I drunk next to his hospital bed, trying to figure out how to say goodbye. His heart killed him at 63, I don’t remember who brought the bottle to the medical complex, my brother or my stepmother, I just remember the look on my sister’s face as we drank. Later, we would question if the evil stepmother maybe didn’t do all that much to save him. When he went down, how long did it take her to call 911? Didn’t we always say she wanted his money? After 27 years of marriage, she got every penny.
I met my husband when I was 20, married him when I was 22. My mother didn’t like him, she said he was just like my dad. A cheater. A liar. A narcissist. A drunk. I saw a man that adored me and wanted to make me his entire world. She did too, but that was the problem. She could see what I could not - that it felt like I was his world now, but that would change over and over and over through time. He would shred my confidence, tear me slowly into pieces until I wasn’t sure who I was anymore, wasn’t sure I was a person. In the end, he would obliterate me almost completely, but at the beginning it was all magic and sparks, my own alcoholism and deeply seeded codependency clouding my judgment. I moved in with him before the relationship turned three months old.
In Dave I saw a man that liked me for ME, unlike my family, who would prefer I not have so many opinions and maybe not be so liberal and so atheist. I didn’t believe that he was just like Dad, I thought Mom was the villain, and Dave certainly helped me believe that she was. He swore my mother had never loved me, never wanted me and I couldn’t help but assume he was right. Why else would she be so mean to my new husband? Within a few years, we stopped visiting.
He didn’t hit, not like my dad, so I thought he was a good guy. Instead he punched holes in the walls when we’d fight, the circular shape of his fist in patched sheetrock decorating almost every room in the house. I would flinch when he would yell and he would yell at me for flinching, “I would NEVER hit you!” he would scream as he punched himself in the head. He was fond of hitting himself, my fear of him was palpable and he could only patch the walls so many times, I guess he thought his skull was the best target for his fists. The dogs would scatter and hide as soon as his tone changed to angry. He swore our family would never see the abuse he had as a child, where he told me his parents used to throw dishes at each other. Technically he never laid a finger on me, I just lived in fear of the ceramic plates and bowls.
Now Dad is gone and so is Dave, and I no longer speak to my brother. He blames me for both of their deaths, Dad’s because we’d had an argument months before his heart attacked him, Dave’s because he says I should have stayed. On the anniversary of his death, he texts me a diatribe of vitriol, saying that “dropping a 17 year marriage, that’s some actual black widow shit” and I can’t help but admire how poetic he makes it sound. What he doesn’t know is that I stayed. I stayed while he punched the walls, and while he patched them. I stayed through the fights and the threats. I stayed after he started sleeping with other women, I’ll never forget the first time. We had argued, and I thought he had gone downstairs to sleep in his office until I heard the front door slam. I watched him walk out to the family minivan and drive away, returning in the morning after I had gone to work, he stayed the night with a nice woman he had met on Craigslist.
I stayed through all of the drinking and the lying and the promises that it would stop. I stayed while he ruined family dinners and threatened the children. I stayed while he kicked the dogs and fell down the basement steps, drunk. I stayed after he wrecked his truck at 30mph, again drunk, with both children and the dog in the cab beside him. He rear ended someone picking the kids up from school, hit her so hard her back window shattered. He never even touched the brake. That night he blamed N, 11 years old, for not watching the road, for not telling him to stop.
I stayed while he posted naked pictures of me in personal ads online saying we were looking for another woman to join us (we were not). I stayed even though friends had started to fall away - “I love you dude, but your husband is a piece of work.” “You are MY friend, but your husband is scary and he’s not invited when you come by.” I stayed even after that one fight, the bad one, where I went to the grocery store to cool off and then got a notification on my phone from the credit card company saying it had been used it to purchase an OnlyFans subscription. I rushed home to find him jerking off in the basement, still not speaking to me, not even remotely ashamed or sorry. I stayed through the animal control visits, I apologized to the neighbors for all of the yelling. I stayed even though I no longer felt like I could breathe in the house, like I was suffocating, like if I had to live in his presence another second I would explode because the alternative was what? Divorce? God forbid, I would be just like my mother.
How jarring, at 40, to realize that despite all the jokes I do - actually - have daddy issues. How illuminating, in therapy, to dig through the piles of my past and see how perfectly it all lines up. Is it my fault that my husband is dead? I accept that might be a possibility. Am I still happy that I do not have to be married to him? Fuck yes.
He was an atrocious husband, though you never would have known it from looking at us. “But you seemed so happy” strangers and friends alike would say, having observed us from afar for so many years. Yes, thank you for noticing. I am very good at pretending everything is ok, I learned it from a very young age. What he lacked in husband skills he also lacked in parenting skills. He loved playing and running around with toddlers but as the children grew, so did his resentment of them. How many times did I plead with him not to talk shit about the kids when they could hear him. Beg him to please, just be nice to the other parents, it’s good that the kids have friends and we want them to have playdates. He hand carved a sign that said “Go Away” and pounded it into the garden by the front door. He hated their friends, he hated the other families, he hated the neighbor kids when they would come through the gate to play. Only now, in the vacant space I live in a year after his death, do I realize the reason he hated everyone was only because he hated himself.
I learned to adapt. To make myself small. To be sneaky. To agree with him so that I could get my way, have sex with him before I’d go out so I could have a night of peace. Keep him happy. If I was a decent liar before I met him, practiced in the ways of hiding boys and bottles from my mother in my high school bedroom, I became a professional trickster, a charlatan to the n-th degree. Once, in the arms of one of my lovers, he told me he admired how loyal I was, how he couldn’t believe I stayed loyal to a marriage and to a man who treated me so badly. In his bed, we loved to endlessly discuss Dave and I felt safe to list all of his wrongdoings, for me like a confessional but one with orgasms and sweaty sex. I was proud when he called me loyal. Proud that I appeared to seem that way, and proud that maybe it was true - maybe I wasn’t going to be like my mother after all, maybe I could stay loyal and be true to this man, even though life with him was terrifying. Even though he was destroying me, piece by piece by piece.