October 23 in Scott

Tonight I remembered dinner time when I was a child at my parents house. I never thought of it as strange or even horrifying until I was an adult even recently. How my father treated me I just have not thought of for decades. I blocked it out.

Dinner time was not something I look forward to as a kid because my father would often come to the table, angry or irritated or just not in a good mood. It’s the time when he would not really engage in conversation but more like interrogation of me. All the other kids the other three were just fine Never caused any trouble. I was very different and my father often called me “insolent“ I looked at my father with fear because he like to yell at me. It seems that he would assign his anger to me. I could look at him and he would say I was looking at him in an insolent manner. He did not like the way I was looking at him or maybe he did not like the way I was eating or how I talked or something or maybe I talked too much. But it got so that in my teens, I just tried to avoid even looking at him at the dinner table. That is when the family congregated together. I would like to go back in time as a bystander as an invisible man and watch how my father was with me. To watch him in those times when he reached across and threw a punch or slapped me. I remember one time he did it and he said in disgust I did not hit you so hard. No dad I say to him now as an adult. It was not so much the physical pain as the psychological injury. I got so that I didn’t like to eat around other people Because that stuck with me and nobody could understand it. My father had an eating problem I think from polio in that he made some horrible sounds whenever he ate, and it was like he was just eating like a slob a pig gulping his food down. I tried to ignore it. He was hypocritical in his table, manners, and how he would be critical of me how I hate, and yet he would always eat with his mouth full and open, which was disgusting to me. I think it did not help that dad would go work at the university and then come home and unwind with beer and maybe a few shots of whiskey. He claimed he was never drunk. I think he was just good at denying it and to him drunk with somebody falling down passing out. I was a different kind of drunk and that that is how I was later, but I was never a mean, drunk like my father was I believe the alcohol did something to just unleash whatever the fuck his Demons were.

I believe we can see things more clearly as adults looking back. We can remove the child view and see situations and eventswith the eyes of an adult. I can see my own behavior with less bias. But I do wonder if I was such a bad kid. According to my mom no. According to some therapists, no.

My oldest brother now owns the family home and sometimes I look at that dining room room and I think OK so this is where the crimes happened where the horrors happened. This is where I had to sit and finish whatever was on my plate no matter how much they had put on it until I was finished. Sometimes sitting there for over an hour trying to eat food I absolutely hated. As my parents would say this is not a restaurant. OK, but don’t make food a punishment.

When I was briefly apparent for four years, I did not make my wife’s son go through what I went through. I learned that when my father did to me was an aberration with families.

When I eat these days, I sometimes remember the torment so long ago of trying to eat a meal with family. I feel so good that nobody is going to yell at me for anything. That I would never be a person like my father that went around yelling at people at family, but never people outside the family. Anger and a bit of sadism we’re OK with family, but not with people outside the house. I have a times wondered why I turned to alcohol and drugs in my teen years and now I can see some reason why. It was too dead in my emotion to use alcohol to an extreme to kill feeling. I can understand why in high school I often try to get alcohol and just kill emotion in me.

My mother once told me that my father and I were so much alike and I never understood it until later. We were alike in that we were very anxious people, but my father never showed it. He would chain smoke and drink and drink would seem like massive amount of coffee and sleep very little. Showing fear or anxiety was not something man of his generation did. They hid it. They pushed it down. I was far more high, strong and anxious than my father was and it showed because I didn’t have to act like him by trying to hide it. I believe my father disliked me so much because he could see some of himself in me.But he had pushed beyond the fear. When he retired, he took a long journey with my mother out west. At one point, he thought he was having a heart attack and they drove back home and he saw a doctor. The doctor told him his heart was OK that he had had a panic attack. This was like an insult to my father because as he told the doctor according to my mother, that is what his son has and he can’t be like that. Interpretation by me is that he could not be fucked up like his kid was.

I am far less fucked up than that kid was so long ago or any of my past selves. But I have understood my father after all this time. There is nothing to forgive because he was just the way he was that’s all and he did not know any better.

It is my choice, not to be so much like him to change myself so that I do not repeat how he was psychologically constructed. Fortunately, I was able to get help and grow in different ways.