Remebering a Father Who Can't: Ch 1

    My father was not a gentle man, nor was he patient.  He was, however, full of life and love he didn’t show easily.  I was introduced to my passions and my curiosity about the world under the watchful eye of both of my parents, but I remember my father the most.  Even in his heated rebukes of my behavior, he was teaching me valuable lessons to last me a lifetime and leading me to discover the kind of person I would want to be.  Now, I am finishing college and he has been diagnosed with dementia.  He is losing his mind and memory just as I am discovering myself and remembering him daily.
    Growing up with my father was a lifetime war.  Surviving each new battle kept him from winning over my mind as I lived to fight another day.  Not everything was bad, but nothing was all good.  Once I started school I could barely stand to be at home.  School was my only relief from constant badgering, but that didn’t last long. 
    One day after my younger sister, Samantha, started kindergarten and I had entered third grade, he came to school.  The intercom rattled in each of our classrooms and the voice said that we were to report to the counselor’s office immediately.  I’d been visiting the counselor on a regular basis and was not alarmed by this until I walked in the door.  My father, red-faced, was clawing at the chair in the corner impatient for me to close the door.  The counselor told me that Dad wanted to talk to me and Sam, just me and Sam.  Awkwardly he excused himself.  All hell was about to break loose, and I was still reeling from the knowledge that Dad and his anger followed me to the one place I thought I was safe.
    “I’m sick of living in a dirty house.”  I couldn’t believe that came out of his mouth.  He interrupted the school day to yell at a 6 and a 9 year-old about house cleaning.  I barely heard his cussing rant except for a few comments about his children’s laziness amidst some long lecture about insubordination.  After that he started blaming my existence for his not finishing college and having a crappy job.  “If you kids would just do what you’re told your Mom and I wouldn’t have so many problems.  I would have a good job and we wouldn’t have to worry about money.  Your Mom makes three times the money I do, and so she has to support us all.  All I ever ask of you two is that the house be kept clean so we can look respectable.  Is that unreasonable?  Don’t your friends have chores that they do without being yelled at?”  I made some affirmative comment or gesture and Sam only could cry.  He made some nasty comment to Sam about crying that angered me, but showing no emotion was the best defense against his attacks.  So, I sat quietly with a glazed-over expression until he started to give his ultimatum.  “If the house isn’t clean by the time I get home in the morning, I’m packing up and moving out.”  My concentration was shattered when he shouted, “I’m leaving you and Mom” as he stormed out of the room.
    We were both left in the room crying in utter disbelief.  I sobbed, “What are we going to do?” as Sam sat, cemented to her chair.  I didn’t care if he left.  I was tired of his relentless yelling and his double standards, but how could he leave Mom?  I let out a string of cuss words as I tried to regroup and figure out something.  Anything.  I couldn’t understand it.  I thought making a kindergartener and a third-grader responsible for a five-person apartment was ludicrous.  Adults have trouble keeping a house clean, and I had never known a kid to even keep their rooms as clean as their parents would like.  And he was the cause of most the messes in the house.  What made him so special?  Being older didn’t mean smarter.  I’d learned that from Dad telling stories about my older cousins doing stupid things I wouldn’t try with a gun to my head.  Why did he get to judge everyone else’s lives?  He was indestructible; strong as an ox, stubborn as a mule, all-knowing as God, and as unforgiving as Scrooge. So I scrolled through the options in my head and wondered at the fact that kids my age were more worried about what to play at recess, while I was choosing between keeping my parents together or not.
    My parents had separated and almost divorced six months earlier, and I attended regular meetings with other kids about divorce.  The most repeated phrase in our sessions was, “Your parents’ divorce is not your fault.”  In one half-hour, my dad had almost made me believe that the statement was a lie. 
    The counselor came back in after a while to two wet, red, devastated faces.  “You can stay in here as long as you want, but I need to work on my computer,” he said.  I knew he wanted us to talk to him, but I’d been taught that what happens at home stays at home.  Even though I’d be talking to him regularly for more than a year, we only talked about my parents almost divorce and regular schoolyard stuff.  I wasn’t ready to break the silence now.
    I sat and mulled over everything that had just happened, but when I couldn’t come up with a better solution than following orders I decided to go back to class.  I gave my sister a hug and told her I’d think of some way to fix this and I would see her right after school got out.  This wasn’t her fault, but he had made her think it was.  The weight of the world was on her small shoulders and I couldn’t stand it.  I had to think of something.
    I went back to class and sat quietly at my desk.  I didn’t hear the teacher until class was over and she asked me if everything was alright.  Nothing was alright, but if I told her then she’d ask questions.  I just wanted to get to recess so I could check on my sister and be alone.  All I could think about was how devastated Mom would be if Dad left, so I was determined to make him stay and never talk about the incident again.  If the house was clean, then he would stay and everything would go back to normal.  I wouldn’t be the cause of my mother’s broken heart.
    We cleaned better than we had ever cleaned before, and Dad didn’t even seem to notice.  I held my breath when he came home around 4am, turned on the TV and made some food in the kitchen.  He didn’t come in and yell at us.  He didn’t even remember that he’d put us through hell that day.
    When we got up in the morning, there was food on the counter, dirty dishes in the sink, Dad’s work clothes on the living room floor, and mud from his boots tracked through the house.  He made a mess we would be yelled at for after school.  He never said anything about leaving again, but life didn’t get any easier. 
    He started waking us when he got home from work if the house wasn’t clean and I stopped sleeping through the night.  I would wake up when he walked through the door and would listen for him coming to our room.  I could tell his mood by his footsteps and could figure out when we’d be woken up.  One night I was so frustrated with his constant beratement that I packed my backpack with clothes and some food and ran away after Mom went to sleep.  I walked from our house to the park six blocks away and set up a little camp for the night.  I stayed about two hours and couldn’t stand the thought of making Mom cry so I went back home.  Nobody ever knew I left, and I never said anything. 
    Not sleeping or laughing or even smiling began to take its toll on me and I started falling asleep in class and getting in fights at recess.  I became more and more quiet and wouldn’t play with anybody at recess.  I ate lunch by myself.  When kids would ask me to play with them or get close to my location I would try and ignore them or appear invisible, and if someone accidentally bumped into me I would turn toward them with my bunched up fist and prepare for their first move.  Everything was a reason to fight.  No place was safe.
I started seeing the counselor more often and would leave in the middle of class sometimes to go to his office.  I wouldn’t talk about anything.  Not even which kids I didn’t like because I didn’t like anybody.  Talking seemed like a waste of breath.  But I kept going there because I didn’t have to appear interested in something or avoid akward stares from everyone.  It was safe in his office. 
    I’ve been a fighter ever since, but I did eventually start to act like a regular kid.  I had a little brother, William, and he was getting the age that he was starting to have a personality.  He was fun.  Watching him grow and taking care of the family brought me out of my reclusive angry stage enough to appear normal.  William and Sam were my whole life, and I would do anything to keep them safe.  Self-sacrifice became a way of life for me because it was always easier to be screamed at than to hear Dad scream at my brother or sister, but as I grew up the fights covered more subjects. Nothing I did ever seemed to be right.  When we did a Father’s Day project in school and the teacher asked me to say something about my dad I said, “My dad’s a perfectionist. He’s great as long as he gets to be the supervisor.”  The house was my first and best example of this.  It was supposed to be cleaned perfectly by two elementary school age kids while he watched TV on the couch or slept. 
    One night Sam and I were supposed to go through all of our clothes to take what we didn’t wear to Goodwill.  We weren’t very smart about it and pulled out every clothing item we owned and put it in the middle of our room.  The pile was enormous.  We could climb up the pile onto the top bunk of our beds.
    We spent all evening sorting through the pile into smaller “keep” and “get rid of” piles.  Our room was ridiculous, and we had to finish before Dad got home and chewed our butts.  Sometime before midnight we fell asleep on top of the sorting pile.  I didn’t even wake up when Dad came home.  He saw our room light on under the door and came to yell at whichever of us was awake.  He opened the door and saw us sleeping in the biggest mess he’d ever seen and slammed the door as he left.  I heard the door slam and sprung to my feet.  My heart was beating so fast and I didn’t know what to do.  There was nothing we could do.  We were busted.
    I woke Sam up as I heard his footsteps come back to our room.  She was just starting to move around as Dad burst through the door and dumped a pitcher of ice cold water on each of us.  When we stood up he grabbed us painfully by the shoulder and pushed us into the livingroom.  Sam started to sit on the couch and I pulled her up because we were soaking wet.  I knew the yelling would be so much worse if we got the couch wet.
    He started yelling and I locked my knees and stared past his head as we stood there.  I heard the baby cry and Mom get out of bed while he continued to scream at the top of his lungs.  This would be our fault too.  Mom opened the bedroom door and squinted into the light of the room and said, “Mark, what’s going on?”  He proceeded to tell Mom what we’d done, but I don’t remember what he told her about everything being all wet.  I stopped listening.  I knew the gist of the whole speech by heart.  We were terrible children and we would never learn to do anything right unless our faces were rubbed in our mistakes like a dog that peed on the floor.
    Some battles were less violent than other, like school.  School was a battle without a winner.  I have never been a good student, simply due to the fact that I rarely completed my homework or scored well on tests. Homework was a huge fight that usually ended with Dad saying, “Your homework needs to be done at school.  We don’t have time for you to waste on it at home.”  This just made me wonder why it was called “homework.” 
    I learned early on that if I could keep school from coming home then I wouldn’t have to listen to any of his lectures.  He used to tell me—when he wasn’t yelling—that he had been a horrible student.  He was determined that his children would do better than he did.  He had an absurdly high IQ, so he told me, but always slacked in school and his grades suffered.  “School is the door to your future.  You can have all the intelligence in the world, but, if you don’t prove it in school, you’ve got nothing.”  Therefore my test scores and report cards always brought on an hour of yelling. 
    I was interested in learning, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to understand everything I was being taught and I didn’t have time to work on things outside of class.  I was thinking about not wanting to be home when I was at school, and thinking about wanting to be at school when I was home.  However, teachers enjoyed me in their classes and told my parents, but my father was so perplexed with my regular grades of Cs and Ds that he had to wonder at their pleasure in my presence.  Truth be told, I enjoyed learning for learning-sake and it showed in my attitude.  I could delve into any subject, and always appeal to the good nature of any teacher to earn a passing grade. 
    By the time I reached high school I had no intention of going to college.  My grades didn’t seem to be worth the effort and Dad told me so.  One of the counselors tried to encourage me to think about college, but I’d given up on that idea.  I saw her almost every day through junior high and high school, and confided some of my darkest secrets to her.  Through talking about Dad, I started to see that his criticism was completely ridiculous, but his words still cut like a knife.  She never condemned my dad, but always let me talk through everything.  She did tell me several times that I was being emotionally abused by my father, and always asked me what I wanted to do about it.  There was nothing she could do without my consent because there was no legal evidence of anything being wrong.  We would always discuss my options of whether to survive until graduation or to go to a children’s home.  I always chose to stay.  I couldn’t leave my brother and sister to deal with our Dad on their own.  Sam and William were my family and my responsibility.  I refused to leave them, and I wasn’t sure if I could take them with me.
    One day, after school, Sam and I were washing dishes and Dad came home.  He stomped into the kitchen and started yelling at us for not being done yet.  Then he pulled Sam into the next room and yelled at her for not having the laundry done, and I heard him slap her across the face.  That was the last straw.  I couldn’t take it anymore.  I took the kitchen trash outside when he went to the other room and got on my bike and made a break for it.  I knew where my counselor’s house was because I’d babysat for her several times, and that’s where I headed.  I wanted all of this crap to stop.  I couldn’t handle hearing him hit her.  I was so mad as I rode that I almost got lost, but made it to the church by the counselor’s house just as Dad drove around the corner.  He was a custodian at that church and was headed to work.  He didn’t know where I was going, and he didn’t even have any idea that I’d left.
    I really wasn’t expecting him to find me, so I rode as hard as I could to get to her house before he got to me.  She was out in her yard with her son when I rode up and dumped my bike.  I ran to her and said, “I need help,” as he jumped out of his truck and stalked toward us.  He started yelling and wouldn’t let anybody talk.  He reached for me, but she stepped in between us before he could grab me.  All I could hear while they were arguing was the pounding in my own ears as my heart raced, but he stalked back to his truck and sped off.  When he was gone she asked me what was happening.  I couldn't stop apologizing for him making a scene, but I finally told her what had happened.  We went inside and she called Social Services.  She related what I had told her and the scene he had made on her front lawn and listened for a while.  When she got off the phone she told me that since they had received numerous calls about Dad before that they would have to investigate the situation before any action could be taken.
      I was lost.  I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t do anything about what had just happened, but I was determined to do whatever I had to do to stay with my brother and sister.  Even if it meant my staying at home and doing nothing.  She told me that I could stay as long as I needed to regroup, but there was nothing she could do until later.  I stayed for a little while and cried at her kitchen table.  I didn’t know what else to do.
    I rode back home terrified and told Sam what had happened.  We both decided to clean everything the best we could to try and relieve his temper.  It was a lost effort and we knew it, but at least we busied ourselves.  We didn’t see him for the rest of the day.  He was so mad at me he couldn’t come home until after we’d gone to bed.  I heard him come home and broke into a cold sweat as I lay in my bed and tried not to breathe.  I was so thankful when he went to bed, but the next day he couldn’t even look at me.
    A few days later the social worker came to the house and questioned us.  She talked to Mom and Dad while we were in the other room and asked them a lot of questions.  Dad was such a smooth talker, I heard him tell her that they just were trying to teach us responsibility and that making children do chores was no crime.  Then we were brought out and Mom and Dad had to go to the next room, but I knew they were listening through the door just like we had been.  The social worker asked us all kinds of questions, but I lied.  I couldn’t tell her anything with Mom and Dad in the house.  If there was some chance that they couldn’t or wouldn’t take us away, I couldn’t risk making Dad more mad.  I wanted to tell her everything, but I wasn’t about to commit emotional suicide.  I knew we’d rather be dead that have Dad hear what I wanted to say.  I felt trapped by the very person who was supposed to be helping us.
    The repercussions of having a social worker in the house were long and unpleasant.  However, after a long, loud lecture that I didn’t listen to, my dad backed off a little.  A clean house, good grades, and obedient children were still at the top of his wish list but a new priority took the bulk of his energy.  Dad had been working as a custodian for many years and started his own business.  He had big plans, but it was slow at first.  He started with two clients and kept work steady for a while.  He worked about four hours a day, but, luckily for us, they were the four hours directly after we got home from school.  He had enough time to give us our orders and drive off so we could work in peace for several hours.  The house was supposed to be clean and supper on the table by the time Mom got home from work, and I was supposed to make sure there was dinner for him after work.  But, a little later, he picked up two more clients and his work more than doubled.  He changed his whole schedule and Sam and I were instant employees.  The new building couldn’t be cleaned until after 10pm so his work day started at 8 or 9pm and ended around 5 or 6am when he worked alone.  Sam and I were required to get ready for work after dinner was eaten and chores finished around 8pm.  Most nights we would work until 2am and go to school the next morning.  Not sleeping wasn’t new to us, but we didn’t like the work any more than we liked to clean our own house.
    “This is a family business and the whole family has to keep it running,” was his response to why we had to work in the business.  I hated that business and took every opportunity to make my opinion known, so I would shoot back, “If you had a real job we wouldn’t have to work.”  This arrogant statement would start a yelling match sometimes, but mostly I received a silent glare that shocked me into silence.  I was fighting on the losing side, but I didn’t think it fair that no one should be fighting for us.
    When I graduated from high school, I was very torn.  I was ready to be on my own and try freedom, but I still didn’t want to leave Sam and William alone.  I stayed at home and started a job, but I still worked for Dad every night until I couldn’t hand the ridiculous demands.  I found an apartment with one of my coworkers at the restaurant I worked at and rationalized that I could provide a safe house if my brother and sister ever needed it.
    Mom and Dad were shocked that I was moving and Dad told me to stay home and save some money.  It was out the question.  I had enough money to pay my deposit, a steady job at a restaurant, and I couldn’t spend another minute in that house.
    The next day I packed everything and moved.  Dad had left early in the morning and didn’t come home all day.  Mom came home from work as I was putting the last load in my car.  She was so upset that she couldn’t get out of her car.  All she could do was sit and cry.  I said good-bye to her and gave her a quick stiff hug before I got in my car and cussed all the way to my new apartment.  I was mad that they were mad about me getting a life. 
    Dad and I wouldn’t talk to each other for 3 months while we both nursed our wounds.  I was positive that he was mad because he couldn’t control me anymore and that he’d lost free labor.  He determined that I was betraying him for all of the years of raising and caring for me.  It would take almost seven years to work out that argument.