I just turned 31 last month and have spent the better part of my 20's and now 30's trying to move on from my childhood. Who hasn't, right? But, not that I'm trying to win any contests here, mine was rather rotten. So rotten, in fact, that I really didn't want to have children because I was so afraid of repeating the mistakes made by those who raised me. It wasn't until my father had been dead for about 3 years that I was even willing to reexamine my "no children, thanks" rule. His death was kind of a wake-up call for me. In a way, his choice to die opened my eyes to the fact that he also had chosen to live the way that he had. Sure, things happened in his past to shape the adult that he had become, but at the same time, he chose not to resist that path either. He chose to let his life be determined for him by outside influences. (I'm not saying that he gave up at an early age. I believe that there were times when he really did try to fight the path that he was on, but ultimately he gave up.) Anyhow, my point here is that I realized after he died that I could choose my own path as well. That I didn't have to choose the one that I was traveling down because "life" had put me on it- I could choose another, more difficult yet infinitely happier path. So I did.
It's amazing how much healing I did after my father's death. While you may not have been able to tell from the outside, I was a very angry person. I hid it well with my perfectly coifed hair and make-up and clothes. Yet behind the costume was a truly miserable, awkward, angry, incomplete person. The only confidence that I had came from the mask that I was wearing, but I knew that it was a mask so there really was no confidence at all.
When I was growing up I learned how to build walls around myself and, as I got older, those walls got higher. In junior high I moved in with my father and his new wife for reasons that I won't go into here. Needless to say, the whole point was for a better life, which turned out to be the worst decision that I ever made. My father was an unemotional void in so many ways. I try to remember him today as a kind, caring and brilliant man (which he was) but truthfully, the older he got the rarer those moments were. For the most part he was just empty and did nothing more than go to work, come home and occupy space. He checked out of life well before he actually died. Living with him was like living with the dead in many ways.
His emotional absence meant that my stepmom had to do the majority of the child raising. This woman was never a candidate for mother of the year, but when my father ultimately chose her as his bride it was because he truly believed that she would make a good mother to his kids. He was old fashioned in that way. And he was fooled by her. If I could select only one word to describe her it would be manipulative. She reeled in my father hook, line and sinker. She showed him what he wanted to see in exchange for a life of comfort. He met her in a diner- she was the waitress, he the customer. He was a very successful engineer, she a washed up has been. He was her ladder to more. He was an idiot. (I'm not saying that my father didn't get anything out of this relationship. He did. He was able to hand over his parenting responsibilities to someone else so that he could resume his life of retreating inside himself. It worked out well for the both of them at first.)
At first. That's the problem with using other people, which ultimately they both were. Someone is bound to get hurt and usually that someone is the innocent by standard. In this case, it was my brother and myself. While my stepmom got the nice house and the new sports car and the endless supply of clothes and jewelry, my brother and I got systematically cut out of my father's lives. We still lived in the same house with him but slowly my stepmother began to cut off our contact with our father. It began in small ways: "Don't bombard your father with questions when he first gets home from work! He's tired and had a tough day. Give him some space!" "Don't talk to your father during dinner! He needs to relax, not be bothered by you two." It just went on from there until the point when we had so many limitations to his attention that there was hardly EVER a time when it was acceptable to talk to him. And if we did we were punished in some way, shape or form by our stepmom for it. I'm sure that my father saw what was happening but he might have just attributed our "pulling away" as normal teenage behavior. I don't know. But either way, he rarely tried to engage us in conversation. And when he did I always had to weigh whether the consequences that I knew would be doled out by my stepmother were worth the joy of spending time with my father. Over time it seemed as if they just weren't. Not because I didn't love my father but more because I was so afraid of my stepmother.
My stepmother's brand of punishment wasn't traceable with bruises or broken bones. It was completely psychological and even more effective than any blow in my opinion. I think that she realized that I was a timid kid and that I was the easier of my brother and I to manipulate. She even threw that it my face quite often. Once, we were screaming at each other for something and I wanted so badly to call her a bitch but I just couldn't say it to her face. For some stupid reason I still was fighting with boundaries even though she had long eliminated any "rules of war" from her repertoire. She could tell that I was holding back and spit at me, "You know you want to call me a bitch. Just do it. At least your brother has balls enough to tell me how he really feels."
Why is this all coming up today? Why am I bombarded with these painful memories, memories that I thought were tucked safely behind me? I've been dealing with settling my father's estate for quite some time now and today I received a form in the mail that I need to sign. As I was looking it over I saw my stepmother's signature at the bottom of the page and all of the sudden it came flooding back.
The truth is that I have put a lot of the memories behind my, but what I didn't realize is that I also have suppressed a lot of memories. I've heard of these types of emotional triggers effecting people before, but seeing her writing was like a physical blow to the head. It nearly took my breath away.
Over time my stepmom had managed it so that the communication between my father and myself was non-existent. I went through her for just about everything and hardly ever interacted with my father. Which meant that, aside from being at school, I had only my brother and my stepmother in my day-to-day life. Understandably, my brother and I were very close, clinging to each other like floatation devices just to keep our heads above water. But my stepmom wouldn't even tolerate that relationship for too long and often played my brother and I against each other in, yet another bid to control us. Most of the time it didn't work, but the pressure in our house was so high that even my brother and I would succumb to her marionette-like string pulling. It was no way to live, but being children we had no choice.
I don't know when it actually began, but at some point my stepmom stopped talking to me for long periods of time as a form of punishment. This was well after she had already put a stop to my relationship with my father and, at this point, she had begun making it more difficult for my brother and to interact with each other. What she was doing was systematically eliminating all contact from my life. If my mother would call to speak with me she would hang up on her and not tell me about the phone call. I had no phone of my own and even when I did get phone calls they had to be before 8pm and could last no longer than 10 minutes each. Even if I was talking to my mother. She had also found petty reasons to ground me for months at a time so that I couldn't spend time with friends after school. For most of my high school years I was not allowed to date, hang out with friends and I never had friends over at the house. To this day I know that this is the reason why I have such a difficult time forging friendships. But that's a whole other issue.
During these long periods of time when my stepmom wasn't talking to me she would communicate with me through post-it notes. They were terse messages that didn't say much of anything except "Do this...", but the words that she used (and the words that she didn't) and the way that she angrily fashioned her letters were enough for me to get the point: I wasn't worth the very breath that she would have to expend to speak out loud to me. Nor was I worth niceties or pleasantries. I wasn't even worth the nicer (store bought) post it notes that she would use to leave messages for my father. Instead, I got the bright orange post-its that she had pilfered from her old job which had the owner's face screen printed on them.
It's funny how I had forgotten about her writing, and I guess that it isn't her writing that is bothering me so much as the isolation that it represents. I was so lonely as a teenager. I had very few friends and no love or affection or attention at home. I left the day that I graduated from high school because I couldn't take another moment living in that pressure cooker. That mausoleum. Ironically, my father had a small clock business on the side and had taken to collecting and hanging up clocks all over our house. We must have had a hundred clocks and they filled every single available space he could find. Many of these clocks had chimes and would ring every 15 minutes with longer chimes going off each hour. Every hour.
I don't know if my father began collecting clocks because he was fascinated with time or if he became obsessed with time after the fact. But at some point it became clear that we were all just marking off time until something gave. For me, the time was a marker of how long I could go without upsetting my stepmother. Then it became a marker of how much time I had until I could escape the mausoleum. Every 15 minutes I could mark another notch on the figurative wall that put me closer and closer to a different life. I think that my father was doing the same thing. I imagine that he looked at the clocks, not as a beautiful addition to his home, but as a way to control time. He could take them apart, recalibrate them and become "father time" in one fail swoop. In the end, he chose to stop the clocks himself. I chose to leave them behind.
Today, with the letter that I got in the mail, I'm one step closer to finalizing my father's estate and putting my stepmom behind me. Yet, at the same time I'm dangerously closer to those memories and the past than I have been in a long time. I want this to be over and I want to move on. I don't care about any monetary gain that may result- more than anything I want closure. She can have the clocks.
