Why Fathers Day’s a Bust for Me
My father was Robert Mitchum handsome.
My father was a provider.
My father would (today) be considered a child abuser.
Until I was 8 we lived in an apartment over my father’s barbershop. The kitchen was on the first floor with a porch that open out into a backyard. The living room, bath, and two bedrooms were upstairs.
The small, back bedroom was mine. My parents (and my baby sister) had the large front bedroom. If I wanted to get to my parents bedroom. I had to walk across the open stairway that lead to the downstairs door that opened up to the side of the building. Then I had to walk across the living room. I felt like I was alone.
Sometime before I was 8 I started to have night terrors, nightmares. I would think there were monsters and ghosts with me in my tiny bedroom, looking at me through the one small window, hiding under my bed. Frightened, I would call out for my father.
He would come with his leather belt and whip me, yelling that if I didn’t get back to sleep, he would beat me harder.
When I was 6, I would walk to the elementary school several blocks away. I never wanted to go. I hated school. If my sister could stay home with my mother, why couldn’t I? Several times my father would “switch” me up Main Street (where the barber shop was) in order to get me walking to school. In the 1950s little girls wore dresses and of course, the switching was on bare legs with the townspeople on Main Street watching.
When we moved into a small house, he made a cat o’ nine tails. His had a handle on a wooden block to which he attached long, narrow leather straps. It made it easier for him to whip the bare legs of both his daughters.
And there was the ongoing berating because of my weight. There’s no wonder I‘m clinically depressed.
As a mother I tried consciously to break the cycle of abuse. I did smacked my daughter several times on her butt when she was smaller (and well-padded with diapers). I never berated her. I never teased her and I never beat her.
So I celebrate Father’s Day by trying to remember the “good times.” There aren’t many.
It’s a different holiday for everyone.
