myfatherandI

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16-JAN-2002 16:38: My Father and I

This is a story . . .

According to my mother I was the product of my father's rape. In spite of this she says I smiled when I was born.

"It's just gas, dear," said the nurse.

But my mother had given birth to three children and she knew a smile when she saw one. She says she knew then I'd never give her much cause to worry. And I didn't. Not really.

I don't know where my father was when I was born. He might have been away at the base camp or perhaps he'd checked himself into the hospital again. He did that from time to time. My mother never knew when he'd leave or when he'd return. His presence in our lives, like his fits of violent behavior, was erratic and unpredictable. When he was home her life was hell. When he was gone, she happily busied herself mothering her children and caring for her home.

Like the third daughter in every fairy tale, I was the fortunate one. I don't remember that life at all. My eldest sister does though. She remembers crouching under the kitchen table as our father laid his boots and obscenities into our mother who lay, curled into a ball on the floor. And my sister Colleen must have remembered things too, but not me. I was only two months old when she left. Three dress ties fashioned into miniature hangman's nooses and placed carefully around each of her sleeping daughters' necks prompted her frantic, middle-of-the-night departure.

She ran first to the church, but the doors were locked tight. From that moment forward, she never again willingly entered a Catholic church. The comfort of the church denied her, she ran to her family. They'd surely known, but why they never did anything about it, I don't know. Why she never fought back, I don't know either. I guess she feared he'd kill us if she did.

She stayed with her family for a short time and then found a low-rental flat. We were poor then, desperately poor. At first, my sisters and I slept on pillow cases stuffed with newspapers, I don't know what my mother slept on. We lived on social assistance but it wasn't enough. In those first few months my mother lost 40 pounds, there simply wasn't enough food to go around. She couldn't live in that kind of desperation so she found a job as a telephone operator and thereafter left her three young daughters to the care of babysitters -- some of them good and some of them very, very, very bad. All three of us received our sexual introductions through those babysitters but for some reason, we never told our mother of those events. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was enough to know that she'd have protected us if she had known. Maybe we were trying to protect her.

Meanwhile, even though she left and then divorced our father, he still managed to inflict terror over her. She moved numerous times in those early days to avoid him but he would always find her. He'd never confront her. He'd just leave a sign that he'd been there: his shoes appearing on the front steps in the morning, his body vanished. She'd move again and he'd find her once more, oftentimes tipped off by her own family members who thought that a father should be able to see his children. (It's mind boggling, don't you think?)

And then, my father came along -- or rather, the man I consider my father.

He was sixteen years older than my mother. Over six feet tall with shoulders like a buffalo, he had once played professional football. He was a veritable mountain of a man. I think it was Colleen who fell in love with him first. By then she'd been diagnosed with some form of autism. If anyone other than our grandmother came to the house she'd quickly retire to a closet where she'd whimper to herself until they left. She didn't speak. She didn't laugh. She didn't cry. But the day that my father walked into our home for the first time, Colleen crawled into his lap. I suspect that was when my mother, not to mention my grandmother, fell in love with him.

Of the three of us, Colleen manifested the damage of her early childhood the most. My mother couldn't take her out of the house, she'd leap from a moving vehicle. At home, she kept to herself. She'd rock: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. She wouldn't play. But my dad thought that was nonsense. "Children have to play!" he declared. So he'd take Colleen to the park, place her tenderly on the swing and then lie on the ground beneath, her tiny feet on his chest. He'd swing her gently, gently, gently: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. When we drove in the car, the expected ritual was that Colleen would sit on his lap. She never jumped out when he held her. Colleen began to heal. She began to play, to talk, to laugh. Within a span of a very short time she was just like every other child. It's amazing what love can do.

As for my biological father, he stopped coming around once my adoptive father was on the scene. Like most bullies, he was easily intimidated. A few years later he signed adoption papers and we three girls were legally adopted by my father.

It's a matter of odd coincidence that both my biological father and adoptive father were born sixteen years apart in the same hospital. It's a further matter of coincidence that they were placed for adoption through the same ward. But it's not coincidental at all that my father was an alcoholic, not the vicious kind though. He was the gentle, jovial kind. He played with us. He'd wake us at midnight just to look at the stars or present us with a gift of chocolate. He never struck his children. We adored him. Trailing his godlike presence we became quail children, our heads bobbing as we followed wherever he led.

In our early years he once became deathly ill with cirrhosis of the liver. The doctors gave him only a few months to live and amazingly, my father's liver regenerated. After 25 years of exceptionally heavy drinking, he quit cold. There's that power of love thing for you again.

We were still poor then, mostly because our father couldn't hold down a job for very long. Fortunately, he was an accomplished thief. He'd take us into the grocery store and pick up some day-old bread -- you could buy it by the box in those days. Then, as his brood of children charmed the people around him, he'd lift the top loaves, squish down the bottom ones, and sandwich our daily necessities in between. They never caught him and we always ate well. You can't buy day-old bread in boxes anymore. Ha! It's probably my father's fault.

Thus began the good years of my childhood.

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