May 27, 2022
Mom had killed herself the night before, my 17th birthday. I was stood leaning against the counter where the dishwasher was. My father was stood glaring at me from few feet away, stood in front of the kitchen sink. My brother was stood in the doorway that was the vestibule to the back door and led to the stairs to the basement fear writ large in his eyes and body language. I was stood facing my father, matching every angry eye blink and shift of balance. I was not afraid of him in that moment, though I probably should have been because he was still a powerful strong man. Mom was in hospital where a machine was breathing for her uselessly as she was brain-dead and would not be drawing breath on her own ever again. Dad was speaking in that cold, quiet, deadly furious way that told you in no uncertain terms to run for the hills and keep running for your life after you reached the hills. I had no fear of him. I mean what was he going to do, beat the snot out of me while his wife was laying dead in a hospital bed? I found the notion almost funny, and was the only thing that kept me from going at him, because I was sure I could now handle him easily.
He was going on about how I had not been to see mom since I had found out about her death the night before. He was right, I had not. I did not care, and cared even less when dad told them to pull the plug the next day. I was not there for that either. While he had been blathering on about my lack of love and respect for my mother, I interrupted him by asking if he remembered that day at the cottage where my brother got tangled in fishing line and got a fish hook stuck through the palm of his hand. His face turned purple from being interrupted, and I was now on the balls of my feet waiting for him to strike. He somehow contained himself, and his eyes were clearly asking “what the fuck does that have to do with anything”? I further asked of him, hardly able to control myself at this point the rage was rolling through me so powerfully, if 1 remembered, or even knew what she had done to me after he had stormed out of the cottage when they had arrived home? His only answer was a shake of his head, no. I pursued my questions further, did he know, or at least have an idea of what she was going to do to me? To this he answered yes, and I asked, if so, why the fuck did you let her do it? His head and shoulders dropped and the threat of awful violence was over, and said only “I didn’t know how to deal with her”.
I do not know what he saw in my face, but he very quickly took three paces away from me and the arms length apart where we had been. Still looking him square in the eye, I said to him that since he had gone into recovery, and if he thought that he was the only one in this family who had issues, he was blind and stupid beyond measure. His head dropped to his chest, and he stumbled on nothing as he stumbled away, saying only that “kids are resilient”. My brother now looked terrified, and like he might have shit himself, retreated to the basement where for the last few years he had hid while playing guitar and eating spaghetti. I kid you not, that was his life. I continued to stand there in the kitchen typically alone, as I struggled to process the events of the last 24 hours.
The event in question took place when I was seven years old. I had been beaten unconscious by my mother, she had also done severe damage to my testes. That damage was only repaired five years later because my right testicle was swollen to the size of an average apple, and it was interfering with my ability to walk. From the morning after the beating my mother had treated my injuries like they were not there. I had needed her to wash the blood out of my hair, I could not do it because I could not lift my legs up far enough to get into the bath tub, nor could I kneel in front of the sill of the tub because I could not get down on my knees. Further, I was not tall enough to do it in the bathroom sink because I could not straighten up from being bent over double. She did it in the bathroom sink where she forced me to stand upright and mercilessly bashed my head into the water spout, and roughly washed the area around the orange-sized lump on my skull from where she had knocked me unconscious with her fucking oar. And every time I cried from the agony from my testes or the orange, she said,”Shut up, stop whining, I don’t care”. Yup sure dad, I am supposed to love and respect this individual, the lousy cunt.
The beatings continued with that type of intensity until I was ten, that is when I found where she hid the oar, and I dropped it down the sewer grate in front of the house while she watched and I called her every nasty name that a ten year old knows while I did it. Still the beatings continued with her normal weapon, a red stick about 18 inches long by 2 inches thick by 2 inches wide, the oar had been for what she thought were “special” occasions. The red stick was the bane of mine, and my brother’s existence until one afternoon shortly before my surgery to repair my testicles. I came home from school to find my brother and mother locked into a physical struggle for the possession of the red stick, he was losing that struggle, and I leapt in to help. With some difficulty I managed to wrench the thing from my mother’s surprisingly strong grip and I raced out to the garage and jumped on my bike and rode like the wind to a different neighbourhood and dropped that fucking stick into someone elses sewer grate, where she would never find the thing.
I was elated that at last we had evened the playing field. I was also keenly aware that the cunt would replace her weapon, and she did. Some months after my surgery, I found that she had replaced her stick. We were alone at home, and I took it from it’s place in the top cupboard over the fridge. With it in hand, I walked into the living room where she was watching her 100 Huntley Street, a Christian Evangelical bullshit show. And in the scariest moment of my young life, I said to her while switching the TV off, “If you ever try to hit us with this ever again, I will wait until you are asleep, and I will ambush you with this thing, and I will do to you worse than what you did to me at that fucking cottage”
Typical of the cunt, instead of looking scared, or like she respected my words, her face just closed up into icy nothingness, the same look she wore while at my surgeons office while he was trying to determine how the injury occurred, and why it was left untreated for so very long, five years plus a few months. Sorry Doc, but the cunt was not going to raise her hand and say, yep, I did it to him because I could.
That was the thing of it, she did it because she could. I was seven years old when this occurred, my brother had been seriously injured, and they had panicked and had raced off to the local hospital. They had abandoned me and left me on my own for more than sixteen hours, they had made no effort to contact anyone at the resort’s administration and ask them to keep an eye on me. By the time that they had arrived back at the resort, it was after two in the morning, I was exhausted and very cold. Upon their arrival no effort was made by either of them to ascertain my condition, and certainly no apologies were offered. Ever. When they had arrived home, my mother’s countenance had been icy, and it was abundantly clear that mom and dad were very upset with each other. That scared me because historically speaking, every time that they had ever had even a spat, I became mom’s whipping boy. Seeing mom’s face now, I knew that this was going to be much worse than normal. With terror clutching my heart, I got into my jammies and climbed into bed, grateful at least to begin to get warm. My mother had then entered my bedroom, and had proceeded to beat me unconscious.
She did it because she could. She had been brought up in a loving supportive environment. Her father had been strict, but far from violent, and had never hit his daughters with anything except his hand on their backsides, as a regular spanking. And only as needed, as opposed to the routine beatings my brother and I received from her. My brother and I had expected to die by dad’s hand after we took her sticks away, his reaction surprised me. I overheard him tell my mother and I quote, “Norma, you cannot continue to beat them. You have to expect them to fight back, hard”. We did fight back hard, and she had made a mortal enemy of me. She had been grousing about my stealing her stick and threatening her. I had taken the thing and burned it down to a twig, and had pissed on it to put it out. I had then returned it with a note saying something to the effect of, here’s your stick, have fun with it. I had wanted to give her the stick back shaped like a dildo, with a note saying here’s your stick, go fuck yourself. But I did not know how to shape the wood.
She did it because she could. From about the age of three, I had begun to wonder why things between mom and I were always so difficult. I, of course, was too young to have any kind of vocabulary for such thoughts, but I knew she treated me very differently than she did my brother. By the time that I had threatened her, at twelve years old, the elephant was apparent in the room, and that terrifying question was thought, but unspoken in the back of my mind, had she ever wanted me? That question would remain unanswered for another four years, until three months before her suicide. Then one afternoon, on a beautiful early June day, while dad was in rehab, mom and I were at each other’s throat and the truth came out. That is when I discovered, at least according to her, my thoughts, needs, desires, opinions had, and never would, matter to her because she had never wanted me. This uncomfortable truth had enabled her to commit atrocious acts of emotional, physical, spiritual violence against me.
For the next 12-13 years, I fought this devastating blow to my psyche the best I could. Even though I had known this intellectually for my entire life, there was really no way that anyone is going to accept it and say, well, that’s okay then. The utter rejection of my needs, desires, thoughts, and opinions were the primary reasons that I was unable to communicate them to the Nanny, I will never forgive that cunt, my mother for working so fruitlessly hard to turn me into the non-person she needed me to be, fuck you cunt!
Serving the Grail 