My Father

I am not going to mention his name here, partly to protect his memory and also to protect the feelings of any family members who might stumble across my blog.  His surname is not the same as mine since I legally changed my name in 1995 as indicated in an earlier post.  This I believe was the point at which he disowned me.  We did not discontinue contact and I still thought of him as my father.  To me it wasn't a personal strike against him that I changed my name but a desire to secure an identity that did not involve my biological family.  Rather than saying "I disown you" I was stating "I own myself."
     On the whole I think that he always hated me, our truce in the eighties and nineties notwithstanding.  When I was a child he began to sexually molest me I think after it became clear to my teachers at school that I was a gifted child with an above average IQ.  My father did not like intelligent or educated people.  He didn't trust them and that one of his sons would turn into such for him was an unforgiveable affront.
     My father had a hard life.  His family was poor and growing up during the Great Depression and the Second World War he had to leave school very early in order to work.  He did well as a working  man and was always able to provide well for his family.
     He always favoured my brother, older than me by three years.  My only sibling was the child he wanted and he never disguised his pride in my brother.  As well as periodically abusing me sexually my father, an alcoholic, would taunt me with cruel names such as Elephant Belly (I was overweight) and Super Crab, which he would spare for when his name calling reduced me to tears.
     The divorce nearly destroyed him.  Twice he attempted suicide with pills and liquor.  When I was thirteen I visited him in hospital.  He was conscious, lying in bed and crying.  As he recovered, with pressure from my mother, he tried to befriend me.  He soon gave up then disappeared from my life for three years, except Christmas and one unfortunate visit when I visited him and he was drunk.  I was fifteen at the time.  Lying on the couch, poached with whisky and beer he was semi conscious and asked me to kiss him on the forehead before I left.  Remembering when he tried to slow dance with me one night at home when Mom was out working and I pushed him back, calling him a "homo" (he let me go but ordered me to never call him that again) as well as his unwarranted touching when I was younger, I shrank away and he left me alone.  It was a Sunday afternoon in November and I took the bus to English Bay where I stood on the beach near the water's edge trying to compose my emotions.
     At seventeen, Mom farmed me to my father and his girlfriend so she could move to another town with her new boyfriend.  I lasted there four months, narrowly avoided a beating by escaping barefoot and hitch hiking from Richmond into Vancouver where friends sheltered me for the night.  I was kicked out and went to stay with my mother and her new boyfriend, a violent alcoholic with a criminal background (he was serving a sentence at the time in a minimum facility) and I twice had to bring in police to rescue my mother from getting the shit beat out of her. 
     When I finished high school that year I had no option but to leave.  Mom sold the family home a year and a half before, no relatives would take me in so I stayed with friends, found a job in a factory and my own apartment.  My father offered the occasional guilt offering.
     Very slowly, under pressure from my mother, my father and I tried to develop a friendship from the late seventies (when I was in my early twenties) till her death from cancer at the age of sixty in 1991.  He was sobre then and for a while we actually liked each other, but as friends.
     I still wanted my father.  He did not want a son.
     He was kind enough to shelter me part time while I was homeless and cruel enough to emotionally abuse me.  When I finally got away and found affordable housing I saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed me with post traumatic stress disorder, brought on by my father's sexual and emotional abuse.
     He is dead now, my father.  I lost contact with him in 2001, then the next year I entered therapy and couldn't see him.  Two years later, while still in therapy I tried to contact him but without success.  No one in the family contacted me and I didn't know where any of them were.  To them I was and remain dead.
     In 2012, in February, an aunt, a sister of my mother's phoned me.  Lanice my step cousin, whom I recently memorialized here following her death last month from cancer had given her my phone number.  The conversation was brief.  Among other things she told me my father died from Alzheimer's three years earlier.  This past April 24 was the fifth anniversary of his death.  I have not spoken since to my aunt, who is pushing ninety and may no longer be alive for all I know.
     I believe that my father, favouring my older brother, was unconsciously driven by a primal and demonic force to undermine and destroy me so that my sibling would retain pre-eminence and prosper.  My brother followed suit by frequently beating me savagely then ultimately rejecting and abandoning me.  They helped make me ill with post traumatic stress disorder and this in many ways  disabled and hobbled me.  They did not break my spirit.
     I am well and recovered now.  I love them both and I have forgiven them and moved on.  My father I may meet again in the after life and perhaps my brother as well.  Gladly, and with peace, love and joy in my heart I walk alone, but full of the love of God and surrounded by a company of angels and saints.  I have friends.
     More than anything, I have peace.