Pity Party

Growing up, my father used to beat me. As I got older, I recognized the injustice of this and started to talk back. Things obviously escalated from there. One time, he threw a knife at me. Another time, he had his fingers around my esophagus to choke me. After that night, I slept with a knife under my bed.

When I was 12, my dad was working the evening/night shift and my mom asked if I wanted to go to dinner with her. On the way to the restaurant, we spoke about her work; her interpersonal problems with her colleagues. I gave her advice, and it must have been good advice because our dinners started happening more frequently with the same role of my mom venting, and me offering advice.

One night, she told me that my father was a paranoid schizophrenic. Our family physician referred him to a psychiatrist and diagnosed him with this. Of course, he was told the diagnosis but didn’t believe her and refused medication. My mother had been slipping this into his coffee every morning but worried he would find out. She also told me that he had accused her some years ago of having an affair and did not believe that I was his daughter. This was probably why he felt it was okay to beat me. Needless to say, our dinners went on for a few years. Years went on. We moved homes every 1-3 years because my dad would find something wrong. He installed video cameras outside of our home. We stopped slipping medication into his coffee as we were afraid he’d find out and didn’t want to find out what he would do if he did.

When I was 19, my parents decided to divorce. My dad was going to move back to his home country. In the months leading up to his departure, my stentorian father became a soft and gentle man. He told me that he loved me. That I was “daddy’s heart.” He also told me to never trust anyone. It was so much easier to hate him than love him.

My mother has always had cognition issues. I remember when I was 15, I asked my aunt if she was “off”, and my aunt told me that she had always been this way. She’s recently been diagnosed with onset dementia. This has brought on its own set of challenges.

There’s so much more I want to share but I don’t want to write an entire novel right now. All I want to say right now is I am so fed up with life at the moment. I’m 30 now and I’m angry. And weepy. I resent my mother for unloading her burdens to me when I was only a kid. I don’t hate my father for a mental illness that he isn’t responsible for. I feel sorry for him. I can only imagine how hard life for him is. I think about the people around me and the “normal” childhoods they’ve had. I think about how unfair it is.