Oh, father

“You know your father wanted me to have an abortion, but I wouldn’t do it. I wanted you,” my mother said. When she said it, I cannot tell you. She said it so often for so long.

No child should even know that it’s possible for a mother to kill you in the womb, but I did. I always knew how tenuous my existence was.

Mother was pregnant with me at 18 by a 26-year-old grad student bartender. He left her before I was born and I have never met him. In college in my 20s there was a brief period of phone and mail contact with him that ended badly.

As a child it was hard to figure out how to feel about these statements from mother. Part of me believed it was proof that she loved me, but another part that I didn’t acknowledge much heard an implied threat.

‘It’s funny that way. You can get used to the tears and the pain. What a child will believe—you never loved me’

What would life have been like if my father had not run away? I will never know.

The “father” my mother brought into my life when I was four years old turned out to be a wife beater, a child beater, an incestuous pedophile, and a would-be murderer. The five or so years he lived with us (he was the father of my younger brother and sister) were the most acutely dangerous. He was capable of killing, and he tried to murder my mother while we three children watched on that last night before mother finally made him go away.

You can’t hurt me now. I got away from you; I never thought I would.

You can’t make me cry. You once had the power—I never felt so good about myself.

Though we children were obviously badly damaged by this, readers know that I spend less time writing about him and his violence than I do my mother’s. There are a few reasons for this. Primarily, it’s because I never loved him, and he never loved me. While I was terrified of him, I experienced no emotional betrayal. This is why he does not haunt me, but my mother does.

Also, I think I’ve “processed” that time (whatever that means) as much as I’m going to. Like many teenagers, I retreated into music, making relationships in my head with singing stars. I saw or projected myself into their work, and imagined in my Walk-Man-clad head that they knew me and understood what happened to me.

When I won a copy of Suzanne Vega’s album Solitude Standing on a radio contest, I wrote my first fan letter. The single Luka was on the charts, and I wrote Suzanne and told her it meant a lot to know that a grown-up understood what it was like to be a kid like me. She sent me back a kind handwritten postcard thanking me for my letter.

Around age 16, I became obsessed with Madonna in that way that certain gay men become obsessed. As readers know, she still lives heavily in my mind as I reframe my mental relationship with the mythic figures who have been such a large part of my thoughts and emotions.

Her 1989 album Like a Prayer is probably the record I will remember as the most emotionally important. It was joyful and exuberant, honest, and tragic all at once. There’s something so alluring about beautiful tragedy.

Seems like yesterday. I lay down next to your boots and I prayed for your anger to end. Oh father, I have sinned.

I listened to the song, and watched the video, Oh Father, so many times. Whatever your thoughts about her, the song and video are real art. Musically and visually, childhood whimsy and magic blends with darkness that can’t be spoken about directly. It feels like my childhood world felt.

It is obviously at least partially autobiographical—Madonna’s mother, dead when she was five years old, shows up in a coffin with the stitching in her lips visible. It is a child’s first confrontation with the horror reality of death and un-mendable loss.

Much of the imagery looked familiar. The little girl dressing up in her mother’s clothes and jewelry only to be discovered by her angry, hitting father. That was me, except it was my mother who slapped and screamed when she found me.

Madonna putting on makeup to cover a facial bruise reminded me of making sure I wore long-sleeved shirts to school.

Obsessing over that song and its imagery, I think, helped me to purge what I needed to about my stepfather. But now as I’m older, I realize that the themes in that piece that I keyed off so well were as much, or more, about my mother. At the time, I could not admit it. Mother had to be a perfect saint in contrast with the murderous father. Because if both my parents were wicked. . . it just could not be allowed to be.

The song is ambivalent. It (rightly) blames her father for what he did. But it also asks whether he really meant it, and whether there is a possibility of forgiveness and redemption.

Oh, father, you never wanted to live that way. You never wanted to hurt me. Why am I running away?

I know why I ran away. I was no longer sure that my mother did not want to hurt me.

Maybe some day, when I look back I’ll be able to say you didn’t mean to be cruel. Somebody hurt you, too.