Where was your father?

answering a reasonable question

A follower here asked a question others might have: where was your father throughout your abusive childhood?

Obviously, I talk about my mother a lot, and very little about my father. There are several reasons for that. Here’s what happened.

My mother was 18 when she got pregnant with me. She was dating my father, a 26-year-old grad student/bartender. To the best of my knowledge, they were together between six and nine months. My father left my mother before I was born.

According to my mother, he said he didn’t want children, and wanted her to have an abortion. She wanted to keep me. I will give her credit for telling me who he was, giving me his name, telling me what she knew about him, and letting me know I was free to find him if I wanted at any point. That point did not come until I was in my 20s.

When I was about four, my mother married my stepfather, and had my brother and sister with him. My stepfather beat me, beat my mother, and more (your imagination is almost certainly right). He was a terror. While there is no moral excuse for beating your wife, it is also true that my mother, the borderline, deliberately provoked him with calculated humiliation and emasculation. I was there. I heard the words she said to him. This was a dance of two abusive people.

One night, my stepfather and mother had the worst fight yet. I ran out into the living room screaming when I heard her screaming, “Stop it Chuck—you’re going to kill me!” He was on top of her on the couch, strangling her. He was, in fact, trying to kill her. My brother and sister came out and stood with me watching it.

For some reason, he stopped. They went to bed, and my mother stayed awake all night in fear. In the morning, he went to work. Mother put his belongings on the porch and had a locksmith change the locks. He camped out there for several days, keeping us trapped. He finally went away.

The reason I talk less about my stepfather is that I had zero emotional connection with him. I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me. I knew he wasn’t my real dad. While I did try when I was little to make him like me, and while he did do some kind things for me, there was never any love between us.

That is why he does not haunt me the way my mother does. The hatred was always right out in the open; it wasn’t a question I had to solve.

When I found my father by long-distance telephone in my 20s, we talked many times. He sent me a box of old photographs, and video copies of 16 mm films he was in as part of a promotion for the Jewish boys’ home that he was placed in as a teen. Fundraiser films from the 60s to encourage donations.

The resemblance between us is remarkable—as teens, nearly identical. I actually (in the literal, real world sense) dropped my drink on the floor when I watched the motion picture footage. It was seeing a ghost of myself on black and white film from another age.

Remember, when I was in my 20s, I was still “on my mother’s side.” I was primed to see my father only as an asshole who used my mother and skipped out. He did do that, but it’s more complicated.

He told me that my mother deliberately tried to trap him into marriage. I called him a liar, and screamed at him, telling him he must be the awful man my mother always said he was. I refused to return his mementos, he called the police. I eventually returned them; we never spoke again.

Years later, my sister told me some information that corroborated what my father claimed. Turns out my mother did, indeed, have boxes full of bridal magazines from 1973 and 1974 that she’d kept hidden in a closet all my life. My sister discovered them. It appears my father’s claim that she salted them throughout the house is likely correct.

What do I think about him now? I have come to no resolution. My feelings are conflicted. He was irresponsible as hell, knocked up unstable young woman and left his son in misery. This is all true. On the other hand, I cannot fully blame him for fleeing my mother—I know her, and she was certainly a full-fledged Borderline by the time she was pregnant with me.


That’s the story.