Exploring the Legacy: My Father Was a Monster

Daddy Dearest

I loved my father. He was smart and funny, and he could build anything. He also told wonderful campfire stories, which makes me wonder if I got my writing chops from him. I know I learned my love of hiking, camping, and rockhounding from my dad. He was an avid traveler, too, so my family and I visited most of the lower forty-eight states before freeways. We explored places like Capitol Reef, Arches, and Monument Valley when they were only accessible via teeth-rattling Jeep trails.

A machinist and gunsmith, he worked hard to support my mother, brother, and me. Even though most of my clothes were homemade, I had piano lessons, flute lessons, encyclopedias, and all of the classical music and books my heart desired. The greatest gift my father gave me was an appreciation for racial diversity. The “n” word was more profane than the “f” word in my house—quite a departure from the small-town dialog I heard in the fifties.

My father’s other bequest was a lifetime of cognitive and emotional dissonance.

You see, my father was also a monster.

It doesn’t help that I understand how he became a monster. He was born to two alcoholics, who both had a penchant for violence. According to him, his mother was the meanest woman in the world. No family gathering was complete without a retelling of the time when she and my aunt nearly beat a man to death with their high heels.

To further complicate things, my father was essentially raised by a black nanny in the thirties in Virginia. She was kind and nurturing, things his mother was not. She also had a son his age, who was his buddy. He could neither express his love for this woman nor his friendship with her son because he feared what his neighbors might do to them. Thus, my dad was badly damaged years before the war broke him completely.

He physically survived combat, mastered two crafts, and married my mother, but PTSD, or shell shock as they called it then, bullied his better angels for the rest of his life.

So, he bullied us. Sometimes, his rage simmered just beneath the surface, and we all tiptoed around him. Other times, he was jovial and fun to be with. We never knew who we would get, and I was too little to comprehend much beyond the need to be hyper-vigilant and responsive to his shifting moods.

He evidently inherited some of his mother’s cruelty, too, for his punishments were sadistic and scarring. Although my brother and I were close, we argued like other children. My father’s remedy was to make us strip to the waist while he cut willow switches from the tree. Then he made us whip each other, and if we weren’t savage enough, he beat us with his belt. This was done in our backyard in full view of the neighbors. No wonder the neighbor kids and many of their parents feared my dad.

His other punishments are unspeakable and left me with irreconcilable emotions. As I said, I can understand why he was inclined toward violence and cruelty, but I cannot understand why he consistently chose them, instead of loving us.

I, too, survived endless trauma and confusion that was magnified by early-onset bipolar disorder. In fact, my dear old therapist once told me, with tears rolling down his cheeks, that my childhood rivaled some of the worst ordeals endured by soldiers and victims of violent crime. It would have been easy for me to tread that well-worn path of generational abuse. Instead, I chose to lock myself in the bathroom and vent my mania by beating my fists against the tile, rather than taking it out on my little ones. I chose to explain my failings and apologize to my children when I was weak or confused.

I tell myself that I did better—that I broke the curse of generations. But did I? In my darkest moments, I wonder if my children really escaped my mental issues unscathed.

But I mostly wonder if my father ever wondered such things or if he was too broken to care.