A Shadow in his own Life…and mine

My father has been a disappointment to me throughout my life. The biggest disappointment I’ve had to endure. That is a brutal fact. He never took pride in my achievements as I grew up and he absolutely failed to protect me from the violence of my stepmother, a woman chosen by him to replace my real mother, who had committed suicide. For many years I hoped that this would change and that he would embrace the role of father so that I would feel like a real daughter to him, instead of an “aside” in his life. What did I have to do – I used to wonder – to wake him up and make him be a dad to me and my sister?

In part, I am responsible for our distorted relationship. When I was four years old I took the devastating news to my granny’s house that my mother had hanged herself and she was dead. I was standing in the centre of her crowded living room surrounded by ashen-faced aunties and uncles trying to digest the news, but the only face I really saw was my father’s. The shock and grief had turned his face white, so white that – on reflection – it would not have been out of place in Edvard Munch’s masterpiece, The Scream. I was looking at Pure Pain, at a shell of a man. When I saw that, I vowed never to do anything that would cause him suffering, ever again. That was how I related to my father; always trying to protect him from more suffering. If only he had made the same commitment to me…

One and a half years after my mother’s death, my father remarried. His bride, Kathleen, introduced my sister and me to pain used as punishment, physical and psychological pain. Before her arrival in my life, I had not experienced any form of deliberate hurt. She inflicted it on me for the most cursory of reasons, or indeed for no reason at all. Very often, punishment was meted out in conjunction with deprivation of food, so we’d go to bed without an evening meal, hungry. On one occasion, Kathleen became enraged with us because the beatings were so violent that her hand hurt. That was when she introduced a bamboo cane to inflict punishment on us without hurting herself.

Most of the time Dad was not around when we were punished, so I assumed that my father knew nothing about this aspect of Kathleen’s cruelty toward us. Besides, we were under strict orders to conceal the marks she left on us, usually on our torso or upper arms and legs. However, this assumption, together with the conviction that my father would not allow such brutality to continue if he became aware of it, died when I was seven. On this day, Kathleen opted for the bamboo cane to punish me and, knowing how painful it was from previous experiences, I ran upstairs in terror and locked myself in the bathroom. From a place of relative safety, sobbing all the while, I pleaded with her not to harm me. Banging on the door, she retorted that the longer I remained in the bathroom, the more severe the punishment would be.

In the brief silence between one sob and the next, I heard my father arriving home from work. Filled with relief, I raced down the stairs and begged him to save me from Kathleen and the cane. To my dying day, I will remember his reply, “It’s okay. Just let her hit you for a while. She’ll calm down after that.” I felt as if I had been struck by lightning. This man, my father, who was supposed to protect me, had just betrayed me to the brutality of this woman. That said everything I needed to know about my father from that day onward. It was very clear that I could not depend on him to protect or care for me. It was over. I was on my own.

Strangely, the four-year-old child in me understood and accepted this without wavering from her vow to care for and protect her father. While my sister loathed him for his betrayal of us, the child in me continued to see him as a man who had suffered greatly; a man who had been gravely damaged by life. However, many years later this perspective changed when I attended an appointment with the psychologist at Sussex university, where I was a student on a postgraduate course. After I’d finished explaining how much my father had suffered in life and why he needed to be protected, the psychologist asked me one question which altered my feelings toward him forever. She asked me whether my father had ever protected me. That is what a father does, not the other way round. It is not the daughter’s responsibility to protect the father.

Suddenly my father’s failings became blindingly obvious. The man had put himself first all the time. For the sake of marital harmony he had given my stepmother free reign, permitting her to unleash her violence on me and my sister. There has never been a single instance when he stepped in to protect us from her. Not when she scrubbed my sister’s neck raw to the point that it bled. Not when she kicked me down the stairs. Not when she locked me in a freezing cold garage. Not when she left him and took us away to England with her a couple of years after they married. Not when she attacked me with a pair of scissors. Especially not the last time I saw them, when Kathleen scratched my face and neck with her nails, marks I attended a PhD interview with the following day.

On that very afternoon, with my face bleeding, i drew a line under our relationship. From a relatively safe place near the front door of their home, I warned them that if she ever attacked me again, I would report her to the police. After a momentary silence, my father turned to my sister and asked if my accusations about Kathleen were true. Out of fear, Elaine hesitated, but then replied that it was true, all of it. He glared at me and ordered me out of the house and told me never to return. I left their house on that day, in tears, but jubilantly happy that I would not have to see either Kathleen or my father again.

That was it. I never did return. That final brutal encounter marked the end for me. It was over. There were no surprises from Kathleen on that day, for her behaviour was as violent as it had always been and my father had acted, true to form, by taking my stepmother’s side despite knowing that I was not to blame. Even worse, after she had punched, hit and scratched me that day, he stood between us and raised his forearms as if to protect her, as if I had been the one who had initiated the attack. I was staggered by his response. That part of me is still in shock even as I write these words.

I am not sure whether I believe in the laws of karma, but if karma exists at all, it would have engineered the final years of their marriage, which were marked by Alzheimer. During those years Kathlees became increasingly violent, dangerously so, to the point where all knives and scissors in the house had to be concealed from her. In the end, my father had to call the police for help because she was rampaging through their house with a knife, intent on harming him. He told the police who had come to take her away, that he was tired of living in fear of her aggression and ongoing menace. It was over for him. That was it. That was how 55 years of marriage ended for them. For me, I’m clear that my childhood was sacrificed to his failure to challenge her brutality and do what any decent father would have done: care for and protect his child. I did not deserve that and neither did my sister.