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Absent But Present
My dad was an absent but present father if that makes sense. He worked a lot to support the family. He worked all shifts at different times. At various times in my childhood and adolescence, he worked first shift. During the worst times, he worked the graveyard shift. When I was a young child, I always prepared for him when he came home from work. He seemed to be the bright part of my day. When he’d turn the key in the door, I’d scream and laugh and yell his name. Once he entered the house, my face and his face would beam with joy and he chased me to pick me up and sing my name in a song he had made up just for me. This was a daily thing until I was no longer a toddler and had begun pre-school.
Generally, my dad was always a secondary figure in the home because he worked so much. For a time when his shifts changed, he would sleep during the day and work at night. So even when he was home, he was not truly there because he was asleep. My siblings and I were given strict instructions not to disturb him for any reason. We should have only entered his room if he had given us permission or if we were in danger. I knew, however, that danger meant something other than the narcissistic abuses that I was dealing with regarding my mother. Danger meant something like the house being on fire or somebody dying even thought most of the time I felt like dying.
Missing Out On A Lot
I often felt like my dad missed out on a lot. He surely had no idea what my mother was doing. He was oblivious. A lot of times this made me angry with him because I came to learn very early on that his absence ultimately meant that I was not going to be protected from the sinister things that my mother was doing. My dad never knew many of the things that were happening because we (the children) were silenced by our mother through trickery, bribes, and threats. I bet you can figure out the child that received all of the threats.
Needless to say, my dad seemed oblivious and only knew what my mother would tell him. If she thought that I was going to be a problem for her, she would go ahead and dress up a story that pinned me as the troublemaker … the problem child. I was always a problem for my mother, and I always seemed to cause trouble for my mother because my inquisitiveness and discerning nature always foiled her plans. I was the child that did not go along with her plans. She was always plotting things behind my dad’s back. In particular, my grandmother, who was not allowed to come over to our home for periods at at time, would be there almost daily. My grandmother was as narcissistic as they came. She was ruthless, and she hated my dad.
Used In Adult Games
My dad also knew that I had an inquisitive and discerning nature. My dad called them my gifts. These gifts were often used against me unfortunately. In fact, my gift of discernment was a way that my dad kept tabs on what was going on in our house. I was often unaware that I was operating in discernment. I just thought that I knew things. It never occurred to me that what I knew might have been different in comparison to what someone else did not know. My keen discernment is what branded me as the “kooky” kid. Instead of helping me to understand my gift, my dad simply capitalized on finding out all that he needed to know to fill in the gaps to decide what it was that my mother was up to while he was at work.
Looking back, it was all a game for my parents. If one was angry with the other or if one was attempting to gain power over the other, my parents would use me as the scapegoat. I was not wise to this for years, but it explained why I sometimes sensed hatred coming at me from both of them. That hurt. It always hurt deeply to know that my dad played the same types of games as my mother. My dad was someone I placed on a pedestal above my mother because he showed me that he loved me compared to what my mother showed me. As a child, my mother told me she did not love me at all. So it was easy to ignore my dad’s faults until I could not ignore them. He, unfortunately, caused me a lot of pain too. Many times he would be react to me just like my mom in proudly proclaiming that he would apologize for nothing because he would always be the parent, and I would always be the child.
Stay tuned for more in my next post …
My Voice Unchained 