Here we are again. That time of year when everyone is trying to decide what to buy for Dad, what card to choose (it must say just the right words), the time when we see Happy Father’s Day written everywhere, Father’s Day Specials, even my physical therapist wearing a tie to celebrate Father’s Day. There is no way to escape it. Those of us sexually abused by our fathers wish that we could. My thoughts multiply in my brain so fast that I can hardly handle them: But he was a good father until he raped me when I was thirteen, he delivered me and therefore gave testimony to everyone that I was his favorite, any thought of anything painful happening to me – like bumping into a Marine Corp trunk in the dark and putting a deep gash on my knee when I was twelve – caused him to descend into a deep fear, a fear that he would lose me, like remembering when he came home from the war, how happy and excited I was to be back with my Daddy, like remembering when he showed me how to take a rifle apart, clean it and then put it back together, and the times when he taught me how to play piano – oh the joy of sitting with him on the bench while he shared with me what he had spent twelve years learning.
A hundred happy memories fill my mind, so full of love. In a flash, I throw them aside as I remember sleeping in a bottom bunk, my rosary under my pillow, my dog Rusty sleeping underneath the bed, a clock ticking on my dresser, the door opening slowly, and the painful rape that followed as I screamed and screamed for help. No help was forthcoming. The abuse worsened, sexual assaults following by beatings with that black leather belt Dad was so proud of, beatings encouraged by my mother. I can still here her screaming, Hit her again, Hit her again.
Someone had to be responsible for what was happening and my mother, whose motto about my father was, Even when he’s wrong, he’s right, ruled her life. Finally, at the age of eighteen I ran away from home. It would be many years and many painful relationships, many hours in Psychiatric Wards after failed suicide attempts, time spent in a women’s shelter, despair, agony, a feeling of being no good, always validated by my father, before I finally discovered that the only person who was going to rescue me was me. Today I’m a happy, healthy woman. Today, I’m the author of 15 books. Today I’m the matriarch of a large family all of whom I love very much.Today I’m happily married and the Founder of The Lamplighter Movement, with 100 chapters in thirteen countries, a promise I made to my father at his graveside while I was in recovery.
But on Father’s Day my heart yearns for a father I could buy a card for, one expressing what a truly great father he was. Before I entered recovery, years after I ran away from home, years before I accepted the truth of what had happened, I wrote a poem about him. I’ve never shared it before but maybe now is the appropriate time.
When I was just a little girl, my Dad seemed ten feet tall,
I feared that lest he didn’t stoop, his head would bump the wall,
He always seemed so right in all, so perfect in every way,
There was no doubt that he was king and all the dragons could slay,
The older I grew, the more he shrank and I found him subject to change,
His answers were not always so right, and it seemed so very strange,
Now I am grown, a woman at last and I find he’s a human like me,
With doubts and fears and worries too, but the memory will always be,
For often I wish for those days gone by, those days when I’d look up and spy,
A man pass by, great than kings, a man that was ten feet high.
It doesn’t amaze me that I wrote that poem. It amazes me that I mailed him a copy on his birthday, shortly before he died of a massive heart attack. What was I thinking?
(I apologize to my readers for not posting a blog last week. I was in California with my family.)
