Facing My Abuser

It's been a hard weekend.

Friday, I saw my stepsisters post some pictures of their reunion with their biological father on Facebook and I was just waiting for my dad to call. Sure enough he did, but I missed the call. I braced myself for the torrential downpour of self pity and anger from my father when I answered his call back to me and I wasn't disappointed.

This time though, it was different. Usually I just listen while supplying the appropriate uh huh and yeahs in the conversation lapses, but I couldn't. Something inside me said no.  Not this time. He doesn't get to do this today.

I told him I don't blame my sisters for wanting to have a relationship with their father, that they are entitled to know him and allow him into their lives. He kept blathering on and before he could get a full wind of poor me under his sails, I knocked it out of him. I told him that sister has a right to feel pain when looking back on her past because he abused her.  He abused all of us.

He had the balls to say he didn't abuse us.

For fifteen years I have played out how this conversation would go in so many ways. In some I'd cry, in others I'd scream. It never went calmly for certain. So it was a huge surprise that I heard myself detailing the abuse we suffered at his hands in such a calm tone and manner. It was so matter of fact. I felt almost entirely detached from the words exiting my mouth. It was as if I was reading a story out of the paper or something.

He said he never hit us with a fist so it wasn't abuse.

No father, slamming your child into the wall and holding her off the ground by her throat isn't abuse. Beating my sister from knees to shoulders with a tennis racket isn't abuse. Lining all four of us up in a line and walking down the line beating us one by one until someone confessed to whatever sin you'd imagined up that day and then beating the confessor because she caused us all to suffer needlessly to cover her lies isn't abuse.  "Spanking" us on an almost daily basis to the point we can't sit. Worst was then laughing to your friends and making me show them the bruises you'd left on my backside.

This isn't even the tip, not even a sliver of what we all went through.

I often sit here wondering if my life isn't some fantasy horror I made up in my mind. Perhaps I created a tragic past in my head to make myself feel better about being such an enormous failure in my life. I know I didn't. I know that what I, and my three younger sisters went through was real and I know the horror of it is worse than everything I can remember because I've blocked so much of it from my mind. Each of my sisters remembers things that I don't, but when they've talked about it, it all comes surging back and I feel even more saddened that we had to live through that.  What we lived with is the stuff of Lifetime movies. Physical abuse, mental abuse, and religious abuse just topping the charts of a childhood so dysfunctional.

Of course, my father didn't appreciate me dealing more pain to him when he was already so hurt. He sarcastically apologized to me and I told him that when he as ready to offer an actual apology I would be ready to accept it and forgive.  The conversation ended there, standing outside of the car in the parking lot of a Halloween store with the kids clamoring to say hi to "Pa."  I had to take a few breaths, put on my game face, and cheerfully tell the kids Pa had to go but let's go look at the Halloween stuff!!  All the while I was shaking and trying to catch my breath.

I don't hold any hopes or illusions in my mind that an apology will come anytime soon, if ever.

So I have been sitting on this all weekend. I faced my abuser. I want to feel proud of myself, but I don't. I feel that I've destroyed the last shreds of what relationship I had with my father, monster though he was. I'm now utterly alone in this world and what I'm facing in this world is daunting and terrifying.

I feel so lost right now. So alone.