Stands with a Knife (trigger warning)

[Beany Boo]

1. 9 years old

• My family moves to a mining company in the remote country. It's on private property. My dad teaches me to drive.

2. 10 years old

• My friends and bullies, try to make my sister and the weakest kid in the group have sex. My sister is 5. I walk in as they're trying to insert his penis. My mother walks in and they disperse. Nothing is said or done, or explained. Weeks later I spontaneously knee the same boy in the crotch. His father's approaching steps are so much heavier, stronger, faster and less stoppable than mine, that I hide under the house. He goes in. My mother comes out. The intent in her voice kills the all the warmth in my body. I scurry over the back fence carrying only my short, little life. I try all day to run away from home. But we are too far from anywhere.

3. 11 years old

• My grandmother (my dad's mother) dies. He begins drinking. I become aware he is the most frightening. My supervision is 'de-prioritised.' I crash the family car, while driving, with permission, unsupervised. I'm sent to another town to stay with that same boy and his family, while our car goes through major repairs. They have nice tasting food which they ask me if I want to eat too.

4. 17 years old

• Apropos of nothing, my father shares with me how he was beaten by his WWII veteran alcoholic father and hospitalised multiple times; without the authorities ever intervening. In his re-telling his voice has pride in it, when he says his father was a "good killer." I pretend with everything, to show him 'calm.'

5. 22 years old

• A psychiatrist gives me a diagnosis of clinical depression. I am so relieved to feel so frightened.

6. 35 years old

• A friend I still miss deeply, commits suicide. For weeks, I keep wanting to go to 'where' he is; to console and sit with him.

7. 36 years old

• My mother apologises to me for the way I was brought up. I'm relieved but can't accept it. I confront my father and threaten to cut him off if he continues to emotionally abuse my mother. His reply is, that he is "bored." Enthralled to his will for a lifetime, I am helpless to act further.

8. 37 years old

• After decades of making my skin crawl off and a rapid deterioration, my father dies of smoking and alcohol related complications; just like his father.

9. 39 years old

• I begin waking up, upright in the night, and crying out, certain that I am only just now dead but have woken up a moment too late.

10. 42 years old

• I wake up one morning and my mother is inside my house without warning. It triggers me. I blow up at her, for the first time in my adult life. I eventually share with her, the story of my father telling me about his childhood beatings. She keeps saying, "Oh fuck." It sounds strange to my ears. As I'm telling her I feel something new about the story. I realise in telling her I can see that my father in sharing it with me, was actually 'overwhelmed' and was in that moment deciding for himself whether or not to threaten my own life. He decided the bottle, it was safer; for him. Upon hearing this my mother recounted how a few years before his death, my father, without provocation, grabbed a kitchen knife and kept her in a stand off with the couch between them for an hour while she talked him down.

11. 44 years old (now)

• I have a healthier boundary with my mother. I still haven't accepted her apology. In March, I suddenly began to acutely grieve for the father that left me for alcohol, at 11 years old, and, though he was always 'there'- physically - he never came back; to his son.

12. 6 years old (I told this story at his funeral)

• When I was 6 my dad had a boat; a dinghy. On weekends he would take me in the boat down to the mangroves and we would follow the tributaries for hours. There was no plan. Sometimes we would set crab traps or fish for bream. Then one weekend my dad suddenly decided to turn out of the mangroves and head for open ocean, in this little dinghy. It took us about a half an hour through choppy swell to make it to the island across the bay. We rarely spoke, ever. But my dad, standing on the beach of that island, looking back at the city, said, absentmindedly, "Don't tell your mother."

My father is still a violent creep who is bathed in dread and crawl-out-of-your-skin fear in my mind. But sometimes he's a little boy being carried across the threshold, of the entrance to a hospital, unconscious, covered in cuts, bruises and fractures, some of which are fresh. And if it didn't almost kill me to think about it, I can see myself, my face pressed into the sea wind, standing in the bow of that little dinghy, with my daddy at the motor, secretly heading for open ocean.

[brownblob]

You've been through a lot beany. Relationships with parents can be complicated. It sounds like you've done a lot of work and can see some of this complexity. Keep healing and taking care of yourself.

[Beany Boo]

Thank you brownblob, your words touch me.

[Imissmysun]

Im so glad you shared. I know its not easy but i also know that its a good first step.

The harder part is processing all the stifled residual feelings associated with these defining moments.

It also sounds like you have been working really methodically on those feelings.

I really appreciate your insights.

[rivergirl]

Beany,
Your post is heartbreaking and also beautiful. You have so much to heal from, but it sounds as though you have made a great deal of progress. And I don't see you perpetuating the cycle of denial and violence that you grew up with. Take care of yourself.

rivergirl

[Beany Boo]

Imissmysun, rivergirl,

Thank you, it feels timely to give that oxygen.

I appreciate your validation.