My Dad Was an Emotional Sea Monster

Content Warning: Child abuse, spousal abuse, and a brief mention of sexual assault.

The first draft of this post had like a jillion paragraphs about my family’s messed up relationship with food but

A.   I really just don’t want to talk about it.

And

B.    The emotions I’ve been uncovering here, the feeling of being judged, surveilled, the I’ll-never-get-it-right feeling, they don’t really come from fatphobia or my mom’s weird controlling/mystical ideas around sugar. They come from my dad being fucking terrifying.

In the present day, my dad is a mild-to-absent part of my life. He’s part of my lifeboat of family liberals, though he does mention Al Franken a little too often. (Ever is too often.) He’s doing this weird thing lately where he regales me with his slight calorie intake and his enviable walking routine, but it seems sad rather than judgey. He bought me and my sister Elizabeth Warren’s book as soon as it came out.

But of course the terror of him from my childhood still lives in my body, makes it hard to feel privacy or autonomy and trust.

I’ve written posts about incidents of explosive violence from him, but I think the frozen feeling comes from the day-to-day of him. It’s hard to focus on my dad, even in the kind care of Summer Therapist, even now with a pink wine spritzer and a Hazy Summer Lofi playlist on. Let me light a few candles and some incense, be right back.

Okay, here I am. I remember the feeling of getting home early for a half snow day and my heart just falling when I realized dad was home early too. I saw him out back chopping wood and all my festive snow day emotions just left me. I felt apprehension, sadness, a beautiful day lost.

I don’t remember a specific instance of him calling us worthless. I remember “lazy.” My senior year of high school, I remember “cocksucker” when I won a photography contest and didn’t give the prize money to him. Also from the teenage years, I remember “You brought this into our house,” (meaning I’d brought violence into our house by being raped and assaulted at a party) as his fists rained down on me, just after he’d kicked my mom down the stairs.

But “worthless” was the insult that sunk in deepest, it was so present that it feels like weather, like, what’s the opposite of a snow day? It’s embedded in my brother too, who’ll use it on me at the slightest provocation. Which is part of why we don’t hang out with that guy.

My dad loomed over everything like the worst supervisor. During the process of grieving the Shy One relationship, one of the hardest things was the way I could still feel TSO with me, fucking judging me all the time—I wasn’t getting over him fast enough, wasn’t doing dating right. I was wallowing too much in my feelings. Mostly, my brain had made up this snippy version of my probably genuinely-rooting-for-me ex, but he was buzzing around my brain for months, reminding me that I’d failed, that his rejection meant I wasn’t lovable, telling me to just fucking give up.

Worthless.

My dad was like a sea monster. You never knew what was going on under the surface or when he might come screaming out of the sea and sink the ship. The simplest things could turn from rumbling menace to terror on a dime.

Once, when I was around ten my sister and I were changing for something and, in the middle of a fight with mom, he decided he needed to come in our room and yell at us too. We locked the door but he kicked it and kicked it until it broke. My sister and I stood there naked and frozen with fear, nowhere to go for cover.

In present-day moments of panic, I feel that day: exposed, afraid, unable to solve the problem or shift the moment. Unable to protect the more vulnerable people around me. I knew there was no privacy or safety, that I didn’t and couldn’t own my own body. There was no place where he ended and I began.

There were school mornings I couldn’t get out the door because I didn’t part my hair correctly. I would stand on a chair, looking into the little mirror on a wall sconce, combing and recombing. I would climb down from the chair, he would check it and find it crooked. I would have to climb back up on the chair and try again. The endlessness, the hopelessness, the feeling of just being too stupid to figure it out.

Worthless.

I feel so much regret, remorse, and loss for the for the ways the father I carry projected itself onto the relationship with The Shy One. I know part of me wished I could Get It Right this time, that that would somehow solve the childhood ache. Though TSO was in no way abusive or scary, I chose someone withholding, uncommunicative, snappish, and exacting, and set out to win him over, to make him into a safe home. I wanted him to make me worthy. Tale as old as time.

As my two months off from dating draw to a close, this is what scares me the most—will I really be able to hold out for someone emotionally available, or will I slip into this fantasy again, hurting myself and some unsuspecting guy in the process? Will seeing the pattern help me be kinder to myself, to believe in the chatty, joyful, equal relationship of my dreams? I hope so! I’ll do my imperfect best.