“Get the fuck out of my house!” he spat as he threw my bags out the front door to the sidewalk below.
My stepfather was a little angry with me. It was the summer before I was supposed to move to Cedar City, Utah, to attend Southern Utah University in the fall, and I was living with my mother and stepfather in La Porte, Indiana. In the back of my brain, I knew it was a bad decision from the start, but after years of not living with my mother (I had moved out when I was 14 to live with my adoptive father), I wanted to spend time with my Mom before leaving the Midwest (for good, I naively thought).
“GET OUT!” He said again. Get the fuck out, he just kept repeating. I don’t really remember my Mom stepping in at all, I think at one point she just suggested everyone step back and take a breather. I think he walked away in a huff. And I think I went outside to grab my bags and bring them back in the house. I had nowhere to go. I had no friends. I had no family outside of the dysfunctional one I was staying with, so I would just suck it up and hide in my bedroom for the night. It’s all a bit hazy. My life, that is.
It was Father’s Day, 1998. And my bags were packed because I would soon be leaving for Utah – way earlier than originally planned. I had recently lost my job because I was caught searching for porn on the computer at work and it felt like the right time to get out. Actually, what really happened is that I was working for my stepfather and he accused me of searching for porn on the computer at work. I woke up one morning to find my ride to work (my stepfather) gone and my Mom informing me I had been fired. And that Frank would be home to “talk” to me about it later. Joy.
So, so, so stupid to think once again living with my stepfather would be anything close to peaceful. I had moved in the month before, so it really only took about six weeks to get my bags thrown out the door on Father’s Day. I was 19 and ready to try a new University after my first attempt at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point went down in a 0.0 first semester Freshman GPA drop-out failure. Thankfully, Southern Utah had listened to my plea, understood my struggle, and wiped the slate clean. I was going to go in as a 20-year-old Freshman. Years later, I would graduate Cum Laude as a 29-year-old Super Senior from an entirely different University back in the Midwest.
But the decade before I was just trying to spend some time with my Mom after a 5-year estrangement. Lip-pierced, tongue-pierced, tattooed me, hoping to reconnect with my mommy before entering the struggle of adulthood. At the time, my Mom and I were HUGE X-Files fans and the movie has just come out some 10 days before. I remember walking through the parking lot to the theatre having a discussion with my Mom about my stepfather’s bad attitude that day. Really not that different than normal, this day he was just being enough of a fucker for me to comment on it. I asked her why he was acting like an asshole. As if the dick was ever just acting like one.
“He’s mad because you didn’t wish him a Happy Father’s Day.” she says with a slight note of sadness.
I’m not sure who that sadness was for. Empathy for him, or just tired of the conflict, but most likely not for me. I was always just that loud-mouthed bitch causing problems. I think I scoffed out loud, said something to the effect of “Why would I do that?” and I think she may have said something about keeping the peace or something. As if that’s MY responsibility. The 19-year-old kid who just spent the last seven years navigating a tumultuous family life as a teenager choosing to live alone with an alcoholic adoptive father. Because it was better for survival.
We loved the movie. We talked about it all the way home, but when we got there Frank was still upset. Except NOW he was upset because I didn’t say Happy Father’s Day AND we went to the movies on HIS special day.
I don’t even remember how the argument started or what it was about. All I remember is that we somehow ended up in the living room and he was in my face. I don’t even know if the lights were on. I somehow see the dining room lights on in my head, but the lights were off in the living room. He was ranting. I don’t know about what, but it culminated in the one phrase that screams out in my memory:
“And to top it all off, you told your Mom I was acting like an asshole.” Right in my face.
I couldn’t take it. I had bit my tongue the whole six weeks I was living in that house. Constantly listening to his arrogance, his misogyny, the emotional and mental abuse. I had sat on my hands for the past seven years as my mom chose this abusive fuckwad over my older brother and me, though he was smart enough to move out when he was seventeen and STAY out. For seven years I lived with this tyrant, and his shadow when I wasn’t living with him, and I had just been recently accused AGAIN of doing something I wasn’t doing – and PORN this time – and I was frankly (cough) just fucking sick of it.
“Well, Frank. You ARE an asshole.”
And GOD did that feel good. Just saying it right to his fucking face. (I’m shaking as I’m writing this. My heart is pounding. Thirty fucking years and it still just sits on my soul.) FINALLY, just to his face telling it like it is.
The second before he exploded feels like an eternity now. The way his face changed before yelling “GET OUT” seems to just be frozen there in my head, all the air sucked out of the room. I honestly thought he was going to hit me. I was sure this was the time I was going to get punched right in the face. I may have even taken a step back.
But he didn’t. Instead, choosing to go and grab my luggage, open the front door, and threw them out onto the Indiana sidewalk. Asserting his man-ness. How dare I. And my mom saying something, and then it was over. And I was alone.
Later I was still sitting in the living room, I think still in the dark, because I just remember him coming from the kitchen through the dining room and standing close to me with the light coming from behind to hit his back in a glow.
“Here,” he says, and hand me a couple of cigarettes. “Your mom tells me you’ve been trying to quit smoking so I just wanted to give you these…”
I don’t remember his reason. “I just wanted to give you these because…” and then something stupid. Something about something being difficult. Like the argument was difficult or something. I think it actually may have been “because I know how hard it is to quit.”
But it’s just like Frank to not let anyone be healthy. Not even let them try.
A dear friend of mine told me I needed to write more. As I had been thinking the same thing myself, I took it as a sign from the Universe that, well, I needed to write more.
I struggle with this. I struggle with getting the thoughts in my head to the paper. They’re so used to being comfortable locked safely in my skull, who the hell wants to be exposed out there in the cold, cold world?
But when I started this journey of self-healing some seven (eight? Six? Time does not exist) or so years ago now, it was an in an effort to release the demons from my skull. And to be open so that others might know they’re not alone.
So much of what is wrong with this world is because so many things happen behind closed doors. We’ve created this deadly culture of secrecy where people have to suffer in silence and to speak up and out means you’re desperate for attention. Blame the victim. But I wholly believe, as I’ve said many times before, if we would all just allow ourselves to be just a little bit more open and vulnerable, we could shift the culture to out and punish the abusers. And help the victims.