Abusive Father

Trigger warnings for abuse and rape.

I'm honestly not sure how to start this, because my family situation has been heavily influenced by my grandparents and how their s**t affected my parents. The cycle of abuse is a seriously real thing in my house. But I need to get these feelings off my chest, and no one but my mom and sister and I know the whole story.

I guess I'll start with my mom.

My mom was raised by her father and step mother as her bio mom died after giving birth to her. Her step mother might as well have been the reincarnation of the cinderella stepmother. She put my mom on diets, forced her to wear makeup, and chose my mom's clothing. If my mom stepped out of line in any way she was grounded. She was grounded so often that during COVID 19 when I was feeling lonely and asked her how she managed it, she said that she had been grounded for longer when she was a girl.

She was also forced to work three jobs to pay for her family (they were poor) but only she and her father worked, while her step mom went to university for degrees that she would never use.

Then when she was sixteen she was kicked out of the house. She had to drop school so she could work to feed herself and pay for an apartment.

She met my dad when she was nineteen and it didn't take long for them to start dating and to move in together.

Unlike my mom, my dad doesn't really talk about his past so all I know is that his father was a serial cheater and when he and my grandmother divorced it really affected him and his brother.

Anyway, one thing lead to another and my mom and dad got married when they were 21. He was my mom's first boyfriend, although my dad had already had several relationships before he met my mom.

Problems began not to long after.

He began raping her in her sleep, we don't know how often but one time she woke up and told him that wasn't okay. He apologized, said it wouldn't happen again.

He started making jokes about her name with his guy friends (a name which was also her bio-mom's name and the only thing connecting her to her mother)

She told him she didn't like it, he apologized (but was still doing it as recently as four years ago)

six years later and they had both me and my sister. Neither of us were easy kids to handle because of our special needs and mental illnesses.

When I was twelve years old my dad raped my mother for the last time. In response she told him that she no longer trusted sleeping in the same room as him, and came to sleep in my room.

My dad drove off in a fit of rage and didn't return until morning.

He has stopped raping her but only because it 'makes her upset' and he is confident that he didn't do anything wrong. He outright told my mom that he would turn himself into the cops if she wanted, commenting that he'd walk away with a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile my mom won't go to counselling because she's scared he'll be arrested and she doesn't want that.

I started learning about all the things my dad did to my mom when I was fourteen. My mom had been having nightmares about what my dad did to her and had to tell someone. With no one on her side of the family in contact with her, and only my equally emotionally abusive grandmother in the picture (more on her later) she spilled it all to me.

I know it was probably wrong of her to do so, but I'm not angry at her. She did everything she could think of at the time to protect my sister and I. My grandmother was all but banned from our lives after she whipped my sister with a purse strap, and was only allowed near us when supervised.

Then there was my sister and I. My dad stayed home with us when my sister and I were one and five respectively (I'm the older one). Most of the time he slept on the couch, and stuck us in front of the tv. But at least one time he left us downstairs to go and play video games on the computer. I am so glad that all we decided to do was pour out all the cereal and make sand castles instead of going under the sink where the cleaning agents were kept.

While my dad mostly neglected me, saying that he didn't feel a connection with me. He terrorized my little sister. Some times he would dote upon her, other times they would fight and he would chase her through the house until she slammed her door shut.

One time it was so bad he put his foot through the wooden door, then screamed at her for hurting him.

There are so many more things I can get into, the fact that he didn’t believe my sister was actually sick when she started randomly passing out due to one of her health issues. He had to see her collapse her job in front of him before he actually believed her.

He raked me over the coals for getting a C, claiming that he got all A’s when he was in high school. Probably the first and only time my grandmother ever helped me because she brought up his report card and it was completely C’s and B’s while mine was almost entirely A’s.

The fact that while he stopped raping my mom when I was fourteen he was still sexually assaulting her in her sleep until about four years ago.

The fact that he doesn’t put any effort into our relationship then complains about us not having a good relationship.

The fact that he still gets angry and every time I see him like that I feel scared and then angry because how dare he make me feel like this.

The fact that he doesn’t respect anything my mom says.

The fact that my mom was so excited at the idea of a divorce… and now she’s given up. She wanted to change her email to 50&free and she’s given it up and I don’t know why.

The fact she can’t tell him she’s asexual (she discovered it when I came out as Ace and she started studying it)

The fact he won’t wash himself or go to the doctor and is angry that my mom won’t compromise her health by having sex with him until he washes, or kiss him until he brushes his teeth.

I hate the most is that I used to hide when he got angry. I didn’t protect them. I couldn’t protect my family from him.

But what I hate the most is… that there were good times too.

Times when we would have tickle fights and pin him to the kitchen floor.

Time when we would wake up and he’d be making Mickey Mouse pancakes.

Or that he knew we loved land before time so he spent dollars and dollars trying to get the stuffed toys for me and my sister.

The fact he praised my hard work and training when I would preform in choir.

When he used to sing to me.

I just don’t know what to think. There are times I hate him so much that I want him out. But there are also times when I wonder why I couldn’t have more of the good times. Why we couldn’t have had an actual relationship. Why couldn’t he listen and respect my mom when she says no?

Are these conflicted feelings normal? And if so suggestions on how I can handle them please?

Thanks for sharing this. It'd be a very long story... (I'll spare you the details.) But at least based on my own experiences, many years ago, your conflicted feelings jive with my own experiences growing up.

Basically I think I had good parents. And as I've written here on PC several times, had my parents had a normal boy, I think things might have gone well. But instead what they got was a depressed, anxiety-ridden, fearful, secretive, gender-dysphoric kid. (Plus I was an only child.) And this was at a time, & in a place, where mental health services were essentially non-existent. So any hint of mental illness was something to be feared, hidden away, embarrassed about, & ignored... assuming it was even recognized which in most cases it probably wasn't. So you can no doubt imagine how things went.

Still my growing up years certainly weren't all bad. Like you I have some fond memories as well. And it's always difficult to reconcile the occasional good times / fond memories with all of the crap. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I suspect more people's lives, growing up, are like that than are those whose experiences were totally one way or the other.

How do you handle your conflicted feelings? I suppose the obvious answer would be to work through what you've experienced with the help of a mental health therapist. Beyond that my personal opinion would be that perhaps it is simply a matter of accepting that the "dichotomy" you experienced is pretty "normal" (if that's a good descriptor to apply to it.) And, beyond that, to learn ways to simply accept that throughout life the good as well as the bad coexist & the challenge is to be able to accept both types of experiences as they are (or were.)

There's a Buddhist practice referred to as "compassionate abiding" that I think is apropos. Here's a link to a mental-health-oriented description of the practice:

Relieve Distress By Allowing It: Compassionate Abiding 101 | Mindset: Perspective Is Everything

And then, along the same lines, here are links to 3 articles, from PC's archives, that offer similar sorts of suggestions:

How to Sit with Painful Emotions

Several Ways to Sit with Your Feelings

A Technique for Feeling Painful Feelings

I'm sorry that you had to experience that. No one should have ever been in a situation like tha that. Have you thought about going to counseling?