Consigned to a solitary existence
Child abuse casts a shadow the length of a lifetime.
Thus far in my writings on this topic, I have focused on description and history. For me, these writings have served as a sort of alternative therapy. Long delayed and avoided, but finally engaged. And they have helped me; the writing process has helped me.
But given the fact that I did not really start this journey of self-discovery until after the age of fifty, there were decades where the internalized and suppressed damage affected everything I touched. Education, career, marriage, all other relationships, just everything.
Now, my family will argue that, with these writings, I have failed to take responsibility for my own actions and decisions. Let me put that to rest here, in what I hope will be my final essay in this series. Yes absolutely, I am responsible for my failures and shortcomings. All of them.
I was unprepared and incomplete, and ultimately I am responsible for these shortcomings. I should have and perhaps could have addressed this at a much earlier age.
I certainly could have distanced myself from my parents decades earlier. It was a relationship that often appeared healthy and normal, but only because I forgave their past transgressions. I thought that was the right thing to do. I once read that becoming a healthy adult starts with forgiving your parents. So I did that. For more than thirty years.
It was a mistake.
In the long run, I struggled with the expected, my parents' expectations, which I never met, and they devalued me for it. Their's was a conditional love. The disapproval and disappointment and depreciation built up over the decades until it all inevitably burst. By this time, I was fifty-two years old.
And that was just the start of my journey. I still remember the date, Wednesday, 29 May 2019. That was when, finally, belatedly, I asked...Why? The writings in this collection have been my attempt to answer that question. But by this age, the consequences were insurmountable. So while my mental health has improved, I struggle everyday with the consequences.
I addressed the expected consequences in The Shadow, the very first essay in this collection. It is the most important piece I have written on this topic, even though I have never been completely satisfied with it. I never felt that it adequately captured the damage.
Maybe that is simply not possible. I cannot fully elucidate the damage; it is just too bleak and depressing. But my life today is a simmering synthesis of it all. And today, my family looks down on me for my struggles and my failures. My parents enjoy complete impunity for their unacknowledged derelictions. As I have written previously, parental impunity is the hallmark of our family.
My siblings have shorter memories and benefited from marginally more reasonable parents. This helped them meet the required parental expectations. So their family unit remains intact. Such as it is.
As a child I was consigned to a lifelong solitary existence. And to this day, I struggle with depression and underdeveloped self-esteem and deeply-seated latent anger, and all of the failings I first described in The Shadow. This is the answer to my Why. These damages are still present, but at least today I recognize them for what they are and where they came from. But they have cost me everything.
It was only after I began this journey that I was able to form just one altogether healthy relationship. My wife's unconditional love sustains me. It is all I have. It is no exaggeration to say that she saved my life. But my death would give my parents a final out. They would say, as they surely do already, well he was always troubled.
No, I was not troubled. I was damaged.
