Amends

As a kid, trying to appease my step dad was like constantly pushing against a door with tornado on the other side. It always blew back open.

Then as a teenager, my emotions and self-will started to spill beyond the intimidation of him I felt.

When I was 15, I was with a group of friends who were caught with alcohol. I had never touched alcohol. I was terrified of it—in fact, sobriety had been a sacred vow to myself.

Don’t give me that bullshit. No one is going to be around beer an not drink.

On top of having my vow be called a lie, my punishment was harsher than any of my drinking friends. I lost my temper like I never had before and the next day he said:

I’m turning all control of you over to you’re mother. You’re out of control.

Bullies want easy targets and indeed, the older I got, the the more he backed off. And the more he backed off, the more shut the door felt—like turning the second, then third lock. And with each lock-turn I relaxed more.

I was so focused to not disturbing the fragile peace, I didn’t recognize the next two years as a decrescendo of his volatile behavior.

By the time he moved out, we had a very civil relationship. When ge got remarried two years later, I went to his wedding. I even went to his new house for dinners.

At 22, after a time of that shut door feeling safely shut, memories from all the years of abuse started to visit me: Blaming me for our dog being run over, holding my head under water, the constant yelling. One by one, these memories shocked me.

I stopped thinking of him as someone I simply smoothed out a bumpy past with. I stopped going to his house for dinner. I stopped talking to him.

I un-forgave him.

In art school I started working with images of dead civil war soldiers and of burly men who scared me.

In critiques, it didn’t resonate with others when I explained that these were to do with my complicated relationship with masculinity. But when I related my feelings about masculinity with stories about my step dad, I was told:

That is what this work is about, your step dad. Focus on that.

With a typewriter, I typed out a list of events and things he said.

• I was his scapegoat.
• I was a mosquito.
• I took it.
• I was the excess baggage that came with wife.
• Memory of his voice makes me scared.
• If I looked too comfortable on the couch he’d make me clean the yard.
• I had to weed his garden for summer vacation.
• He made me run laps in the hay field because I was fat.
• He took credit.
• His new TV was off limits.
• His new VCR was off limits.
• The stereo was off limits.
• He ran over a kitten in a driveway and pretended not to notice, even after it’s crying six year old owner did.
• I lived under his roof.
• I owed him.
• My friends didn’t stay the night.
• When he ate barbeque, the sauce would drizzle down his forearm.
• When brushed his teeth, the toothpaste would drizzle down his forearm.
• When I became better than him at bad mitten, he made a rule that I had to serve it directly to him.
• When I told him to fuck off he chased me into the back yard, pushed me onto the hood of the car, punched my face, and said “you’re going to learn some respect”.
• He choked my mom once.
• His potato chips were off limits.
• His lunch meat was off limits.
• He almost caused a car accident, then ignored the driver trying to confront him.
• I threw up after a bowl of oatmeal. He made me eat another bowl.
• When he got mad while driving, he he would turn up the music loud and drive fast.
• Once, when I was winning an argument, he interjected: “If you want to get physical, we’ll get physical.”

By the end of college, I had just begun to recognize the feelings that I had to stuff to survive living it.

The year I graduated college, at my sister’s high school graduation party, I saw him for the first time in several years.

When he greeted me, I felt obliged to be polite and so I returned his hug.

Who he didn’t realize was also at this party was his son from a previous marriage, whom he hadn’t seen in 19 years. My sister’s half sibling. My step brother until he and his sister heartbreakingly, suddenly, stopped visiting when I was five. The neutered explanation was that it was over a child support dispute.

Then someone at the party spilled the beans to my step dad.

From his comments over the years I could tell it was deeply painful for him to have lost his children. I thought his reaction would have been to burst into tears of love and run with open arms and an aching heart. Or tears from devastating shame, for his actions that were the real cause of his absence, and a thousand of “I’m sorry”s on his lips.

But instead, he said, with cold contempt:

Who invited him?

He was still exactly the person I grew up with, he had no capacity to take responsibility for himself. Despite that, he tried to make an apology to me.

Weeks prior, he asked my mom what year I was born. The fact that he didn’t know made me think of a gift he gave me as a kid.

This is a set of US coins sealed in this case. Never open it because it will be a collector’s item one day. It’s from your birth year.

Despite only being able to look at them, I liked studying their shiny newness and the details on the coins. Including the year. Which was not the year I was born. I was baffled how, as an adult, let alone my father figure, didn’t know what year I was born. I knew his birth date and I was just a kid.

Ahead of the party, his question made me wonder if he planned to give me a gift for my own college graduation. Then I wondered if my growing distance the past couple of years had prompted an amends from him, which I knew was part of 12 Step programs.

At the end of the party, he pulled me aside. He had a wrapped gift, about the size of a sealed set of US coins.

I have something for you.

If this was a amend, I knew, like my polite hug, I would have felt obligated to just say “that’s ok”, pouring water on my fragile uncovering of the hurt and anger that I was just starting to find access to.

Even if I could see the depth and shape of all the hurt, my self esteem was still an ant hill and my words to say how I really felt would not have come to me. And despite all the hurt I received from him, I was afraid to hurt his feelings. So I said:

Give that to me another time.

He said “okay”, walked away, and that was the last conversation I’ve had with him.

I hoped he would take my meaning as:

I support what you’re trying to do for your own recovery and maybe even to help me heal. But I’m not in a place to receive it, though I’m open to it down the road.

But he didn’t. Years later he complained to my mom:

That stuff is in the past and I’ve changed. I tried to make amends with him but he wouldn’t accept it. The ball is in his court.

Really?

With all of the effort he put into terrorizing and bullying me, that’s all the effort he could muster for an apology?

And if he’s telling himself that since 12 Step says not to make amends if it will harm the other person and therefore he’s respecting my boundaries by waiting for me to tell him that “another time” could be now, I say: how convenient that when he’s finally thinking of what’s good for me is when it means he doesn’t have to take responsibility for himself.