This chapter is part of the Jean case narrative series. Use the series navigation below to move through the account in order.
The Price for Seeing My Father
Every time my father visited, I would get a beating. Every time I spent visitation hours with him ( they were not mandatory, any of the children could decline to go at any time), it wouldn't matter if I said nothing, or did nothing. Some bizarre connection had formed in my mother's mind with her crazy mantra of "You're just like your father" until beating me must have become a substitute for the physical harm she wished she could inflict on him for having made the terrible decision not to give in to her every whim.
When the court finally granted my father the right to unsupervised weekend visits alone at his apartment (against continued groundless protests from Jean) my brother and sister did not want to go. I can't imagine an anguish greater than having one's children kidnapped, and then when returned, returned broken, brainwashed, afraid and uncaring. I read a quote once that said "If you want to hurt someone who has nothing left, give them back something broken". That's what my mother did.
I chose to go on those weekend visits. It was painful and lonely. I felt guilty that I was there, and that my brother and sister were not. I wanted things to be like they were before, and I could tell it hurt my father deeply. And there was always the tension about going home. Because I knew, no matter what, even if I was to hide in my room and not say a word, the beating would come. And as I'd matured, half a head taller than my mother already, they got worse. As though she thought the bigger I was, the more I could take. Or the more I reminded her of my father. And she would back me into the corner of whatever room I was in, and flail at me until she was too tired to hit me anymore.
No one can stand for that kind of abuse without developing a rage of their own. My own rage, when it broke, was something terrible. I would lash out, punch walls, break knuckles, because if I ever lost control when she was beating me, and lashed out at her instead there was no doubt there would be blood on my hands when it was done. She had ruined our lives, and she was killing me day by day with her abuse. And I still had years more to take.
Our apartment was small. You had to cut through two adjoining bedrooms to reach the third. Jean would leave this door open at night so that a little light could creep in, because apparently she and Dick had difficulty finding the knob after a night of drinking. And with the door partially open, they would go at each other with complete sexual abandon, regardless of the hour and without regard for the fact that a ten and thirteen year old boy were twelve feet away and quite obviously aware of the situation.
It's kind of difficult for a woman to preach family values when she's screwing her boyfriend loud enough to keep her kids awake every night in the next room.
Never once did my father have a woman at his apartment while I was there as a child, or even a young adult. These details show the truth in who really cared for our physical and mental well being, and who wanted to establish some moral understanding and growth. It wasn't Jean. Her only thought, only motivation, was always "ME".
Even moments that should have been high points in my life, she somehow managed to destroyed. At fourteen, I went away to summer camp. I sold raffle tickets for months to earn enough to go away for two weeks.
And when I returned, it was to have my eleven year old brother tell me about an incident at the house that to me became part of my mother's observable and unusual pattern. Another of my Uncle Tim's young friends, "Stevie", barely in his twenties, lived just around the corned from our house. While Dick was apparently away, my mother had him over. She pulled my sterio out of the room I shared with my brother, with the it blaring in the next room in an apparent (and unsuccessful) attempt to cover their sounds, she was mounting this young man too. The fact that my brother heard and knew about the whole thing and was obviously bothered by it, and that according to my brother it happened early in the evening, and that she ignored him and my sister for hours, and that she just didn't care enough about anyone but herself to at least be discreet about her attraction to younger men, all made me sick when I got home.
Throughout high school, this situation continued.
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