by j. parker For a large portion of my childhood, my father worked the second shift. He claimed that he did this to earn the shift bonus that came with the less desirable hours. My mother claimed it was so he could avoid her and the duties of raising children. Were I him, I may have made the same choice. By the time I reached adolescence, I had come to the realization that my mother was a drunk who emotionally and verbally abused everyone around her, and was physically abusive towards my father. In regards to his work schedule, I'm not really sure who was telling the truth.

Regardless of his motives, I rarely saw my father during the week for a span of about 8 years. During the day I was at school, and during the evenings my dad left us alone with my unstable, marginally functional, alcoholic mother. In many ways I had two parents who were just "phoning it in," so to speak.

One warm early fall night when I was 8 years old, my father was at work and my mother was screaming into the phone at him.. This was normal. They would fight for hours on the phone every night. (Another benefit of the second shift was that he was the only employee in the office, allowing for these arguments.) My brother was in the living room playing, and I was monitoring their conversation from my usual listening post which sat just down the short hallway to our kitchen where my mother sat, drank, smoked and talked on the phone for a majority of the day. If she wasn't arguing with my father, she was arguing with her mother, brothers, or half-sister, or gossiping with the old ladies in the neighborhood.

As a result, before my brother learned to talk, I spent most of my time alone. But even after he learned to talk, he and I were very different people who didn't have much in common. He lived in a very physical world with trucks, and footballs, and army men, while I lived in my head. He and I really didn't interact that well.

I learned to entertain myself for hours with nothing more than a box of crayons and some paper, drawing elaborate depictions of the control panels of spacecraft or writing stories. And Legos. I loved Legos. I can still, 25 years later, get lost for hours in a box of Legos. Legos always worked the way they should. Legos were never capricious or illogical. Legos never scared you by acting irrational. Legos didn't blame you when things went badly. Legos provided me with a refuge of logic and sanity where things made sense.

This was important because on nights like this, nothing in my world made sense to me. My mother argued over the phone with my father for hours that night. I'd become a skilled eavesdropper by that age as a result of my fear of what would come from those conversations and I sat in my usual listening position, leaning against the wall in the dining room with my legs pulled tightly to my chest. She always sat on the same stool in the same place in the kitchen with her back to the dining room. The phone cord was stretched taught across the room, there was a beer on the counter and a cigarette in her hand. I cocked my head around the corner, hoping to turn my ear towards the vitriolic argument without being noticed. This clandestine sort of listening was a survival tactic in my childhood

She spoke rapidly in shrill tones, her left hand, complete with cigarette, waving smoke in the air, her outstretched finger pointing at things and people that were only there in her mind's eye. The words were always different. (With the exception of "bastard." She loved to call my father a bastard.) But, the themes were always the same.

"You don't love me, you bastard!" or "You cheated on me you bastard." or "You leave me stuck here at home to care for your kids while you go gallivanting all over town, you bastard!" She would always emphasize bastard like she was a preacher, and was speaking the name of the LORD.

The most common topic of discussion was "cheating," both real and imagined. I knew what it meant to "sleep around" on your spouse, and that my parents had both participated in such nefarious activities. Long before the protracted argument I was hearing that night, I'd overheard my mother, screaming at my father, "You BASTARD, you fucked that whore in our bed. Our marital bed! Where our children were conceived!"

Then there was the all-out free-for-all that occurred after my father caught my mother in the backseat of a car with one of the regulars from the restaurant where she worked.

I lay in bed and listened. Waiting for the seemingly inevitable, "oh my God, what have I done?" I was expecting one of them to do serious harm to the other. And, it almost happened that night. Sometime, during that battle, my mother grabbed a knife and chased my father around the house, slashing wildly,and slicing a 2 foot gash in the large painting of Sigmund Freud that hung in our living room.

I know it was 2 feet. The following morning, I measured.

In retrospect I realize that the ins and outs of marital infidelity are things an 8 year-old, for his or her sanity, shouldn't know. When I first grasped what had happened, I knew it was wrong. It made me immensely sad, scared and angry to realize that my parents would jeopardize our family for their own selfish desires, and it made me frustrated to the point of rage that there was nothing I could do to stop it. At first, I lashed out and screamed at them. As a matter of propriety and out of a general awkwardness about sex, I couldn't bring myself to scream, "HOW DARE YOU FUCK OUR FAMILY AWAY YOU DIRTY ROTTEN LOATHSOME WHORES!" That's what I was thinking. But instead, I threw things, I shouted "STOP IT! STOP IT NOW!" at the top of my lungs. But, my real feelings, I kept them all inside, learning to live with an overwhelming sense of impending doom that I have to this day, and breaking down into hysterical fits at random, seemingly inappropriate times.

For example, when I was in second grade and my father was in Chicago on business, I broke down sobbing in class for no apparent reason. The teacher, Mrs. Nicholson, looked at me and said sternly, "what's wrong? Why are you crying?"

"My dad. I'm scared about my dad."

"Why?"

Being unable to tell the truth and say that my parent's marriage was falling apart, my home life was a wreck that left me shaking most of the time, and I was dealing with crippling problems trying to relate to my classmates, I tried to make up the best response that my second grade brain could muster.

"He's in Chicago."

I blubbered and sobbed some more. The words didn't want to come. So, I just spit out what I could.

"I'm...I'm afraid that the Sears Tower is going to fall on him."

Not being the touchy-feely sort that you'd expect for a primary school teacher, she simply reassured me that the "Sears Tower was fine" the last time she was in Chicago and admonished me that I should "stop crying and disturbing the class." She then went back to teaching us about the ins and outs of phonics, or whatever it is that's important to second grade teachers.

Despite the immediate anxiety that I felt when I first learned about fucking around on one's partner, over time, I became relatively desensitized to and completely indifferent to its practical and moral ramifications. I just ignored them, mostly out of a sense of self-preservation. Parents drunk again and fucking the neighbors? Eh, who cares?

This also meant that, at very early age, I accepted that infidelity in a relationship was par for the course. Combined with my deep-seated sense of insecurity that made me accept short-term rewards rather than strive for long-term success, this would come back to haunt me in my own relationships as an adult. I would find myself compelled to cheat on my girlfriends, and with little intrinsic moral opposition to doing so. While it seems that most are endued with this as part of their moral compass, I had to find my own way.

Though my parents' arguments about extra-marital activities were most prevalent and probably most important, there were plenty of other topics to be covered. A less frequent, yet rather disturbing, theme of the arguments was mother's fixation with the notion that my paternal grandmother had a bizarre attachment to my father and uncles. My mother, to this day, views my grandmother as a feminine archetype who will always overshadow her in my father's mind. Given that none of my uncles have been able to sustain normal, healthy adult relationships with women, I would tend to believe there is actually some merit to my mother's assertion.

My grandmother was a domineering, sociopathic, alcoholic whore, and I truly believe that she is the woman that my father and uncles have been chasing their entire lives. Four of them, in their late 40s and early 50s, still live in the house where they were raised, across the street from the Catholic grade school they attended. Their marriages failed, they all moved back home to live with mommy, and never left. The house was willed to them, and they will most likely live there for the rest of their lives.

There's little wonder that my mother tried best she could to mimic her. She nearly reached that goal, and I believe that's why my parents' marriage survived where my uncles' ultimately failed.

The topic that always worried me most was that of myself. My palms got clammy and I became generally anxious when they discussed me, and to a lesser extent, my brother. My mother constantly accused my father of not wanting to have children, especially me. If my mother's portrait of events was accurate, my father never held me, rarely played with me, and pretty much didn't acknowledge my existence beyond his annoyance for the first two years of my life. He didn't even show up for my birth, choosing to go out with his buddies and drink instead. I was at best, cheap entertainment, but, more often than not, something to be pawned off or even eliminated at the first opportunity.

However, as disturbing as these themes were, the words I heard this night chilled me to the bone.

"I'm going to fucking kill myself, but I'm gonna kill your fucking kids first, you bastard...oh, you don't care? Well, fuck you, man! FUCK YOU!" Echoed out of the kitchen as I sat momentarily frozen on the floor.

I can still hear those words. I'll never forget them. It's the fear that makes me remember.

I sprinted to the living room where my 4 year-old brother sat rolling his Tonka trucks across the room with the obligatory "Vroom! Vroom!" I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out the front door. I remember hiding beside the porch, hyperventilating, trying to explain to my brother that we had to run away until our father came home. I remember crying. After that, I only vaguely recall what happened.

I remember going to a neighbor's house, and explaining that my mother was drunk again and I was scared. They let my brother and me play with their kids and watch TV and the adrenaline rush waned. I remember falling asleep on their couch and having awful nightmares. They must have called my parents, most likely my father. As dysfunctional as my neighborhood was, everyone knew and looked out for the neighbors, sometimes for the better, but usually for the worse.

They probably knew that a call to my mother would have merely resulted in her storming across the street to "rescue" her children as she did on several occasions. I'm not really sure where my mother thought we were. If I had to guess, I'd say that she maintained laser-like focus on verbally assaulting my father until she got too drunk to talk, then stumbled into the other room to lose consciousness.

My next memory of that night is of my father waking me up as I slept on a neighbors couch and carrying my brother and me home. My mother was passed out on the sofa, surrounded by beer cans, and snoring away, blissfully ignorant of the trauma she'd inflicted. The following morning, she recalled none of it.

But, I'll never feel safe again.

Posted by J. Parker at 12:00 AM

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