I woke up today with the worst cramps I can remember having. Doubled over in pain, feeling like I needed to throw up.  Fun times. Being a woman can be really awesome sometimes!  I find that sometimes when I try to deal with the issues with dad, I get cramps and pelvic pain, even if it’s not the right time of my cycle.  I suppose my body is reminding me of some of the pain, just as I had been getting paid in my arms and shoulders and neck all this time.

On Friday, I saw an energy healer at a local shop.  I can have trouble relaxing and really tuning in to a session when I’m not convinced the person is legitimate, and I started the session with some qualms.  It ended up being interesting more than helpful.  It was supposed to be energy healing, and honestly, I could see and feel that not much was being done.  She gave a lot of information, but it was mostly a set-up to how very much of her work she thought I needed to come back for.

With that said, she did hone in on the spots that hurt the most for me:  right under my shoulder blade, the top of my shoulder, my collar bone, throat, back of neck, the lump hidden under my hair on the back of my head, right jaw.  All “my” spots.   She seemed to know a lot about what had actually happened, too. Things I hadn’t told anyone yet.  Many things I’d only told one friend.  So I have no doubt she can read intuitively from the body. She knew dad had shaken me by the shoulders and held me down that way. She knew he strangled me.  She knew he’d forced me into oral sex.  She could feel that in my face, jaw, throat.  She gagged a lot as she worked and kept talking about how I’d vomit up black sludge later.  She kept talking about it. It got me worked up, and honestly a bit re-traumatized, and before I knew it it was much later, a much longer session than I’d agreed to for her work. I felt pretty manipulated, especially when I checked in and nothing much worse than I did before working with her. Nothing had shifted away; I felt like I was buried under more.

But she kept gong on, claiming my dad had been with me in many lives and was driven to control me.  Fixated on it.  She told me in one life, when he had been my stepmother, he killed me as a baby. Threw me off a cliff.  “He” didn’t want me, I was in his way.  (In my childhood and especially adolescence, he frequently made me feel like I was in his way).

She described him as cruel.  It was only in those moments that I remembered just how cruel he was.  How I worried that some day he would get really mad and actually kill me.  Now, I think, he would have done it out of spite if he thought he wouldn’t get caught or have to deal with the consequences.  The way she described him sounded like a monster.  Maybe that is the benefit of that iffy lesson, that I have to remember that he was a monster!

All this time I’ve been almost feeling sorry for him, acting as if HE was the victim, just because I know he had a bad childhood.  That childhood didn’t FORCE him to become a monster.  My childhood was as bad or worse, and I turned out to be a good person. He always had a choice.  He just made the self-centered one.  She described him as if he was a demon. Can a demon live with a person who talks about God, holds a bible, goes to church? Sometimes I have trouble reconciling the things that were taught to me (parents, church) with lived experience.  They’d tell me evil is afraid of god, the church, the bible… I’ve seen evil laugh at the naivety of that idea.

I think sometimes I want there to be an explanation external to him – that he was possessed or influenced, so it wasn’t just… him doing the things he did.   Maybe he was just a monster, though.  My mom from time to time brings up that she thinks he’s in Heaven… like, okay, lady, if heaven actually existed, he wouldn’t be there. Not if there was any sense of justice. He should be in Hell.  Of course, Hell for my father would just be not having anyone to manipulate, not having anyone that would admire him, idolize him, trust him, believe in him.  Eventually I will forgive him, but I will never look up to him.  I will always see him as a child molester, a wife beater, a child abuser, a pathological liar, a cheater, a hypocrite.  I will always wish I had a different father, or that he had left us or died when I was young.

I remember one time when he was in a car accident, I think when I was 11 or 12. He had been taking a class in another city, someone ran a red light and hit him. When someone (my grandmother? an aunt?) left a message for us, they made it sound like he was critically injured. I remember feeling a thrill, at the idea he might die, and quickly covering it up. Feeling guilty at my reaction. Suppressing that memory as soon as I could.  It turned out he’d just had mild whiplash.

That can’t be normal, right?  And yet, I remember now that when he actually did die, my reaction wasn’t to cry.  I went into the bathroom because I felt like throwing up. I think I did? I can’t remember any more. I ended up taking a shower and then meeting a relative who was going to drive me “home.” (Writing this now, it’s difficult to think of that place as “home”). My mom had arranged the ride assuming I couldn’t drive.  I think I would have been fine.  The relative was kind of a mess.  I remember I was not crying.  The first time I cried was that night our school’s football game, at the beginning of the game they made an announcement and had a moment of silence.  I remember hugging one of my siblings and crying a little. I pitied us for having to be in that moment.  My brother didn’t have a good game.  Why did we let him play? Somehow we let him feel pressured into it, as if dad would expect him to go on anyway? Who cares what dad would have wanted?  It was terrible to let him do that.  We were just lucky he didn’t get hurt.

I remember crying at the casket at the funeral home with my siblings, but I wasn’t really crying for dad, I was crying for us.  For how fucked up our lives were going to become. For our loss of innocence and security.  I remember thinking: it didn’t even look like him. They colored his hair or something, too dark.  He looked too tanned.  Too smoothed out.  Basically, he didn’t look like someone who had been out drinking and smoking as much as he liked, so he didn’t look like himself .  Maybe that was good, for people not to remember him as he really was.  They could keep pretending that he had been what he wanted them to see, not what who he was.