The other day sparked a series of memories that I want to bring up today, I think I have spoken of my adoptive father before but hey, I talk about what is heavy on my mind here because all of it impacts my writing and my day to day life. Maybe someone will see the not so fun posts and know they are not alone when that is the worst feeling to be stuck in. They are not pleasant memories I am mentioning today because when I say I have a dark past I am not kidding about that. I have talked about my narcissistic mother, I have talked about my living situation that I am enduring, now it is time to touch on my father. Now I am going to be very clear on this, I am talking about my adoptive father, not my biological father whom I have started building a relationship with since finding him on social media of all places.

I am not sure why my mother got involved with this man in the first place. We will call him John. Perhaps it was her own need to be in the center of attention on feel like the world revolved around her, or maybe she hid my heritage from him. As a child you could not tell I was half native very easily at all. They got together when I was 2-3 and they got married by the time I was four, just the right age to be a flower girl. He treated me well as far as I can recall until I was six when his first biological child came along. That was when I noticed the differences in how he would react to me vs before and was confusing to me yet I learned fast not to question things, two hour time out’s in the corner, standing with your nose to the wall that get’s rest if that nose leaves the wall or you move to much will do that to you, especially when that timer does not start till you stop crying.

I noticed differences as my other siblings came along when it came to birthdays first. They got to have their school friend’s over for a party or set up a swimming pool birthday party etc. I got something small with my grandparents, siblings and my grandparents that was it really. I may have not had the best social skills at school but I still had friends so it didn’t make sense to me. When this came to my attention I also noticed differences at Christmas, concert tickets for them, and a Tamagotchi for me. Don’t get me wrong, the value of the gift has never been a thing for me, it has always been the thought, however when it comes to huge ass differences with how one kid is treated vs three others that is a different story.

He would happily go through my diary and journal even as a teenager and ground me for what I put in there especially if it was about him. He was physically abusive as well as mentally. I didn’t get a lot of his comments to me until my parents split and I found out he as my adopted father in an effort to undermine him by my mother. Then the slurs were glaringly obvious. His comments on how when I would talk I could power different things any time I talked actually made it so even to this day I tend to be to quiet. My punishments would be more severe then my siblings, one resulted in a broken arm. I would try to break up my parent’s physical fights because I would always see them and was concerned for my siblings and them seeing them because I know what it was like at that age to see it.

When I look back at photos as I started to mature there are some very questionable photos with hand placement on him. I also had at a young age noticed his emotions never met his eyes ever this is also noticeable in photos as well. I was taught to do laundry when I was at his place by doing all the laundry and having to ‘go look it up you know how to use a computer’, dishes were up to me along with most basic household chores. By the time I hit my teen years I was getting tired of always being in the middle of my divorced parents, listening to them vent about the other in great detail. I was getting tired of being belittled, my mother went after my appearance, he went after anything he could. When it came to homework if I was grounded from the computer I was not allowed to access the computer even when homework needed access to it. Marks were never good enough, oddly when I left home and went to high school through a distance learning based program my marks went from barely passing to honors. Funny how that one worked.

A lot of his stuff was subtle and to this day I am still going wtf to memories that I recall. He has also chosen to side with a daughter of his that actually tried to incite some extreme violence against me, sending drug addicts to my home, I was getting death threats. He still expects me to play nice with her and go to family gatherings despite the restraining order. He will help my siblings with many things, including a new car when they started driving. Now I get the oldest tends to get the short end of the straw at times because they are still learning a lot about parenting however there are things you do not do. He has always gone after my mental health, telling me I am making to big of a deal of things, or to just forgive (forgive doesn’t mean things go back to how they were), or saying ‘this might be the last time your grandparents get to see you guys all at once they are getting older’ or snide comments ‘I just wish all my kids were here and could get along’.

When you take your ex, who has his very own post here with you to family gatherings or get togethers with your father and that ex is the one who calls him out a good 3-4 times in a single hour on bullshit there is something wrong. I tolerate him as best I can for my grandparent’s sake, it would break my grandmas heart one of the four individuals who never treated me differently then any of the other kids when I was growing up. I have learned to not ask for help from him as an adult, the text message back that takes an hour to read that makes you cry within the first few sentences and feel like your useless will do that.

As a teen, he and I got into a fight because I was learning to set boundaries and expect them to be kept. I can’t recall what this one was about, I do recall it was on the stairs he was coming up them as I was going down. He was often hands on when giving me shit or telling me how I did whatever it was that day wrong, this was one of those days. Given the location it probably had to do with laundry. I told him twice to get his hands off me before breaking his grip. A new trick a friend at school at taught me. To this day he will argue that I just randomly tried to push him down the stairs. I didn’t know that this wasn’t how things were, I thought many of my friends when I was good enough to go and hang out at their home were spoiled by their parents when as a parent myself I know that is what I should have been getting not what I was living.

After I turned 16 and a fight ended up with me landing on the floor with one hell of a bruise on my arm he refused to let me leave the house, I was actually scared that day and tried to get out my bedroom window not knowing there was a trigger on it that let him know any time the window was opened. He caught me half out the window and hauled me back in, I still have issues putting the after effects of him catching me doing that into words. I ended up moving back in with my mother which only lasted a few months before I refused to put up with either of them and left home, I only returned when I was pregnant and that is part of the abuse I dealt with regarding my mother what happened then. At one point I did end up staying in his home for a few weeks due to issues with a new apartment we were moving into not being ready. I wasn’t allowed to have the code for the locks on the doors, the garage or the alarm code in my 30s.

There are many things I can tell you that he has said or done over the years, it got to the point that at family gatherings I show up and tend to find a quiet corner and stay there for a polite amount of time and then leave, as a kid I would find a place to hide with a book. They were my escape, my way to cope with what I was dealing with. However it is the stuff I can’t tell you that scares me, I have a lot of blocked memories of my time with him and that doesn’t happen for any random reason. I do recall as a preteen when we were doing the counselling thing overhearing him get diagnosed as a sociopath. I recall learning his patterns so I could avoid thing with him. I also know the few good memories with him are really superficial. You can always tell when I am having a hard time with his attitude because I am using his given name. I know when he is treating me well that he is going to ask something of me that I am not going to like at all. I also know until a few years ago to him anything mental health was a load of crap and just excuses for people to not behave until he had his own mental health crisis, now suddenly it exists and is valid.

I have faced a lot of abuse over my life, from my parents, one sibling in particular, which lead to me being blind to a lot of the signs of abuse and toxic individuals I would date. It wasn’t until the past decade or so that I started to really learn the impact he had on me and start working towards healing and accepting myself. I still catch myself repeating the negative things he would say to me “you talk to me” and always being nervous with anyone that I have done exactly that or “you earned it” when it came to guys I was with. Almost every single ex I have was abusive. I faced physical abuse less then I did mental and that saying “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is a load of shit. Words will hurt you the worst and they haunt you, in some cases to this day I am certain they will haunt me till the day I die. It has caused friction in relationships because I can be slow to meet up in the first place so I come off as high needs when straight up, I am scared to trust my own judgement when it comes to people. I do not have a great track record with that. I have started to create ways to reduce the odds of that happening yet I can be very timid about new people and meeting them in person even if I have talked to them for a decent amount of time and I always feel bad about it. They don’t deserve to deal with the fall out of my darker past and yet it is there, I can’t change it and I can’t change how it has impacted me with how I handle things. I also would not change it though. These experiences make me who I am today, the bad and the good form me as a whole. Accepting that has gone a long way towards not being so hard on myself but to say the least my self esteem and confidence in myself are really low, and I fight every day to improve it yet it seems to be the area I am most vulnerable in as well. Words tend to have a huge impact on me, to the point they can turn my favorite thing into a punishment at times, even if that favorite thing is still a favorite thing after.

You can learn to carry the weight of all of this stuff, you can forgive those people for your own sake, you can refuse to let them affect anything further then those few moments or sometimes day depending on the situation. Every day is a new day, every day is a chance to begin again, every day is a day I am still alive. I am a survivor which is in my blood. I refuse to give in more then I must, and each time I dust myself off the next time it impacts me less and I get back up faster. The thing I hate though are the black area’s in my memory because as they open they are never good things so I have no way of knowing what may trigger those memories. I have also learned to stand my ground extremely well when it comes to an established boundary, maybe to well at times. I am who I am because of what I have lived and even if I could go back and change things I wouldn’t it is as simple as that, I don’t want to be someone else. I want to be me and that is part of me.

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