Since before I was born, my dad’s temper used to scare me silly. If pre-birth is an exaggeration, maybe it wasn’t until I was out of the womb and contemplating taking my first breath. I vaguely remember him threatening me with the back of his hand if I didn’t shape up and start inhaling.
Like many young girls who look up to their all-powerful fathers, he seemed larger than life. His haywire lack of control was definitely grandiose, and he used his tirades to incapacitate people, including me. No minutia was too insignificant to trigger his fury. He’d throw malfunctioning lawn mowers and chain saws as far as he could heave them. Any physical object that didn’t do as he ordered faced similar consequences.
It may be tempting to picture him as a large brut. To the contrary, he was fairly thin and just 5-foot-10. He was a painfully ordinary man. He drove a truck for a living and took the disrespect he received on the job out on my siblings, me and our mom.
She used to nearly cower in fear during his verbal assaults. I’d like to say heaven help her, but heaven never did. For some reason, tax time was particularly agitating. She was their typist, given that she was a secretary, and he was the dictator, given his natural dictatorial abilities. Without fail, each year some stumbling block would arise on the 1040 and he’d lash out and start screaming at her until her eyes overflowed, yet she’d sit there in a stupor and take it like good wives in those days seemed to take many things.
His temper tantrums used to launch me past fear into a strange realm of blankness. I can remember feeling frozen and diffused, as though having an out-of-body experience, or at least trying to, while waiting for the tsunami to blow over.
The challenge was that sometimes he was funny. Not every minute was he harsh. Sometimes he made jokes. He could usually make people laugh in a random grocery-store encounter. I always felt afraid if people didn’t laugh at his jokes, because he’d let loose insults like daggers.
I frankly never knew what would come out of his mouth, so his unpredictable moods usually took me off guard. Once I remember looking inside a shopping bag that he’d brought home after an excursion with my mom. I can remember him happily putting the bag down on the table and smiling at me. He didn’t say anything. He just kept smiling and not talking. I wanted to know what the strange happiness was about, so I hesitatingly peeked inside the bag as he watched me. Every step of the way he watched me.
When I saw various toys inside the bag, I beamed at him. What a happy moment. He shopped for us. I could tell he picked out some of it himself and was happy about it. I wanted to hug him, but of course, touching did not occur in our household, so I stood there happily basking in the glory. Joy warmed my heart. My dad cared.
Suddenly, without warning, he pushed the bag away and spat out, “Fine, don’t wait for Christmas. Just spoil it right now,” and stomped out of the room.
Huh? What happened? I wasn’t supposed to look? Why didn’t he tell me not to peek? If only he’d have bloody told me that it was a bloody secret for bloody Christmas, I would not have looked. He made it seem like I deliberately stuck a knife in his heart. I wasn’t just devastated. I was crushed.
Over the years, somehow I kept hurting him repeatedly by walking into encounters like this. I never tried to hurt him, yet it kept happening. The guilt I felt being in the same room with him was overpowering. At some point, my blankness-beyond-fear grew and grew until I learned not to make a move until he told me what to do. I believe it turned into not having thoughts of my own until he told me what to think. I’d literally sit in a room with him and not move, waiting for instructions, waiting for him to talk, waiting for his approval of some action I might take, up until I was 18.
The day I left for college, my mind didn’t suddenly mature. My experience and wisdom didn’t magically flesh out and fill in so that I understood not to take orders from guys. Too bad, because it would have prevented a lot of painful choices, including the choice to have an abortion in college when I’d had sex with a guy for no other reason than fear of hurting his feelings if I’d said no.
This country would do well to start backing up on the abortion debate and questioning why, over and over again, tens of millions of times since Roe vs. Wade, women and girls have had careless sex, risking their bodies and futures and ending up backed into a pregnancy corner with no real choices. Choosing to have an abortion reminds me of the choice my older brother used to give me when he was old enough to copy my dad: “Do you want a kick or a hit?”
Real choice means choosing to stay out of the pregnancy corner.
Happy Fathers’ Day to the caring fathers out there. You know who you are. So do your daughters. If you have them tricked now, it won’t last forever.
To those of you who treat your daughters like my dad treated me, please open your hearts and love them like they desperately need to be loved. You only get one shot at it. Every move they make in the future will have something to do with the way you’re treating them right now.
Kathy Ayers lives in Littleton.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
