This was what my mother sang when she was mad at my father. It was an adaptation of a Tex Williams song from a few years earlier and she would sing it when my father would abuse her to block him out and to annoy him at the same time.
My mother had stopped being afraid of my father. For many years, earlier in their marriage, she would take the verbal and physical abuse without complaint. As if she deserved it. But now, she was stronger, both physically and emotionally.
“Why don’t you smoke yourself to death,” yells my father over the top of her singing. I hear the fridge door slam closed. Everything in it rattles.
I hate my father.
When the bottles in the fridge stop rattling, I hear my father say “You’re a bitch”.
“Then why do you keep coming back?” my mother asks.
“It’s my house,” he says.
“Maybe if you paid something for it but until then you may as well stay away” says my mother.
I can hear them moving around in the kitchen.
“Oh you’re a big man” says my mother sarcastically. “Does it make you feel good to hit a woman?”
One of the coats has started to slide off my bed and I struggle with my burn to pull it up again. I want to call my mother to help me but I know I can’t. “Stay in bed” is all she would say and I would make my father madder.
I don’t like listening to them fight but it’s hard not to. They always did.
I lay in bed wishing my father was dead so we could live happy. The Famous Five have been placed back under my pillow but I can’t sleep. I have pulled the worn flannelette sheet over my head and try to imagine a life without my father.
My mother starts to sing again:
“Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette…”
This time she’s interrupted by a thump followed by the clatter of dishes. I can hear my mother yelling but now the words are indecipherable.
There’s no crying. My mother is long past crying over what she can’t change but I’m worried about her. My father’s voice assaults my ears and I don’t know what to do.
I can hear thumping sounds and grunting. What if he kills my mother? I’m scared about what will happen to me if my mother dies. I don’t want to be my father’s daughter. I want him to die.
I can’t bear the sound of my father’s angry screaming voice and I can’t hear my mother anymore. I don’t know what to do. What if she’s dead? There are no more words moving through the house, just the sounds of fury and rage in a discordant melody that has replaced my mother’s singing.
I am worried that this time my mother is dead. Who will look after me? I can’t bear not to know and I slip slowly and silently from my bed.
Quietly, I pad across the hall and through the laundry to the kitchen door. I wait outside the closed door trying to decide if I should open it. I can’t help it, I have to see if my mother is dead. Quietly, I turn the door knob above my head and slowly push the door open a crack. The house is silent except for the sound of the television.
I can’t see anything so I open it a little further. Lying on the floor I see my father sleeping and as my eyes travel upwards I see my mother, bloodied, kneeling over him. With my face barely visible through the crack in the door she makes eye contact with me and screams, “Go back to bed.”
I pull the door closed and make my way back to my bed as fast as I can.
A few minutes later, I hear my mother telling my father to get up and go to bed and I hear him bouncing off the hallway walls as he staggers to his room.
My mother is alive and my father has gone to bed. I hear the sounds of my mother putting the kettle on to make herself a cup of tea and I know she’s okay. I can sleep now.
“Are you okay?” Joan asks.
I nod.
“Where did you go?”
I shrug my shoulders. “Dunno.”
18th October
Joan still wanted to work on my dad “issues” this week. I’d rather not but I have to trust that she knows what she’s doing.
My dad is pretty sick at the moment and no one expects him to live for very long. I never thought his death would affect me but it does. I spent my whole childhood wishing he was dead but now he’s close to death I’m sad about it and not really feeling that okay. Now I feel guilty for wishing he was dead.
It upsets me to think that if he needs me, he won’t be able to find me in this new house. There is nothing rational about that. He’s never been to my house no matter where I lived. I don’t understand these feelings. They create such an anxiety in me that I don’t know what to think or feel. I’ve been to see him a few times in the hospital and he looks pitiful. Nothing like the angry man I grew up knowing. I guess that’s what age and a few cerebral hemorrhages do to a person.
I worry that because my father is an alcoholic that I might be like him. Another anxiety trigger! But right now I can’t even drink water from the tap in case it makes me sick so I know I’m not an alcoholic at the moment. But I still get anxious about it.
I always thought that I had blue eyes. But when I looked at them they were kind of grey-green. I don’t know when I lost those blue eyes but like everything else they just seemed to disappear.
I’m waiting for my father to die. He’s sick and old. He hasn’t always been sick or old. I don’t remember when he was young. When I look at a photo of him with me when I was a baby he scares me. It’s like looking at a picture of the devil. When I look at him in his hospital bed I don’t see a devil. I see an old man who is sick. I wonder what caused him so much pain to make him my devil. Was it me?
My father is disappearing, like my blue eyes. One day I’ll wake up and not even remember a time when I had a father. Did I ever have a father? I whisper the words. Out loud they scare me. To have a father like mine means you don’t belong anywhere. You’re kind of stuck in a nowhere that means wherever you are, you’re in the wrong place.
I wished he’d die when he was the devil. Then not having a father gave you somewhere to go. Then you could belong in a happy place, wherever that is. I always thought I loved him but it didn’t seem to matter to him. It didn’t make him stop being the devil even when I told him I loved him. Did he think I was lying to him? Is that what made him angry?
Now he’s dying and I want him to stay. I don’t know why. Now that my memories are with my blue eyes it doesn’t seem to matter that he was my devil. I don’t want to be left here.
