Daddy Issues

Don’t tell me that we don’t all have them. Whether we were raised by superdad, had no dad, or had the grand champion of jackasses to look up to, every girl comes by her Daddy issues very honestly. Straight or Lesbian, it is undeniable that our perspective of men is shaped early and without fail by the blank that is filled by our Fathers. In my case it’s not so simple. I grew up with “dad” and “my real dad” as the flagships for the would-be men in my life. I know very little about my Father, it’s all summed up in a wine box at home, pages and pages of dilapidated letters written while he served in the Navy. Mostly to my mother but some to both of us. He called me Amy, which I resented for a long time as his not knowing my real name for some reason. As a child you find things to support what you’ve been told to feel. In my case I had a step father who made sure that I resented the very existence of my real father. I was adopted when I was five years old by my step dad, supposedly with ease since my father “didn’t want me” and signed me right over. The truth was he had a drug problem and felt that I would have a better chance at life with a “good dad” instead of himself. The “good dad” would abuse me and destroy every fiber of any chance at a healthy relationship in my future. My real father would put a gun in his mouth when I was seven and be buried on Christmas Eve. I have never seen his grave.

I”m supposedly just like him. Joe was his name. I get my personality, my flaws, my sense of humor and my appearance from a man that I would only know for a moment in my life. I remember him. I remember his laugh and his faces. I remember he loved me. That I remember. The rest is just what I’ve found through quiet digging and sorting what I get from my mother from what I do not. They were both artists but I can say I lean towards my fathers style, while I clearly get my maternal instincts from my mother. They both did drugs, she stopped and he did not. I am not an addict, but I have done drugs in my life. I have not since I had children so I would say I do not get addiction from him. My mental illness, which I love to say out loud, would have to come from them both although he is the one who gave up, so I’d say he is the one who let it win. I do not get that from him. I will never let anything destroy me. My goals are simple. Live, laugh, love. I can’t achieve that with a 9mm aimed at my uvula. So while they say a risk of suicide is heightened by a family member’s choosing to commit it, I say they are full of shit. It would, however, leave me to doubt that men are more capable of handling internal conflict than women, as is the example set by my father.

My step-dad I’ll not name. Just because. I called him Daddy. I still do in my dreams. Dreams that haunt and terrorize the little sleep that I do get. Dreams of him capturing me, holding me hostage, taking me from my husband and children. Hopeless helpless dreams full of desperation and fear. Why? I can’t say. I haven’t spoken to my Dad since his January confessions of all the completely reasonable factors that contributed to his abuse. How he drank and did drugs and how he loved me so much he could not stop himself. How I was so irresistible and how no woman can compare to me and his love for me is so pure and different from any other love that he’s felt it since he first laid eyes on me. My step father is a sick man. I have to come to terms with this. He was ridiculous as a parent. My mothers death left him practically drowning. Flailing, if you will. Drunk most of the time, although drunk was good, and wasted was bad. I would take him drunk. He was overly affectionate and downright manic when he was intoxicated. He “tickled” me too much and was very clingy and emotional, but he didn’t hit me. So that was better than wasted. Wasted was another story. Wasted would have him throwing me against walls, hitting me with household items, extension chords, water hoses, whatever he could reach. Wasted would have him calling me a whore, beating me, and swearing that I’d be nothing in life other than something for someone to fuck someday. Wasted was my worst nightmare. Drunk I would take. Dad had a tendency to sneak into my room at night to crawl into my bed and cuddle. When he realized that I never slept, that I waited in fear of him catching me off guard he immediately began to “punish me” by forcing me to sleep in his bed while he spooned me and held me as tightly as he could to keep me from “laying awake and thinking of lies.” I was, according to him, a pathological liar. Everything I ever said was a lie. I was notorious for not telling the truth if you asked him. This was all, of course, to dissuade any hopes of my every telling on HIM. And so it went for years. It’s hard to sleep when Daddy can’t keep his hands to himself. It’s hard to trust anyone when the only person you have to believe in abuses you to sooth his own loneliness. His own sickness. I would have sworn he had demons in him.  Until I was seventeen and even after, as he spent nearly two years stalking and tormenting me after I moved out of the house, he would do his best to make certain that I knew that I was only a girl and that I would be judged accordingly. If I did not cook, clean, and satisfy I was worthless.

Now we are here, today, with a past full of shit, and we are expected to now have healthy relationships. Whatever your experience, you can not deny the completely real fear of finding a man who is just like your father. In my case, I couldn’t find a man who would give me enough negative attention to make me feel wanted. I broke a few down and drug a few through the mud and all in all, even in my first marriage, my number one issue was attention. Why? Even though it was bad attention, obsession even, my Daddy paid a lot of it to me. I grew up thinking that being scrutinized and tormented WAS attention. So when I went out into the world and discovered that sex was good, after all, and men were not all out to hurt me, it became quite the MO to find someone to keep me company.  What I found was weakness. Or so I saw it. If a boy treated me decently I immediately took it as not caring enough about me to see my flaws. It was a challenge to stay in a relationship, the healthier it was the more like torture it seemed to be. I was unsatisfiable, and incredibly lonely. My first marriage ended because my husband wasn’t faithful to me. Our entire relationship I felt I wasn’t enough for him and he proved me right eventually. Of course only in the darkest moment of our time together, when I felt most rejected and abused, did my heart suddenly love the man. We are cordial now, we have three children together, and I will always have a soft spot for him as their father. When I was with him, I felt invisible. It wasn’t until I found someone who would be completely controlling and jealous over me that I would feel safe and secure. Someone who would point out my flaws, put me in my place, and insist that I take the domestic role in the relationship. The man who rejected me the most in the beginning. That is where I found my happiness. That’s the man I would chase to the ends of the earth. That’s the man that I married. So now here I am in my second marriage, to someone who showed his affection by acting out of jealousy and paying attention to me through criticism and this is what I fell in love with. As the world does work in mysterious ways he is, strangely, becoming less and less this way as time passes. Our friendship grows into something safe and the insecurity is beginning to subside. There is the natural ebb and flow, it comes and goes, but mostly goes and for me the thing that lured me in is not so prominent or necessary anymore. It took me finding someone who would bear enough resemblance to my crooked past to make me feel at home, but who would grow out of it just as I am, so that we would survive it after all. It sounds insane, but isn’t that where I fit anyway?

October 19, 2010 | Categories: Agorophobia, Anxiety, Bipolar, Child Abuse, death, Depression, drugs, family, Insomnia, love, mental illness, Personality Disorder, revenge, schizophrenia, sex | Tags: Agorophobia, Anxiety, Bipolar, Child Abuse, Daddy Issues, Death, Depression, Drugs, Family, Insomnia, Love, mental illness, Personality Disorder, Schizophrenia, Sleep, Suicide | 2 Comments