My father used to call me "Mim," "Mim-gee," "Littlest Daughter," and sometimes "Schmerecasa 2" (my brother and sister were Schmerecase and Schmerecasa 1, respectively, note the feminine endings). My father had a wit. None of these sweet nicknames of affection gave any clue to the kinds of abuses my father was capable of. But he did have a wit, for what it's worth. Perhaps after I've cleared out the stories that first must be told, I will have more inclination to write about how that could be fun, at times, as long as you were within his parameters. Following are a few stories of the many many in our lives. These (and others) have stuck out. I imagine the stories will continue to come out even after a lot of the processing has been done. Processing comes first.
Creepmouse and Other "Play"
It's relevant to go further into the type of play my father engaged us in. My father was very rough in his physical play with my sister and myself. I was also very much smaller than both my brother and sister, who were 12 and 7 years older than myself respectively. My father used his hand, with his long nails intact, to attack us and tickle, wrestle, pounce on, as a character he called "Creepmouse." Especially with my sister and myself. If he did it with my brother, I never witnessed it.
It was supposed to be fun. At least that was what he (and my sister, eager for his strokes at that age) kept saying.
If my father had been gentle and his hand had been soft and aware of my being, creepmouse might have been a very good memory for me. But I remember creepmouse as mostly bringing pain. And pain that made me cry and made my father laugh at me as I cried.
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I would get so angry I would try to attack him and he'd laugh loudly right in my face (my sister would join in because at our house it was apparently very funny to see the smallest most defenseless child in pain) and hold me away from him with his hand on my head as I tried in vain to hit him back and screamed in rage and pain. Creepmouse almost never ended well. And somehow, it was always my fault for being too sensitive.
This is gaslighting taken to the extreme, and against a child. There really is no excuse for this other than his own emotional immaturity and inability to empathize at all with his children. This was a huge downfall of his.
It was one way, however, to get my father to play with me. I used to beg him to play creepmouse with me. When I was very little, I was more of an oddity, really, and he really never played with me in any other way. He read to me when he felt like it, his choice of books, not mine. That even waited until I was older, so he could read the more advanced and academic books. But my father didn't play unless it was harsh, hard, and painful, and almost always, with creepmouse. After he'd hurt me, my mother would excuse him by saying he didn't realize his own strength, so he never was to blame, never apologized, never owned it as an emotionally mature adult could. Too boot, I was told I was too sensitive, and overreacting and yes... it was all my fault because I had asked him to play with me in the first place. This is what I mean by cowardice, actually from both parents.
Who was the adult here? There wasn't one present during any of those interactions.
It was a great relief to me when I learned how to play cribbage, because I could play that with my father without being assaulted in the process, and he liked it, so he'd play.
However his play manifested, it always was deeply competitive, an "I got you, but you can't get me back, hahaha" game. He competed regularly with his kids and wanted us to compete against neighborhood kids and relatives' kids for who knows how much about a particular topic of parental choice.
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Latin & Catastrophizing
In an act that was for him play and for me a directive, my dad tried to force me to learn latin at 10 years old to show off to another couple of families how smart we were (not "you," but "we"). Developmentally, I was not at all ready for such a thing. Funny thing here, he also tried to get T____ M______, a neighbor boy (11), to learn it with me and T____ never showed up again to our house. I wish I had been T____! And kudos to him for getting the hell out of there as quickly as possible. More about the M______ later.
My father even told me outright he wanted to show me off once I learned it. Show that his kid was smarter and better than his brother's kids, or other academic's kids. And again, nothing more than extension of his desires and wishes. My interest in this particular project of his was never addressed, not for a single moment. To ask me whether I wanted to or not... well, that was simply unacceptable to do for my father. If he had asked me and I'd said no (which I'd have been terrified to say, in truth), he'd then have played the guilt card and I would have been given his full disgust and disapproval once again. (When you poke her this way, if she doesn't jump just right, she's no fun to play with. This was my continued personal experience with my father.)
And when he gave me an adult completely dry translation assignment and I copied it instead of translating it, and he told me I had plagiarized and that it was a crime and how bad I was for doing it. He shamed me very deeply that day, I remember it well. The best thing he could have done that never would have occurred to him was to tell me how impressed he was I'd tracked down the English translation of the Latin book he'd given me from his library. Nope. No points for ingenuity there, I had broken his rules. He also turned off any inclination I might have had to really learn another language. If he had given me the Latin and the translation and asked me to see if I could find the similarities, my brain probably could have wrapped around that one at the time, even if I hadn't enjoyed it. But that was not my father. He wanted it perfect and he assumed I would be adult in my intellectual thinking far before I was ready to do so. And he trounced on (ironically with great drama and disdain) any emotional part of me that disagreed with his ideas.
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Toilet Paper, Dental Floss & Dangerous Bathrooms
This section may bother some people who are sensitive to bathroom issues. Please be aware before you proceed.
When I was young, I had physiological problems with my digestion. I still do, but they have improved once I realized what they were and worked on ways to address them. I still do struggle even now. But when I was a child, it was very hard. I had no parenting or medical support for the physical pain I endured as a child. I either had the runs or I was uncomfortably constipated and unable to completely evacuate (this is a very common symptom of chronic mercury poisoning, for those who do not know). I spent long periods of time pushing in the bathroom to try to make myself feel better. I even gave myself a permanent fissure pushing so hard because I always needed to hurry up. I also used a lot of toilet paper because it felt necessary to clean up, or I wouldn't get clean.
Without fail, if my father was home, within 15 minutes of my sitting on the toilet, my father's harsh knocking and voice would be at the door, "Miriam, c'mon, you've been in there too long, get out." "Okay, Dad, I'm trying!" A few minutes go by with me trying to clean off while my bowls were half in and half out, and again the knocking, only this time, seriously angry and harsh, "C'MON MIRIAM! GET OUT. RIGHT NOW!"
So... dirty or clean, finished or not, I had to come out and just deal with the physical pain of not being allowed to finish. I learned to live with the feeling of continuous incomplete evacuation.
Blog entry #12 at school, once I was bussed to the schools in from the 4th through the 6th grades in West Berkeley, the bathrooms and toilet seats were smeared with fecal matter, and girls sat on top of the swinging doors taunting anybody who came in to use the toilets and threatening to put their heads in the toilets. I learned to hold it. It was painful every day.
There weren't any safe bathrooms for a large swath of my childhood. Not at home, and certainly not at school. I became afraid to ask friends to use their bathrooms at their house for fear I would take too long there, too. There was no place in which I could truly relax and just go. To this day, I have my own bathroom and I hide in it, knowing nobody can kick me out of it because we have another bigger bathroom.
Somehow, in some fashion, my parents figured out a way to blame my bowel problems on me, as well. Something was wrong with me, it was all in my head. Doctors (who are very poor bunch overall, to be frank) concurred, never bothered to look, xray, do any motility tests, anything. It was in my head only. I was broken and would just have to cope in the big bad world. It never occurred to them that I might have some sort of actual physiological problem and that some mineral oil or some magnesium might help me feel a whole lot better and make things flow more easily.
At this stage of life, I have actual structural damage for which I will require surgery, the most of it because of being unable to relax and go to the bathroom when I was a child. How things were in the bathroom for me directly resulted in this damage. I won't go so far as to name them, but they are significant and affect my life every day.
One day soon, it will require a highly invasive surgery that I am none too eager to have done.
I really do covet my own little bathroom in our house. I am very uncomfortable in institutional types of bathrooms, and in homes where people aren't respectful. I stay away from those. It's still frightening to go into a bathroom that I have no control over.
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I really wish my mother and father had been empathetic and worked to find out what caused my gut pain and the terrible back and forth of my bowels when I was younger. And simple kindness would have gone such a very long way for me.
It wasn't to be, not from my father.
Later, when we moved into a house with two bathrooms, my father laid claim to the big one and my mother and I were relegated to the little half bathroom, but at least I could go without being yelled at any longer. Oddly enough, even though I had been trained to not use a lot of toilet paper, our house drainage plugged up, worse than it ever had with my toilet paper of the past.
My father came down on me like a pile of rocks, "Miriam, you're still using too much toilet paper, we're going to have to call a plumber this time, you can't do that, the whole house is blocked, now nobody can use the bathrooms. You just can't do this any more, you can't! This is horrible and expensive and it's your fault," as he stomped away towards his study leaving my mother to contact the plumber.
What does the plumber find when he opens the pipes up? Dental floss. My father's dental floss. Which he had been flushing down the toilet every single day since the day we had moved in. When I found this out I looked at dad, and he looked embarrassed for himself, he expressed exactly zero regret at having blamed the entire thing on me. In fact, he made light of it and teased me as though it was still my fault. I was supposed to laugh at this. Yes, I really was. (His wit failed him profoundly at times.)
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After years of abuse in this regard, I wanted him to apologize to me for once, to own that he had made an assumption about me and immediately blamed me for something that wasn't even my fault. That was never to be. It was fine he made a mistake and pulled the shame card on me full force, but he could not own it or acknowledge it. If I'd asked him to apologize, he'd have probably told me I was overreacting, taking it too seriously. And he would remind me of the past and how anything like this had always been my fault before (even though a plumber had not ever been called previously, so we don't know for a fact it wasn't his dental floss at the other house, too). Nothing like a good gaslight to attempt to throw attention and blame back on to me. My father excelled at that. And that is what I personally define as shitty parenting.
Being unable to own one's mistakes and blaming them on another, especially someone a great deal smaller and less powerful that you are is sublime narcissism. I am saying here and now, he can stick all that dental floss up his ass and twirl on it.
"...but what if the narcissist happens to be your mother, father, or primary care giver? A parent who manipulates a child into meeting their own emotional needs is no longer 'charismatic, charming, exasperating or downright ludicrous', but cruel and abusive; the effects of which are rarely diagnosed or treated in the children or adult children of narcissists. The symptoms of a narcissistic family system are exactly what make a diagnosis so difficult − everything seems so perfect. '
"The emotional damage done by a narcissistic parent can, in many ways, be even more devastating to the healthy ego-development of a child than overt abuse, because it is so insidious. Although many of the same symptoms occur in the client's life that stem from the incest family, the alcohol troubled family, the physically abusive family, and so forth, none of those issues were present in the narcissistic family. In fact, the family of origin seems to have functioned quite well —at least on the surface. Like 'a shiny red apple with a worm inside', the narcissistic system hides its dysfunction, even from the people who grow up inside of it. This masking is what makes treatment so difficult; you cannot heal what you do not understand." ~ http://www.academia.edu/924834/Adult_Children_of_Narcissistic_Parents_The_Echoes
I think my father held on to his dysfunction because he believed his suffering (and the consequent suffering of those around him) would make him a better poet. And because it was for this cause of becoming a better poet, it was all selfless and justified, not dealing with any past pain and working through it to become healthier. I believe in my dad's mind, that would have removed his talent for poetry, and he was terrified of losing that special gift. I, for one, do not want to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of poetry. Thank you, but no.
I have my own quote about this: "Don't call suffering upon yourself. Life will bring you plenty all on its own." ~Miriam Mason
I could cry during a Shakespearean tragedy, that was fine, even expected. He loved it when I got stuff he wanted me to get. But I could not cry because of anything he did or decided, or because I needed to be held and not judged, or because I needed to be loved for just being me. Because then he'd "really give you something to cry about." Or turn you over as the "bad child" to mom to take care of. Some more on Shakespeare later, also.
“Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.” ~ Elizabeth Bowen
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