The dream, I can't bore you with details. It was a classic emotional blockage thing. I wanted to make peace with my father. Was trying to make art. He initiates a fight, it gets physical, but I'm adult and can actually defend myself, so end up taking him down. Which makes me miserable.
Wake with my chest muscles knotted and my ears ringing. Sit up, gasping, and the next thing I or my husband know am sobbing. He reaches out, asks if I'm okay, what happened. "Emotional blockage," are the actual words that float out, unbidden. Even in my sleep I'm trying to problem solve.
I tell Sig the essentials of the top paragraph, specifically, "I wanted to make peace with my father." Which is a hell of a thing to utter. As it's impossible. It's like believing in capital-G deus, for me. It's irreal. He tried to strangle me when I was four years old. Which is what I confronted him with, in dream.
I've always been vague on the date, consciously, but clearly my psyche keeps a calendar. We moved back to Alabama in late 1979. So it was 1980 when everything happened. Fuck, I might as well blurt it here as anywhere. The last three hours have been spent walking, trying to think everything through.
My mom was trying to give me a bath. I was too young to totally behave, so I thrashed, I guess. Fighting taking a bath, who knows why. Someway I kicked, caught her in the solar plexus. She doubles over, and my father, in the next room, rushes in, asking what happened. Mom manages to say, "Kicked me" and dad was immediately on me, hands around my throat, throttling me, drowning me. Screaming my dad's name (my name too, by the way) Mom manages to pull him away, and it's reality reset. She tries to calm him, and I guess they do their best with me, and put me to bed.
The next bit is less clear, but at some point I wake and see a thin strip of light from the hall, where the bathroom is. Mom's in there, crying, and my father's trying to calm her. Because she miscarried.
The next thirteen years, you might gather, are hell. I was raised in relative isolation (i.e. no resources, no close friends, only seeing family or friends of family outside of school) by a semi-rational man with a tendency to try and enforce his will with a hand to my throat, or a belt to my back, etc. He flew into rages. I didn't know why, consciously. Didn't know I was going to have a brother. No-one talked to me about it. We've still never talked about any of it. It's something I eventually pieced together, as repressed fragments of memory eventually drifted back into configurations resembling a whole.
I killed my brother. My father tried to kill me. Everyone in the family knew what had happened, and was happening, and no-one did anything to help. Failing to murder, he did the next best thing and turned me into one of the countless billions of broken and generally fucked humans who drift through life, a little half-there. I could have become an alcoholic, or a fiend, or an abuser. I could have become any species of monster. And did not.
Instead, you get this. A blog, with occasional art, and much maundering over things beyond my grip.
Hell of a start to the day, hunh? Sorry 'bout that.
No comments:
Post a Comment