Raising children and breaking the cycle of abuse

The most blessed thing that has ever happened in my life was to have children.  When I sometimes think about being a trans woman and what I have lost by not transitioning when I should have, as a child, I am reminded of my children, and how much more worth it they are than anything else.

I believe it when we say this is chemical.  A parent’s love for a child is vast and unfathomable, deeper far than a child’s love for the same parent.  It is the way of things.  That imbalance is part of its joy.

Today I want to talk about abuse.  It comes in many forms.  It also comes in degrees, although I don’t wish to equivocate on this—abuse is abuse, no matter how severe.  It is evil, and what changes is the degree of how unspeakable it is.  

As adults, as citizens, as parents our greatest fundamental compact with life itself should be to respect and protect the innocence of children.  Even when they are not our own.  And by innocence I mean joy, thinking, feeling, all those beautiful and wondrous things that take place in the heart, soul, and mind of the plasticity of growing up.  We cannot fully protect our children, nor should we, as over-protecting produces its own problems.  Children are not plants in a terrarium.  But there are useful parallels.

Up until very recently I reviled my father because of his weakness.  I regarded him as a weak man because of how abusive he was.  His form of abuse to those in his life was that he was mean, belittling, cruel, verbally abusive, physically domineering, sometimes violent, but always leaving those of us around him in fear of the volatility and in fear that the aggression and nastiness be directed at one of us.

He hit my mother when I was a baby.  And although I don’t know this for a fact, I can feel in my body that he struck her when I was inside her.  I know that I could hear him speaking with cruelty to her and know that I could feel the rush of chemicals that flowed through her body when he was.  I could also feel her loneliness, her fear, and her desperation.

And when I was born, no breast milk, no tender love from my mother was felt as lack.  Even as an infant I knew in my body that something was missing.  I can feel it even now as I write.  My posse of therapists, my friends, the various dominatrixes and Sex Workers I have seen have all been part of the healing process of this core wound.  And the more I see it for what it is and where it came from, the more I feel I can heal it.

I tell more and more people that I am a baby, and they understand one thing, that I am fragile.  And being fragile and knowing it is what allows me to grow, and to be stronger.  The more I admit this part of me, the more I accept it, the easier it is to protect and heal it.

My father has had an enormous impact on the lives of his immediate family, destroying the confidence of his partners, his children…I don’t know who else.  Sometimes the neighbours or other friends, when he would just be so rude.  Sometimes I am rude like this too, not because it is my character, but because it is part of what I learned, and I haven’t quite figured out how to stamp it out.  ADD people, and this is not an excuse, also have a tendency to come across as unfeeling, and this will be the subject of a future post, but has been touched on in others, particularly in my reivew of Gabor Maté’s book Scattered Minds, which was life-changing (thank you Ex-Mistress).

When I was so small that I can’t even remember, I decided to shut my father out.  And I mean really shut him out.  Like a clam.  I wouldn’t let him near me emotionally.  He sensed it and would spend effort trying to penetrate my defenses.  But in the end, it was my disrespect for him, my total shut down, that made it impossible for him to penetrate.  Yes, he hurt me still, but not in ways that affected my sense of self, or who I was.  And my resistance of his abuse has helped my siblings who suffered from it more deeply, as they absorbed it into their selves and could no longer name it for what it was.

My father is a narcissist.  Even now, as he approaches his twilight, he is woefully unaware of his life, or even willing to self-examine.  The only difference in his behaviour is that he is needy now, because he can no longer care for himself, so he is generally more polite and friendly because he is afraid of being left alone.

So, yes, I have no respect for him.  But I used to think he was a failure as a human in part because he didn’t break the cycle of abuse.  His own father abandoned him, his then wife, and his siblings in a spectacular way, running off with his secretary.  They went from a comfortable chauffeur-driven life to one in a one-room rooming house with an outhouse.  It was traumatizing for all, and much destruction ensued.  My father became emotionally mangled, sexually stunted, but still somehow managed to gain admission to an Ivy League University, to marry my mother, a woman who went to the top women’s university in the US, and who was a level of gorgeous that is hard to comprehend.  Beyond stunning.

Part of my disrespect for my father came from the idea that he didn’t break the cycle of abuse.  But recent things have come to light that make me realise he did.  And while I have the “privilege” of being the only person in the immediate family who was never struck by my father (including spankings), and this was regardless of sex or age, there was some other evil lurking inside of him that he was able to master, and for that, I am feeling much gratitude.

I am almost certain that my father was sexually abused as a child by his father.  I know that my father’s younger brother, a real pretty boy (like me), was, and that this has shaped his life.  My father’s father, after running off with his secretary, had a child with her, my uncle, and proceeded to sexually abuse him…eventually he left them cold and returned to his former wife, and she took him back in and they remarried and stayed together until death.

You will perhaps know that I consider sex abuse of any kind heinous, but when it involves children, there is no evil that I find greater.  I was a pretty boy.  No matter what I wore growing up, I was almost always gendered female by strangers when they saw me.  Like my uncle.  And my grandfather was inappropriate with me, very.  I was 6.  It was troubling.  Very.  And I never spoke with anyone about it.  Until a month or so ago, when I shared this with one of my siblings.  And sometimes when you open up about something, it is as if that thing was the key to blockage, and other things begin to flow.  That is what has happened.

And I don’t know the content of my father’s relationship with his father.  I will ask him, and I will share with him what his father did to me.  Next week.  But I am very proud of my father for breaking this cycle.  I have never given him credit for this, and to break this scourge is a tough ask.  And now, I begin to understand and also forgive my father’s kink.  And I can well imagine what it cost him to master this and to break the cycle.

Fast forward to my life and raising my own children.  My version of carrying abuse forward was the aspect of my father that was cruel, mean, belittling.  One day when my children were quite young, not yet double digits, I spoke to them when were in the car after I had collected them from school.  I gave them some context.  I was afraid that I would crush their dreams.

“The duty of a father towards his children is to let you fly, to help you fly, to be there when you need my help, but to let you discover on your own,” I said.  “But sometimes parents, fathers, can say mean things.  Sometimes the things we have experienced in our own lives makes us tell you things as if your lives were ours or not your own.  I want you to know that your life is yours, not anybody else’s.  It is sacred, and special, and private to you.  Your dreams and wishes and hopes are yours, for you, only for you.  And no father, no mother, nobody, should ever take those things from you.  And I know how much you love me.  And listen to me.  I will always love you more, but sometimes I might not hear you, or sometimes I might not always say or do the right thing.  Sometimes I might crush your dreams.  And I want you to know right now, that you have permission to say so, to tell me that it isn’t okay, that I am doing something which is wrong for you.  I’m going to give you a magic word.  It is so magic that you are never to use it unless it is really, really, important.  Because the word will stop me, no matter what, and make me hear you.  So you will treat that word as a sacred word, you will keep it to yourself, and you will only use it if you, really, really have to.  If you ever feel that I am destroying your dreams, you use that word and I will hear it, and listen to you, and stop.”

I made them say the word to me, and they were puzzled by it a bit, by all of this.  But it worked.  One of them used it once, and I was true to my word.  And I feel that I have broken that cycle, and that they have grown up with their dreams intact, with a full sense of possibility.

We are all born with a mix of good and bad.  Some of us have privilege, most do not.  The measure of our humanity is not what we are born with, but how far we travel from where we started, how much we overcome.  This aspect of breaking the cycle is the first and most important step.  It is also the hardest.