So the latest news in my family is: A few days ago my asshole dad (and I use that term loosely) broke my mother’s arm. Of course, she won’t come right out and say he did it, she goes back and forth between saying she fell coming out of the bathroom and saying “I don’t know how it happened”. But everyone in my family knows him and their history, and we’ve pretty much formed a concensus that he was involved. Bastard!!
I don’t call her, since I haven’t spoken to him in 8 years, and the last time I did call her, he told me I have to go through him to talk to her. So I just quit calling, and she’s so controlled by him that she doesn’t call me, either. We both (her and I) are content to just see each other on her annual visit here (alone), where we talk about very important things such as the weather and what book we read last.
After I left the house at 19, they bought a travel trailer and moved to coastal North Carolina. There they still sit, 17 years later, and at 63, she still works full-time. He doesn’t work, as he has had a couple of heart attacks with bypasses and recently a stroke.
It’s quite absurd to me to picture two old fucks, sitting up there in some tiny, nasty little trailer, him beating the crap out of her, and her still taking it. Absurd!!
I used to feel sorry for her, and her parents helped her leave him many times, they even bought her 3 houses when she would leave him. She always went back. Several years ago I washed my hands of the whole thing and extricated myself from this dysfunction. I don’t feel sorry for her, as I’ve come to learn that you make your choices in life and then you have to live with the consequences of those choices. I do feel some resentment towards her, as I, my brothers, and the rest of my family have also had to live with the consequences of her choices.
Fuck you, “dad”, and fuck you too, mom, for putting up with this shit for the last 40 years.
That sucks. Sorry to say, but hopefully the above will be a permanent solution someday, for this guy atleast.
Yeah, my mom’s parents thought he’d be dead long before now. They left my mom almost $100,000 when they died, with the provision that it not be given to her until she was 60. So she got the money 3 years ago, and it’s long been spent. By him.
We (the saner members of my family and I) have come to the conclusion that he’s going to outlive us all, just to be spiteful.
:mad:
Wow. We too have such a family member that will out live us all, and is the very root of all of the evil in our family. And I don’t even believe in “evil”, but she is.
Well, that just sucks more than I can fully grasp.
We were fortunate - *Our monster lived a long time, but passed on before any of his children. Good riddance.
My late husband’s dad beat his wife and kids regularly. He’d actually get into fist fights with the older boys, and they all left home at an early age. Things were so bad, when his sisters got married, they asked an uncle to give them away, not their dad.
We moved away when we were in our early 20’s, from Iowa to Seattle. All of the kids except the two youngest sisters were still at home. One day one of them called and said dad was getting worse – mom wouldn’t call anyone, and the boys were all scattered, east coast, Navy, all over the place.
Hubby got on a bus and rode three days back to Iowa, walked in the door, didn’t say a word, just looked at his mom’s black eye and knocked his dad cold.
That was the last time his dad hit anybody.
When you see a thread started by me titled: Ding-Dong, The Bastard’s Dead! you will know that it is indeed a very happy day in my life.
After years of therapy, I can now view the situation objectively and without emotion. But I still had fantasies today of going to North Carolina and killing him. I find it extremely sad that a whole life (my mom’s) has been wasted with this jackass, and the ripples of it still affect me, my brothers, my kids, and my mom’s sisters and their families. An entire family has been affected forever by this ONE asshole’s deeds!
My aunt (mom’s sister) called my mom yesterday and said the conversation was very tense, as my dad was sitting right there. Who knows if any of us will ever really know what happened.
She also told me two stories, that I actually wish she hadn’t shared, because I will think about them for a very long time. One is that about a week after I was born, my dad beat my mom so bad that she was bed-ridden for three days. Another is that once when us kids were very small, my mom left my dad and went to her parents house with us. My dad called there and said that he was coming for her, and my grandfather sat there with all the lights off, with his shotgun in hand, waiting for my dad. He planned on killing him that day, with my grandmother pleading with him not to, and my aunt had us kids in the basement.
Why oh why did my mother continuously leave and then go back? I will spend the rest of my life wondering that, and resenting her for it.
I have two stories relating to this topic, one I take sick satisfaction in, and the other which is depressing.
The first involves my father. My dad’s lived an interesting life, as it were he enlisted in the Army during WWII, at age 16 or so. Which was pretty illegal at the time but from what I understand it wasn’t that uncommon. And at 16 my dad was 6’2" and weighed 220 lbs.
By the time he was sent back to the states he was 19 and was 6’5" and weighed 235 lbs. Well my dad was raised in an extremely rural and poor part of Virginia. And his dad was a nasty son of a bitch that used to beat his mom, my dad, and my dad’s little brothers.
Well the same week dad first got back he comes home from work one day to find his mom beaten the worst he’d ever seen. As my dad tells it he was mentally not the same person as he is now, nor was he the same person who left for the Pacific at age 16. My dad said he lost a lot of friends and saw a lot of terrible things during the war, and that compounded with all the other bullshit he had to go through in his life exploded out of him at once on that very day. His mom refused to tell him where his dad was, but he assumed correctly he was back through the woods fishing on the river. My grandfather was somewhat ready for it and him and a buddy, both fairly drunk, stood up and basically baited him confident in years of being a bully.
After that my grandfather gets his one and only hit on my dad, and that’s a knife slash around his upper torso/collar bone (still has the scar to this day.) As my dad says “that’s the last time he ever did anything to anybody” then my dad proceeded to beat him with a fury and anger that to this day says “he’s ashamed of.” After walking out of the woods he was fully sure he had just beat his father to death (as he continued hitting him long after he’d knocked him out.) Amazingly the guy is alive, and literally crawls with a busted knee, several broken bones and severe internal injuries to the house, and my grandmother then takes him to the hospital.
He survives, but is in bad physical condition for the rest of his life. He walked with a slight limp for the resf of his days, and had verry bad back problems and significant trouble with his left arm. Psychologically he was pretty much destroyed, it was ironic that after so many times of forcing my grandmother to shamefully explain that she’d “had an accident” he told his doctors that he was robbed by a black man while out fishing. He never hit anyone after that, and pretty much drank himself to death and died of heart failure about five years later.
My dad greatly regrets what he does, not that he beat up his father but that he allowed himself to lose control so badly. Personally I can’t imagine not doing the same in his situation.
The other situation came with my ex-wife (sidenote don’t get married in your early 20s.) I was only married to this woman for 2 years but a lot of crazy stories came out of it.
I really liked her family overall, they were a nice middle class family but her sister was always in trouble. She ended up marrying an asshole wifebeater and had like 3 kids with the guy.
Well my father-in-law was a calm and reasonable man who tried many times to get his daughter out of the situation. When the guy beat one of the kids he had enough. And asked me to go over there with him. I hated getting involved but I couldn’t say no so I went. He basically yells at the guy and went over there with full intentions to kick his ass, he didn’t because his daughter kept herself in between them, which was disgusting to me.
Well after this my FIL pulls a power play that I have a lot of respect for to this day. Firstly he gets the husband arrested, doesn’t even call the cops about domestic abuse because he knows it won’t work, he calls him in for smelling coke (we don’t know if he really did, but he kept a lot of it, so that got him in a great deal of trouble.) The backfired to some degree as the guy, like most assholes, was able to weasel some sort of deal and was out after 3 months. At this point my FIL gives my sister in law an ultimatum, she leaves this guy, and he promises to finance this completely, or he’s going to take the kids and he’s going to no longer offer her any help or try to even hear about her situation.
She adamantly refuses everything. He takes it to court, and since both my SIL and brother in law are somewhat stupid they lose custody after he talks about the cocaine thing, and gets like 10+ people to talk about all the things they’ve seen this guy do, and even about how the mother has been negligent. I’m still amazed to this day that my FIL got custody as I understand it’s very rare for grandparents to do this, but the court basically said they had no choice as the children couldn’t be left in that home and would be sent into foster care otherwise.
Afterwards my FIL offers my SIL one last chance and begs her to leave him, but she says she can’t, and he basically washed his hands of her. From what I understand she still lives with him and still takes the beatings.
I feel sorry for her but at the same time you being a victim of domestic abuse stops being an excuse to punish your children. That’s why I feel more sorry for you (OP) than I do you mother. It’s very hard to get out of an abusive situation but as a mother you were her number one priority and she has really high expectations as far as I’m concerned to protect and care for you and get you out of situations like that. I don’t like saying it is the victim’s fault but they facilitate it and they do make choices in their life, and when kids are involved I just can’t feel that sorry for a mom that puts her kids through that.
Thanks for the stories, Martin.
Yes, my mother has made her choices. I haven’t forgiven her for them and maybe I never will. Yet I’ll never confront her with them… she knows what she did. She’s living with those consequences now, also, in that she sees and talks to her grandchildren once a year, period. I may have be forced to deal with that whole mess, but my children do not.
Her sisters (my aunts) are all in a tizzy over this, and I’ve decided that I can’t invest myself emotionally. My days of drama with mom and dad are over, and I won’t go back.
Go back and take a baseball bat with you. Use it. Consider it therapy for yourself and your mother.
I would ask you all not to judge too harshly a person who has been beaten into submission. When it comes to what they should or should not do, the whole, ‘why can’t they leave?’ thing.
All I ask is that you reserve judgement. Unless it has happened to you, where you have been literally beaten into submission, your will and spirit broken, physically overpowered you cannot know the psychological toll.
I feel it speaks more to the quality of manipulation and systematic abuse he has subjected her too, and how accurate he was in choosing a victim than to her strength of spirit or lack thereof.
Certainly it’s no excuse to overlook the on going damage to your children or the efforts of those trying to help you leave, don’t misunderstand me.
I guess I’m just saying try not to judge, try to move to a place where you can accept that this is something you can never understand, you cannot know what it must be like.
I understand what you’re saying, Elbows, and I tend to agree with you, except for one thing: She did leave him, for two years, when I was 11 years old. Got divorced, we moved to be near my grandparents, and she had their full support, just like she’d always had.
They got remarried! Now, THAT I don’t understand.
trublmakr, did you ever consider hiring someone to beat the shit out of your father so you don’t have to do it yourself? Surely there are people in Tucson who will do it for the right price.
My mom re-married her asshole too! It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? (My mother’s asshole isn’t my bio-dad, however.) I’m sorry about your mom, but washing your hands of it all does seem like a good decision.
We don’t advocate illegal activities, here, Milkman.
And Clothahump saying, “Go back and take a baseball bat with you. Use it.” wasn’t essentially the same as what I said?
I’m pretty sure they’re both against board rules. Don’t get defensive about it. No one wants to see you get in dutch with the mods, is all.
And, just between you and me, I wouldn’t take my cues on how to act on the boards from Clothahump.
Clothahump has been here awhile. I was just trying to help a newbie out, Milkman. No offense meant. 
Yikes!
A few questions I have…
Was your dad born on July 3rd, 1938 or 1939?
Is his initials MKMK the 3rd, or MMK the 3rd?
Did your dad leave Tucson in late 80’s, early 90’s?
There are a few coincidences here and I’ve been looking for my father for years now. I HOPE it’s not him, but he’s been missing (or not wanting to be found) since about 1990. He too is an abuser.
I think Milkman Dan’s beef was that it seemed like you were singling him out when Clothahump did essentially the same thing. Although I’m not sure exactly where self-administered beating and beating-for-hire fall on the moral ladder. From a practical perspective (and hypothetically speaking) I think a personally administered beating is a better idea, because if a beating for hire went wrong and turned into murder, you’d be on the hook for it. Sorry, end of hijack.
Martin Hyde, trublmakr and others, those are some really tough stories. I’m glad that no one in my family has ever had to deal with domestic violence (ok, other than me beating up on my sister when I was eight.)