Father Dearest

“Sadly, no one in our family ever said, ‘I love you.’ Do you realize that? The truth is, I think we were all frightened of saying it, since the obvious reply would’ve been, ‘Well, if this is love, what is hate like?'” ~ Louie Anderson, Dear Dad, Letters from an Adult Child

We spent the holidays in the Philippines with my parents. Now that my parents are older, I try to make it out there twice a year, time and money permitting. 

As you grow up, the things that you see and experience, without having anything else from which to compare, you assume to be normal. If your father yells at your mother for not having prepared dinner earlier, or if your father beats you for disobeying his rules, you may not like it, but you accept it as simply how life must be because, again, you know no differently.

The last few visits to see my parents have opened my eyes even more to how dysfunctional my family is, and how horrifyingly toxic my father is. 

I already knew even when I was a teenager how abusive my father was. I had come home one day, one hour after school dismissal because I had wanted to watch a soccer game. When I arrived home, my father was waiting for me. He had asked me why I was late, and I told him that I watched a soccer game after school. He did not believe me, and instead yelled at me for coming home late (it was 4:30 p.m.) and accused me of being late as I was probably out with a boyfriend. Out of frustration for being wrongly accused, I yelled at him that I was not with a boyfriend and that I was late because of a soccer game, and that I had even arrived home in a school bus since it was a school sponsored activity that I had attended. He was furious that I yelled back at him, and he slapped me for “being disrespectful.” He even got a hold of a whiskey bottle, and he was about to hit me over the head with it, and had my brother not stopped him, I would have died that day. 

After that day, I went to live with my cousin for the next year, until I was off to live in a dorm at university. 

During this recent trip, my parents got into an argument. There was a leak coming from the kitchen sink, and my father asked my mom to call the plumber. My mom was in the middle of cleaning up the water that had leaked onto the kitchen floor and did not call the plumber right away. My father got very angry and yelled at my mom because she had not called the plumber when he had asked (told) her to do so. He started going off on a rant about how she never does what he says, and he kept inching closer and closer to her, as though he was going to slap her. I got in between them and said to my father, “Stop yelling at her!“

His face twisted angrily, and he yelled at me, “Don’t you ever yell at me again!“ I yelled back, “Stop yelling at her!“ He stepped closer to me, and yelled “Don’t you ever disrespect me again! Do not ever yell at me!“

It was at that moment that the memory of that day from high school came flooding back. It took everything out of me to not punch him flat in his face. He is eight-four now. I could easily hurt him. Every fiber in my body wanted to lash out at him, in retaliation for all the times he physically and emotionally abused me when I was younger. But I managed to stop myself, from punching him, from slapping him, from yelling at him some more. I backed off, but my blood was still boiling from the hate that had been brewing all these years. I tolerated him throughout my life, maybe even had forgiven him at some point, but to see him continuing to mistreat my mom, all the anger and hatred that I had suppressed all these years, came dangerously close to exploding out of me once again.