An inner voice told me if I could not make my mother happy, I was a bad son. I felt responsible for my mother’s happiness. She wanted to hurt my father the way he hurt her. One time she took me to a hotel to catch my father with another woman. I was about ten years old at the time. I knocked on the hotel room door and a woman opened it. My father was right behind her. When he saw me, he started to scream and yell at my mother, who was standing beside me in the hall. She shouted back. Other guests stepped out of their rooms into the hallway to witness this insane scene. I was so afraid and ashamed. I just wanted to be told everything would be fine. Instead, my parents acted like I wasn’t there. Feelings of isolation and shame would carry into my adult life. The shame of being an invisible child, whose feelings did not matter, would influence my behaviors later on.
My mother always dressed provocatively. I remember men staring at her inappropriately. I would keep my head down, too ashamed to look up. I just wanted to disappear. I once told my mother how I felt. She went ballistic saying, “Don’t you ever tell me how to dress. It’s none of your business! Your father put these thoughts into your head!”
My parents rarely said anything nice to each another. My father was kind until he drank. Then he would become unbearable. His remarks were very hurtful. As bad as it was, I always wanted my parents to stay together. I prayed it would work out. My father would only do something nice for my mother on her birthday or Christmas if I forced him. I would fight with him to get money so I could buy my mother a gift, seemingly from him. He would spoil the surprise by getting drunk or attaching a nasty comment to the gift. My father’s attempts to sabotage everything she did made things difficult. Whenever we were ready to leave from somewhere my father would address my brothers and me by saying, “Let’s go, girls.” Happiness was never a comfortable feeling for him. He was hurting inside and he was hurting those around him as well. His inner voice, like mine, told him he did not deserve to be happy.
When his drinking got worse, he became physically abusive. I spent many nights sitting at the top of the stairs waiting for him to come home from work. I worried about my mother’s safety. If he was drunk, I didn’t know what he might do to her. When my father did not come home right from work, I knew he was going to come home drunk. That meant trouble. There were nights they shouted at each other as I stood shaking uncontrollably at the top of the stairs. One time, I heard a slap and a terrified scream from my mother. I flew down the stairs and stood in front of my mother to protect her. My father hit me a few times and knocked me away. My mother then hit him. The next day my father told me he was sorry and to forget it ever happened. I wished I could.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I attended a Catholic grammar school. Students who got into trouble were called into the principal’s office. After the door was shut, the principal would broadcast the student being beaten on the intercom system so the whole school could hear. All the students were terrified of being called into the office. When I was in the third grade, the principal called a girl who sat in front of me to the office. As I sat behind her, I saw a stream of urine coming down her seat into the aisle. She began to cry from embarrassment. We found out later that her mother was just picking her up to go to the doctor.
In the seven years I attended grammar school, I had four terrible experiences. The first was a beating I got from a young priest because my hair was too long. The second was a fight with a kid in school; I had made his lip bleed. The teacher brought me from room to room while smacking me in the face in front of each class. The third episode occurred when I was waiting for the school bus to take me home. One of the other kids threw a snowball at the bus. The next thing I knew, a nun was washing my face with a handful of snow. She assumed I threw the snowball. It wasn’t the snow that bothered me, but the humiliation of the other kids laughing at me when the nun left.
The fourth and worst experience was in confession. I hadn’t gone to church for a long time. As I confessed this to the priest, he became upset. He called me an animal and said I should live in a jungle with the other animals. He went on and on about how sick I made him and what a disgrace I was. I reached this conclusion: If this man represents God then who needs God? To me, these experiences were proof that I wasn’t a good person, and I deserved punishment. The warden or my inner voice emphasized this belief whenever possible.
As I grew older, sports became my stress reliever. I always felt the need to win. Losing meant that I was a failure. I could not handle that. I also had to be right all the time. During an argument, I had to get the last word in. I needed people to see things my way. The terrifying thought of being wrong made me feel defective. I never let anyone get close. If someone was getting too close or becoming attached to me, I would find ways to distance myself by pushing them away.
As I got older, my anger grew. When my father got drunk, his verbal abuse was relentless. He would put us down until we were mentally beaten into submission. One night he started to abuse my mother verbally. I lost my temper. I grabbed the glass of wine he was drinking and threw it at him. I ran out the door knowing that if he caught me my life would end. My best friend and I went to see several movies before returning home. When we drove into the apartment complex, I noticed my father sitting in our screened-in porch with a drink in his hand. He was waiting for me to walk in. My friend said, “If you walk in there, he’s going to kill you.” I agreed. I spent the next two days at my girlfriend’s house. When I finally returned home, he was sober.
The first time I met my wife, it was at a graduation party at my cousin’s house. I answered the door and there she was, an attractive girl with beautiful long hair and brown eyes. I was struck by her humility and kindness. She was very different from my family’s loud and boisterous ways. We began dating. Not wanting to fall into the same trap as my parents, I tried so hard to avoid voicing any negative feelings about our relationship. I didn’t know what healthy anger was so I never let her know how I felt. The warden told me I would lose her love if I expressed those feelings. As a result, I continued to wear the same mask I had worn for my mother since I was a kid. I gave the impression that I could solve all of her problems, that nothing bothered me. I put all my energy into this role. I would never reveal my inner self. I couldn’t. The warden made it clear that she would never accept someone as worthless as me.
My inner voice defined intimacy for me as painful and something to avoid at all costs. I had witnessed what happened to my parents when they became vulnerable with each other. As a result, I found it difficult to express my feelings. I felt like I did not deserve to be heard. Eventually, I got the courage to ask this very special woman to marry me. Now I had to figure out how to be a good husband. When I was a child, much of my happiness depended on how happy I could make my mother. At the time, I did not realize that I had a lot of healing to do before I was capable of having a healthy relationship.
Children brought out the best in me. I could not wait to have kids of my own. Whenever I would see a father showing affection to his child it would make me long for the childhood that I never had. I have a brother who is eleven years younger than me. In many ways, I took on the responsibility of parenting him. We would play ball together and watch movies. I tried to guide him as best I could. When I cuddled with him, it gave me such a warm and loving feeling.
My inner voice continued to haunt and remind me how inadequate I was. I told myself I would never abuse my wife in the ways my father abused my mother. On the outside, our relationship appeared wonderful, but on the inside, there was unfinished business. I continued to deny my feelings. The mask I wore allowed me to pretend that everything was fine. I would say “yes” to anything my wife asked, even if I felt like saying “no.” For example, if she asked me to go to a movie I didn’t want to see, I would say ”yes” and end up resenting her. Part of me expected her to know what I really wanted to do without even asking. Of course, she could not read my mind.
Money and My Attempts to Fix the Emptiness Inside
By the time I graduated from college in 1981, my father’s compulsions had taken their toll. Due to heavy drinking, he was suffering from panic attacks. These turned out to be a blessing of sorts. His fear of death gave him