Me and my Dad

I've always had a tumultuous relationship with my dad.

On one hand, he can be very sweet and especially generous with his funds and such.

On the other hand, he has verbally and physically abused me since I was a child.


As a kid, I always remember kind of being 'afraid' of him. He was always so gruff, so abrupt towards me, and any minor infraction would result in him whipping me with switches/his belt/whatever he could find. So, starting at a young age, he incited fear in me. I felt like he was different from the other dads my friends had. They could seem jolly, and part of the group. I always remember my dad being abrupt and cold.

As I grew older, it got worse. If he said "get off the computer at 9:30", he god-damn meant it. No, he wouldnt let me save, or finish up what I was doing. If I protested, it turned into a screaming match, and he'd usually end up backhanding my lip. Next day, I'd go to school with a cut on my lip or a slight bruise. I was made fun of it.

He would mentally mess with me too. One of my earliest memories of this is me sitting down with him, around age 8-9. He asked, casually, what the fat kid's name from South Park was. When I answered "Cartman", he IMMEDIATELY starting raising his voice, asking how I knew, why I was watching it. Scared the shit out of me. And of course, I got grounded. A more recent time occurred when I was around 15-16. He expected all As and Bs from me but I can count on one hand the amount of times he opened up a book with me to help me study. I get off the bus, and I had to pee really bad. So I went to my mom/dad's bathroom. When I get out he's in there doing nothing and when I say hi, he just kind of grunts. I walk to the office room to say hello to my Warcraft friends (basically the only friends I had at the time due to crippling anxiety and no self esteem which I still lack) and right there, ducked taped to the door, is my report card.

But on the flip side....he never REALLY physically abused me. Not the sort of abuse you hear about on TV and stuff like that. So I can't really complain.

Now, a regular adult would have confronted me about this sort of thing as a parent would. Maybe upset, but nothing like this. He did stuff like that on purpose, just to mess with my head.

It got to where any time we got into an argument he would start to bow up on me, until one day he just snapped and started choking me to the ground. I can't even rememvber what the argument was about, but it was something petty. From that day forward, the man scared the shit out of me and I had little respect or love for him.

He started getting into the habit of berating me, telling me I'd never amount to anything. That I was shit. That I was nothing. He had already destroyed any sense of self esteem I had at a young age. Now, he had basically raped it at this point.

One thing I never understood was that he was generous, usually, with money and materialistic things. Maybe it was his way of "making up" for what he did? I don't know.

This has been an on-off again thing for years. Except now, he is very open about how I am the root cause of all of this family's problems. Mother is as well. Maybe when I die, they'll get their peace they want.

That's the conundrum I guess. I love my dad. I love him to death. But, there's still heavy ground we're treading. I dont know what to feel, half the time. Usually we act like nothing happened and block out whatever it was, and move on.

I love my Dad but there are things I'll never understand why he did, things that I will never forget. You don't smack 13 year old kids in the mouth just because they're trying to log off a game. I still remember him attacking me. I think he would do it again, given the chance.