My dad was a pussy. He let my mom start huge fights with me at the dinner table and a few months ago when I asked him, he said that my mother used to say I was manipulative. It was late. I was on my second glass of wine, which he didn’t want me to get anyways because I had coerced him into taking me out to fancy dinner at the place I had last coerced my mom into (I am a slow learner when it comes to avoiding bad vibes) and I said “ITS NEVER THE CHILDS FAULT! ITS NEVER THE CHILDS FAULT!” I learned that in social work school and then I felt bad for poisoning the waters, just like I used to feel bad back then. Things never change. He took it without a word. Things never change. What I had to say still didn’t influence that much.
I also learned, but this time by observation, that people are manipulative for reasons other than genetic ones. Besides, I don’t remember being manipulative. I remember telling it like it is. I remember avoiding that bitch who threw the iron at me down the stairs. I remember exploding with anger… but not being manipulative. And I’m not manipulative now, nor was I ever really, so that part of the story doesn’t ring true. My dad said that as if he, independently, would not have been able to judge whether or not I was manipulative himself. Was he not there?
Anyways, 10 years later, I am entirely scathed but very good at dealing with it. Once, when I was on my way to Mexico for a semester abroad, I called my mother a liar and she jumped out on the highway. Then, when we got to the airport, she jumped out of the car and headed for a plane to nowhere. I never saw my dad cry before and I seem to have blocked the rest of the event out, like even the plane ride, I don’t remember it, AT ALL. But I got there and had a great time and broke up with my abusive boyfriend. So that was that. But anyways, who does that? When I brought it up with my mother sometime in the middle between then and now, for some, I don’t know, closure? Reconciliation? Validation of the fact that she had fucked me repeatedly, she did not remember. Not only did she not remember, she claimed not to understand what I was saying. Was I speaking pig latin or something. IAMTALKINGABOUTSOMETHINGTHATHAPPENEDANDWEWEREBOTHTHEREINFACTTHOSEOTHERPEOPLEINOURFAMILYWERETHERETOO!THEY’REWITNESSES.ICANPROVEIT. She left me crying that night on the curb in front of my apartment. The one she wouldn’t visit for 6 months because it was in the ghetto and that too was apparently doing something to her. She said that she wouldn’t change; that she was an old dog who couldn’t learn new tricks. I believed her and adjusted myself accordingly.
She could divorce my father and get a new man and new friends and have lots of sex though. Those tricks she had the energy for. She got happier, which made her easier to get along with. And I changed. First I changed into someone who was morbidly depressed and couldn’t concentrate on anything and didn’t know why, but could only blame herself. Who slept with her friend who she didn’t like who made her feel stupid for not living up to his expectations and never helped her out because in his opinion people should help themselves. And in her’s too. Asking other people for help didn’t seem to work so she would help herself and make absolutely as few demands on others as possible (but that didn’t work either).
He always said that friends were not for comfort. Ok. What ARE they for then? If you can’t help people, then what are YOU doing!? Other people seem to understand these distinctions far better than I do. I understand this distinction. After I fought with my friend so many times and eventually unjustly accused him of raping me, he proposed that we engage in a congenial working relationship. Thats kind of like the decision to only help yourself, I think, which requires ignoring all slights… But eventually, since we worked in the same place, we did have a congenial working relationship. It didn’t solve the problem of it feeling like rape.
