Just a depressive thought - II

Just a depressive thought - II

I just came back from having a little walk outside. I walked down the promenade alongside the Rhine. There were quite a lot of people out as well. No wonder, it's really hot today, the sun is burning down on all of us, everybody's off work and want to enjoy these first glimpses of the summer in our cold country. And yet, I saw something that struck me and it brought me to this point of not only wanting and needing to write, but actually overcoming this phase of feeling without any energy that I've been passing through for more than a month now. I saw a woman slapping a girl, 3, maybe 4 years old, hard on her bum. Presumably, the woman was the girl's mother, but her slap was so vigorous, so aggressive and combined with so much shaming and spiteful speech, that I couldn't help but think about it for the entire rest of my little walk. But why did it shock me to such an extent? Half a year ago I would not have liked seeing something like this, but that would've probably been the end of my reaction to this woman's aggression. But I've read so much during the last half a year about how I was raised that seeing something like this now really pissed me off.

As I've stated before, my girlfriend, my wife to be, left me the week before last Christmas. And I had such a hard time understanding her logic behind her actions, her breaking-up from the left field, that I wondered what I was carrying around with me that made her feel so bad in this relationship, that she saw ghosting me, the man that she had loved so much, as her only way of getting better. And this emotional turmoil turned to be the champagne cork on the bottle of my suppressed memories. And after it had popped, everything came flooding out. But in contrast to my earlier break-ups where I had blamed my then ex-girlfriends for everything and didn't want to accept any of the blame, shoving the cork back in, this time I embraced the opportunity this horrific shock brought me, and continued swirling the bottle about, let everything come out and get everything out.

I wrote my mother a postcard, starting it with "Dear Mother, yes, you've read correctly, I am calling you mother now". Because I felt, I knew, that there was something essential missing from my life, something that belonged to me, something that was ripped out of my chest against my will. And I figured, actually having a mother-child-relationship would be a good starting point for finding an emotional balance. Because I never knew how to address my mother. She had left when I was not even three years old, and ever since – for the past 26 years – I had maybe seen her for an entirety of 365 days, possibly less. And I never knew how to call her. My father only ever referred to her as "the feminist" with such revulsion that it actually makes me cringe until this day, whenever I hear the word "feminist." Her name was never uttered in my father's house. It was basically forbidden, even punishable. So whenever I saw her, or during the few times that we talked on the phone, or whenever I wrote her a letter or email, I simply did not know how to call her. Even as a little boy I knew that "hey feminist" was probably a stupid way to address your mother, but I simply had forgotten the word "mother", or so I thought.

After she had received the postcard she called me and we had, for the first time in our lives, an honest conversation about us as related people, about our needs, our wishes and our pasts. We talked for three hours during which I told her that I was going to ask the district court in my hometown for a copy of my parents' divorce decree. I told her that I wanted to find everything out, I wanted to understand what was wrong with me, what had happened to me and how it had changed me, damaged me. And how I could stop anything like what I had done from ever happening again. I knew, and I stated it repeatedly, that I had hurt my now Ex-Girlfriend in some way that I couldn't quite grasp yet. But it was not important that I hadn't done it unintentionally. I was still at fault for hurting her. Often and arrogantly.

My mother told me that she had an entire folder, filled ad nauseam with everything even remotely with her breaking-up with my father, the divorce and the subsequent custody battle, just lying around there. She offered to hand it over to me for my research and I accepted without a moment's hesitation. Whatever it took, I wanted to get this horrible thing out of me, and, as John Oliver said "you've to to painfully and actively come to grips with history."

And this was the moment when my mother dropped the A-Bomb of all suppressed memories. She told me about the tape. The tape is an old Compact Cassette, as they were used in the 80ies and 90ies for music and audio-books and whatnot. She told me she had received this monstrous thing during the first summer that she had spent away from my father, so when I was about 3 or 3 and a quarter years old. She described as "him playing with little Balthasar in the garden breaking his habit of saying mommy" Already then the pure thought of my father exercising this kind of power over a small boy as to bringing him to unlearn pure and elemental needs frightened me as I've seldom been frightened before. But I asked her for the tape anyways and she promised to hand it over, too.

I also asked her for something I was sure I never would. Years ago my sister, who is 13 years older than me, told me about a document, our mother gave to her when she was 18 years old, so about 23 years ago. Back then she described it to me as a "letter filled with inappropriate details about our parents' sex-life." She also stated that she had asked our mother to promise to never show it neither my brother nor me. A promise which our mother hadn't kept but instead had sent this document to my brother when he was 25 years old, so about 10 years ago (him being 6 years older than me).

So, I asked my mother for it, because I was curious and thought that maybe it contained information that could help me on my quest to eradicate this horrendous thing lurking inside me. Boy, was I in for a surprise.

My mother told me that it actually wasn't a letter, but an article or rather a chapter she had written during the time of the divorce for a book on domestic violence and sexualised violence. A chapter that had been refused to be printed by the lady-editors because they were afraid of it being misused by perverted men for arousal's sake because it was so graphic and … honest? Yes, let's go with honest. A criticism she refused by stating that for somebody who never had experienced something like this a graphic description in all of its mind-numbing horror is exactly what's needed. Yet, it never had been published. She told me that the document was also included in the breakup-folder.

About two weeks later we met for my and her Ex-Girlfriend's birthday. We spent a fantastic day together, mostly talking about our respective lives, what we had been up to for the past years etc. But on this day my mother also handed me over a bunch of things: cuff links she had inherited from her grandfather and thought I might like them, being the only one of her children who enjoyed fancy clothing every once in a while; the folder of horror, as I came to call it during the past month; old vinyls that I had asked her for, too; the book in which her article should've been published originally; a bunch of books on anti-authoritarian education and descriptions of how to raise children without breaking them mentally; and a perfume she remembered her dad using when she was a child and thought I might like, too.

During March I stayed on a friend's couch because my room was sub-rent and I only could go back in April. So my friend was actually present for some of my reading-sessions in this fat folder of horrors. And each page hurt like a knife to the heart. But I kept on going. I wanted to not leave a single page unturned, not a single of my father's fucking lies uncovered.

And so my downfall started.

I was – and probably still am – burned-out from the past year of uni. But this particular type of private research threw me right into the unbearable abyss of depression.

For years, nay, decades, my father had been telling the story of his beloved wife leaving him all of a sudden. He had told my brother and me how "the feminist" had decided from one day to the next, to leave him and her children only to pursue "self-fulfillment." It was perpetuated so often it basically became a chorus to his rhetoric. "The feminist went away for her self-fulfillment." "The feminist said she abhorred you, her children, her sons." "The feminist decided to be lesbian all of a sudden." "I had devoted a quarter of a century to the feminist and then she left me all alone." lather, rinse, repeat. For nearly 18 years. Basically for each year these two had lived together, he told my brother and me for another year, how much time he had wasted on her, and how horrible she was, how spiteful and how horrible she was as a wife and caregiver.

And even though I knew most of these stories were exaggerations if not outright fabrications, I was not ready for the truth I found in this folder.

My dad told me once, maybe twice, when I was but a boy, how his hand slipped once and had hit her, because "the feminist" had been taking a dig at him for hours, until he couldn't take it anymore. While her description reads as follows: "I stand under the shower. It feels like the water is running straight through my brains. When I had been hit on my ear for the first time I felt a nasty sting, the second time it felt similar. But the third time I was nauseous and felt like something had ripped apart. I go see the doctor and he tells me how right I was. The eardrum had been ripped into. The first two times it must've healed on its own, the third time it had been damaged to badly that I would need surgery. And more surgeries followed."

My mother described 18 years of intense domestic abuse, physical violence, incidents of de facto rape, suicide-attempts and much much more on these ten pages.

I read it out loudly and as clearly as my clumped throat could handle. My friend Alex was sitting next to me, peacefully painting his Warhammer miniatures. Sometimes, during a little break he would comment, how horrific all of this was. After I had finished, I got up slowly, went to the cabinet, filled myself a glass of maple-wodka and sat on the floor for five minutes. I was just as the beginning of my journey, finding out what this thing was that had been hiding in the darkest shadows of my soul, on my quest to learn how to actually feel again, learn how to cry to not let dark emotions bulge up in my chest for weeks, months, years even. And here I was, learning that I had been raised by a piece-of-shit wife-beater and rapist. Learning it first hand. Feeling horrified, not only for reading all of these monstrous flashbacks my mother had put to paper after she had managed to get away from him; but also feeling even more freaked out by the realisation that I believed all of it. That my knowledge of my father actually told me "yup, all of this seems legit. He could totally do that." And also knowing that he in his mentally deranged narcissistic state would not even by lying when he would say "no, I never did this." He believes all of his fabrications and lies to such an extend, that none of these things ever happened. He was the perfect husband, and the perfect father.

My mother had left us when I was not even three years old. She went away on January 1st 1992, right the morning after new-years, still carrying that black eye her still-husband had smacked into her when she had told him right before Christmas that she would leave him. She was so afraid he might kill her if she would just take her three children and disappear during a night that she had decided to be up-front and clear about her intentions. In her state of being fully mentally broken and needing recovery, while also thinking that their marriage was perverted, not knowing how mentally sick her then still-husband was, they had decided for now that the children would stay with him.

During our phone call she had also described the day she had returned to see if communication between the two was possible. So, in April 1993, one year and three months after she had left, she came back to see her children. But the moment that she was allowed entrance into the house, my then 16 year old sister was ordered by our father to bring my 9 year old brother and me (4 years old) upstairs, while my father wanted to talk to her. "The purpose of my visit was gone within a minute and there I stood in the kitchen, my husband opposite me holding this massive bread-knife with the red handle in his hand. If I leave this house alive – I told myself – I will file for divorce." Thankfully she did make it out alive and filed for divorce, so my parents were divorced in the summer of 1994. And because the legal situation in these days appeared to still be from the 19th century, my father got full custody of us.

Again thankfully, the situation changed during the next years. In 1995 a custody-reform actually changed the situation quite a bit. Before, just one of the divorcees got full custody automatically and it was basically the judge's job to figure out which one should get 100 per cent of the kids. This judicial reform now stated that a 50-50 custody should be the norm. Also, in 1996 rape in a marriage became illegal. Yes, freaking 1996 made raping one's spouse illegal in my country!

So my mother went to court yet again in 1996 to get at least some custody of her sons. Her daughter, my older sister, had at this point already become of full age. She had been living outside of this house of horrors for over a year at this point.

Because in 1995, when my sister was 17 years old and getting ready for her last high-school exams, she had the audacity of having an accident. She was on her way to school and must have not been paying attention, or was distracted, maybe from all the horrors she had endured in her short life so far. However, she was riding along on her bike and crashed into a car. Vehicle damaged, bike damaged, she concussed, that was the outcome. She knew she would possibly need medical attention or at least some time off. Yet, she was so afraid of going home, or just calling our father, so afraid of whatever kind of arbitrary punishment he would come up with for her """failure""" that she called her then-boyfriend instead. He came, picked her up and brought her to his home, where his mother, lets call her Marge, took care of her. My sister told me that she stayed there for a few days and went back only to pick up some things like clothing etc. to be able to stay longer at Marge's place and recover a bit.

When she came back to my father's house, he intervened, caught her, and took her key to the house. Eliminating any kind of feeling of trust, or respect, I imagine. Basically through his actions telling her "you can go, but never come back unless I allow it, or you can leave, and never see your brothers again, unless I say so." And so she was kicked out. I still remember all the yelling during the next couple of years whenever she came back to see us. I don't know how often it happened, I would say maybe two or three times a year for the next 5-7 years. She came to see us, but we were sent to our room upstairs immediately. And we had to hear these two yell at each other for maybe an hour or longer. She just wanted to see her two brothers who would've really benefitted from her older voice of reason and tender love, the sister-caregiver who took care of the still-in-shock older brother and the unguided baby-brother who didn't understand why his sister all of a sudden was not allowed to see him. And our father, who did everything he could to keep her from seeing the two boys. We would hear them for so long, yelling, her screams of frustration and pleading. Just for her to be allowed to see us for maybe a minute or two. Run up the stairs, hug us once, and then disappearing again for god knows how long.

She became of age and wrote her final exams while she was living with Marge and her boyfriend, recovering from a concussion and being intentionally emotionally hurt by her father through separation from the family.

And immediately after, my mother filed for a custody lawsuit.

I did read not only through the entirety of the lawyers' correspondence, but also through my mother's letters to her lawyer, her appeal to the court, later some letters she wrote to a feminist magazine that was dealing with issues of women who've had enough of their abusive husbands. My mother wrote detailed accounts of what had happened, the violence, abusive language, total lack of respect for her, her bodily autonomy, the way she had been treated ever since. She explained why she married her then Ex-husband in the first place, only to give her at the time two children at least the façade of a regular family backdrop. She explained why she had avoided it before; she had tried to not become her boyfriend's and then later husband's property.

I also read through the reports the court's children's psychologist had written on my brother (13) and me (7). This psychiatrist wrote a sobering prognosis on the future development of our mental state if our father were to continue our isolation. If he were not stopped from establishing ever more control over the two of us. Despite that, she, the psychologist, advised to leave us at our father's place for the time being, fearing that a relocation would rip us apart mentally, yet, she urged the court to instruct the youth welfare services to control us on a regular basis. In absence of the father! Because she was very aware of how he established psychological control over us, engulfing us in his fight against his ex wife. How he made us his child soldiers in the divorce-war. She was aware at least to some degree, how he was filling our heads with lies.

Yet, nobody working for the welfare services ever came to talk to any of us. Or maybe somebody came and thought just talking to our father was enough, ignoring the psychologist's advice. I don't know which one is true. I just know that neither my brother nor I ever talked to anybody sent to help us. Nor did I ever see anybody inspecting my father's house, which, at this point, started turning into a hoarder wet dream of boxes everywhere, slowly but surely filling up every available cubic centimetre.

And yet, my mother only gained the right to see me every once in a while. My brother, who is six years older than me, as I mentioned, was already too engulfed by our father's lies. The psychologist's profile of his mental state reads uncomfortable, to be frank. She describes the way he associates himself with our parents' conflict, the way he gets upset when asked if he could imagine even talking to our mother.

I guess I can feel glad. My sibling had a way stronger connection to our mother before she left, so they were hit way harder when she actually went away. They were more susceptible to our father's lies and the way he used them like puppets in his war. On the other hand, a therapist I talked to for a while mentioned that yes, they have these feeling of direct abandonment to face, they feel … betrayed by our mother especially, whom they actually knew. They have two parents who utterly failed them. But at least they do have parents. Defective ones in their point of view, surely, but they were there. Me on the other hand, I had to face not having anybody, really. For years I referred to myself as a three-quarter orphan, because I didn't have a mother. And the father in whose house I was living never really cared much about me. Where my siblings had defective parents who gave them at least a minimum of anchorage, I didn't have anybody, I was afloat, a drifter from the very beginning.

And this is what I thought of myself until this fateful phone call with my newly accepted mother. This is what I thought until listening to this tape…

It has been with me now for 6 weeks. But after reading through so many files in this folder, I couldn't muster the energy to listen to this tape. I knew more or less what I would have to face, I thought. But I also knew I couldn't stomach it. Two weeks ago, two friends came over to see how I was doing and to see if I would like to paint miniatures together to get some distraction. I jumped at the opportunity of having two friends with me who had known about my odyssey of horros from its very beginning. We listened to the tape together, and they were as befuddled as me. Most of what was happening was that my father was reading a comic with me. I called Scrooge McDuck, who in Germany is called Dagobert Duck, constantly DagoDuck, because I was still learning how to speak. We chuckled whenever we heard things like this. But some things didn't really make sense. Or … they did make sense, in a perverted kind of way. We noticed that my sister was referred to multiple times. She was doing chores in the house. The way my father talked about her, it seemed more like she was a servant in the house, the replacement-mother, now that the real mother was gone. Which matched what my sister had told me. That she was taking care of the house, the laundry, the dishes, our clothes, ironing, vacuuming etc. A servant, that is exactly what my father made of her. While at the same time he was committing a heinous crime on his youngest son.

Whenever I was uttering the word "mom" or "mommy" he would reply with a "growl" ("knurr" in German). It seemed playful. But that's only the way a narcissist disguises his cruelty. He used the word "Knurr" to indicate to me that this word "mommy" was not to be spoken in his house ever again. And when I wouldn't stop using the word, he would threaten me with "dusting off your pants" meaning spank the three year old. The tape finishes with me using the now illegal word again and him doing his shtick, trying to make me stop using this word. And when I wouldn't budge, he clearly grabs me and ….

the tape stops the same moment a slap is audible.

…

A friend of mine told me recently that we've all been programmed to some extent. I agree. Yet, what my father did to me, purge fundamental and absolutely natural needs and wants from me during my infancy … It is a thought that had been haunting me ever since. It is not the normal kind of programming – if I might use this word for lack of a better term. It is proof for me that my father punished me horrifically for wanting my mother back, for wanting an emotional connection back that I had been cut off from. And any divorce is hard enough on everybody involved, especially the children. But if the parents can still talk for their children's sake, I guess most issues can be resolved, and the trauma can be limited. But in my case, I learned, the trauma was actually enforced.

I've known for quite a while, that my father's mental state has been degrading to quite some degree. And that in his paranoia and narcissistic derangement he had been hurting a lot of people. But things like these that I wanted to actually know, showed me, that he is not only a victim of violent abuse turned perpetrator. But that even in his moments of sanity, he cared to little about his own children's mental well-being and way more about his own convenience, that he turned on us in such a way. That he willingly sacrificed so much of our souls, of all three of us. I am still abhorred by this.

I am still shocked when thinking about these violent experiences in my early childhood could have influenced me subconsciously during my relationships. That things like this were in the back of my head, making me behave erratically, developing panic, anger, verbal violence, and throwing me into fits of pure horror whenever I wanted to open myself emotionally, but felt flooded by the pure awe of accepting emotional closeness and love. How I became a living and breathing paradox in the face of what I yearned for, but feared so much. And I think I found the fundamental explanation of this fear. And I could not fathom how a father would chose his own convenience before his children's power to feel one of the most important yet basic emotions and be happy with it. A friend had to help me accept the conclusion that he is not only a sick man. But also a bad man.