The Father’s Last Chapter and a Message for You All
The Enabler and his Wife
Today is a very special day indeed. Not because it’s my last entry in The Great Mystery Story. Not just because the tenth reader of this blog (that I was shown to invite) has just been diagnosed yesterday with ADHD and entered the first stage of Seeing what is, but because it’s my daughter’s 20th birthday.
Happy birthday my beautiful daughter x.
She has accompanied her mother on several visits to family recently to ensure my son is portrayed as the unwitting victim to my brainwashing hocus-pocus and the cause of their manipulative pain. They know too well that they cannot slate him as he doesn’t have the scapegoating record that I have and the family know and love him.
I am, and always will be the issue, and as long as that keeps the blame off him, then that’s ok by me. His mother would risk estranging the others if they were to slander my beautiful son.
I wish to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for the two that reached out to him offering an ‘unbiased’ ear. I know one for sure has her doubts about his mother’s story.
They’ll be even more thanks from me should they ever read the blog that my son encourages them to do and thereby cease enabling his mother. But why should they? Not one of my family does. I was so wrong in the early chapters but that was when I had rookie-hope. I couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to know the truth until I realised their desperation to keep sleeping. To never See what is.
You see, sleeping people are everywhere and when you’re awake, it’s unbelievably disturbing in the early days.
Thankfully today, hope is nothing more than a distant but painful memory. I’ve received no letters in this past year (one disclaimer: my half-brother offered to write to me when my son visited. He sleeps and no letter from the sleeping people is ever good concerning my healing so I told him not to). There were no birthday cards. No questions. Just distant echoing damnation to what I’ve ‘done’ to my family and my son.
They are grateful the problem has left the family.
And to be honest, so am I.
I believe this whole story and in particular this chapter is the best birthday present a father could give his daughter in these circumstances and if anyone from the family that finally Sees the truth after reading this, I ask you to hit the share button below and to send it to her with all your love and sincere care to help guide her to the absolute truth and her Spirit and to finally cease the narcissistic generational trauma in our families. This isn’t about my relationship with her nor you. Not once has a word been written with that agenda. I know it’s unlikely I’ll ever see my daughter and grandson again but that’s the cost to both of us for me not healing sooner. I have to carry that. But know this; it has been worth every single tear and public outing of myself in the writing of this Story if you all can finally See and offer her the support she has always needed.
If only my mother had held her hand up and presented me with the honest story and chose to heal rather than harm when I was 20? However that wasn’t my journey. If it was, I doubt that others would have been helped the way they have. It’s simple maths; ripples travel farther when others begin to make their own and shine again and I’m incredibly grateful to have been invited by the Universe to be part of that.
Ok, the enabler and his wife……..
‘I knew I’d be the one to have you’ were the words from my ex only a week into our relationship in the 90’s. They were music to my ears.
She house-shared with 3 other women who, over the previous 12 months, I’d shared a bed with. Individually mind, not together unfortunately. I loved sex and I loved the validation I got from being good at it. If I was good at it, then any woman I dated wouldn’t leave me- a common psychological adaptation for a guy with mommy issues.
I was to be her knight in shining armour and she was to ensure I felt like that too at the beginning. I used to love being love bombed. ADHDers generally do. I used to see red flags and think there was a carnival in town.
I was chosen to be the one that would provide her with all the ‘stuff’ required to ensure she could keep her daddy’s princess crown polished and also save her from the ‘nightmare of ever living in a council house again’; like she did once upon-a-time with her mother once her parent’s abusive marriage ended.
It took only 6 months for me to try and escape the relationship. My Spirit told me to run but it was shrouded with trauma and the need for familiarity and ego stroking for my battered self-esteem. It wasn’t long before I was literally begging her to have me back. That there are abandonment issues. Sneaky little fuckers dressed-up as true love. Trauma bonding and certainly the strongest narcotic on the planet.
It only took 18 months for us to get pregnant ‘by accident’ whilst on the pill. My son followed 9 months later.
He was and still is the best accident I’ve ever had. I was to work 6 days a week in my own newly opened optometry practice whilst bottle feeding him many nights. His mother was simply not a night owl. But that wasn’t to ever to be good enough, or indeed, what actually happened in her storytelling.
In the early days, she would hold him and look genuinely loved up. But it wasn’t to stay this way. As he got older she got more agitated and controlling. It also when the punching started. The physical abuse I rarely spoke of.
To this day, I sleep with my lover and I am tense as we go to sleep. I’ve always been tense since leaving the marriage in every new and failed relationship. Always when we are going to sleep. Most times I get up and sleep downstairs.
I never truly understood why until my healing began. I’d always ask a new lover, ‘If I snore would you be gentle and wake me and I can move rooms?’. They’d often give me the look of ‘of course why would I not?’.
I didn’t realise that punching me in my head was physical abuse. I’d had a lot of that during my childhood from the reactive abuse of my step father and it was normal.
There were three occasions in our time together that I was so ashamed of myself. She would also make sure that I never forgot to own that shame too:
The motor home incident when I drove erratically with the children to shut them up so that my their mother would stop her verbal assault on them.
The time when I was driving and lashed out with my left hand to silence her relentless abusive onslaught of never being good enough or doing enough.
It wasn’t meant to make contact but ironically, it was my wedding ring that was to catch her nose and split the delicate thin skin.
The time when I put my hand around her neck and pushed her against the hallway wall, ‘go on I dare you’ she said before I screamed and walk out the door. My son says he witnessed this.
I haven’t been the only one to experience reactive abuse. Their mother’s first boyfriend after our separation did what my step father did way back then and took it out on the child, by holding my son’s neck too, against a wall.
Reactive abuse is not abuse per se. It is a response from the victim of abuse when there is no other choice in that moment. Yet for someone looking in, it looks just like that. And that’s exactly how I felt;
‘How could I do that?’ I’d ask myself with the years of shame that I carried, never really knowing the answer until recently.
Her boyfriend, like me, was to remain alone in his room years before he finally left a broken man.
Everyone was told, that he too, was the abuser.
Butter wouldn’t ever melt in their mother’s mouth as she is a marvellous actress to those that sleep. She has very few friends as they eventually know something is off. They just don’t realise how off and how dark.
Once my son got older and developed his beautiful personality and agency, my marriage became a battleground as my objections to his treatment intensified. I was never good at sticking up for myself. Only others deserved that love. I would allow him his mess. His dirt on his clothes. His unadulterated playtime. She, on the other hand, resented everything about his ways that didn’t serve her. She would constantly moan about the work she had to do around him and me. She’d say things like ‘if you loved me you’d stand by me taking the washing out’ as I returned home from a six day week and having shopped and cooked the family meal and read his bedtime story. I would use the ‘wrong’ toilet for a shit where I was made to feel dirty for going to the wrong one for that time of day and those goal posts moved constantly.
So what does a narcissist do when they find their little baby isn’t serving their needs anymore? They have another. Another they can try to control. Preferably a girl. Preferably another princess.
But it takes two for conception and despite everything; despite the fact that my body was screaming ‘NOOOO’ and disengaging my anatomy so as to keep it from doing the dreaded deed; despite me having to manually stimulate myself, I went ahead like any good enabler should.
She was to finally have the daughter she always needed. She finally had her very own princess that she could vicariously experience her own life again.
Shortly after, I was to have a vasectomy but spent the next five years sleeping alone, ‘too fat to fuck’.
My depression worsened and 5 years before I physically left the marriage and the children, I was to find any opportunity to stay away. Endlessly trying to find love in the darkest of places and my alcoholism and drug use began in earnest.
I wasn’t present for my children as I should have been. I just needed peace and it didn’t matter how or where I got it. Even if it meant looking down the neck of a bottle of wine.
Over the years after separation, I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to go to their grandparents funerals and my children were led to believe I didn’t care. But she would see to it that my family got visits and communication from her. She’s very caring and considerate like that.
She has a thing for funerals. She arrived with the children and previously said boyfriend at my biological father’s funeral in 2011. They looked like the Walton’s. Shortly after arriving, she told me it would be better if the children stayed around them. After all, we had just split up and I hadn’t been punished quite enough at that point.
I continued to enable until around a year ago when all this started. I would do DIY jobs for her. Listen to her constant winging about the children. I’d feel the pressure from her to continue to be the ‘bad dad’ and do her dirty work for her but I said ‘no’ and continued to until finally I went no contact and all this could be finally Seen and told in The Great Mystery Story.
That’s the power of sleeping through your own trauma. Of not recognising it for what it is. It’s too goddam painful to See and we’ll keep doing the same thing again and again; existing in existential pain and never truly living to then passing on our poisoned chalice to our children.
Alternatively, we can finally make the choice to heal.
And so to The Message….
We always knew. That’s the thing. Our Spirit always tells us (anxiety, depression, addiction, endless doing etc) but our need to be loved when we don’t love ourselves takes priority over everything and everybody and how do we get love? By doing and never turning back to see the carnage. Looking outward not inward.
We live in a toxically positive world and one where we are told that forgiveness is the only way. I See it everywhere; people forgiving their parents before they’ve seen, felt and processed the pain they truly caused. Some are held ransom from living in the properties their affluent parents bought them or the inheritance they risk from challenging them. Yes we can forgive, but not until we know what we are forgiving. I myself will not forgive, but instead, I feel compassion and pity. They will never See themselves and they will never See me.
We have all been told, and bought into, the elaborate stories by others and ourselves.
It takes something wonderful to be curious again.
Doing is not Being
The post war era was about ‘stuff’ and our parents bought into that. Most weren’t present for us at best and seriously abusive at worst. Some were innocent like sheep to the slaughter. Others knew what they were doing and continue to deny their children’s truth.
Think of ‘Children In Need’. Really? It's blatantly written yet praised for allocating 2 weeks or so fundraising. The fact that there are children in need is a fucking disgrace. But hey! ‘Want to sponsor me? You’ll see me on Facebook doing my bit for them’.
It’s time for our generation to own its shit and heal so our children can heal. We are not in for a bright future otherwise.
To learn what it means to really let the love in. To really feel. To no longer be scared. To be curious once more. To See our beauty.
Connection. Community. Presence. Love. Spirit. Magic.
This I know to be true.
That’s the message I was given.
To be 3 Moons and 2 Suns once more.
Thank you all so very much.
The End of the Story but The Beginning of everything else.
P xx