OmbreMad has moved on Nostr: From that moment on, I began being the one he beat up. I dared to expose him once, ...

From that moment on, I began being the one he beat up. I dared to expose him once, and that was enough to warrant punishment. As I grew up, I stood up against him more often when my mother was beaten, and I ended up taking the hits instead. Also, I wasn’t exactly a gender-conforming manly-man, and my bisexual awakening was probably more obvious to my parents than it was to myself, and that gave another reason for my father to pick me as a target.

When I was about 15 or so, I was filled with revenge and hatred. And one day, when he started raising his voice and cornering me against a wall, I thought I had enough. I pushed him back. Hard. Keep in mind I was now taller and stronger than him: I sent him banging over a wall, breaking a door’s knob. I didn’t intend my reaction to be that strong, but it kind of happened that way, probably out of fear. At the moment, I ran out of the house for a few hours — I did that quite often anyway — because I thought he’d kill me. But he never ever tried to touch me or my mother ever again. It was over.

My mother did try to run away once, with my sister and me. I only have vague memories of this. I wasn’t 10 yet, and one morning she woke us up very early. We walked a lot, took the first regional train, and went knocking at some friend’s door, waking her and her family up. We spent like a day and a half there, but then my father came to pick us all up (I don’t know how he figured out where we were). It was a short-lived attempt at an escape, the only one I can think of. And I cannot help but feeling a bit resentful at my mother for not trying to protect us a bit more, even when I was the one who got beaten up.

My sister does not remember much of this. For good reasons. Because of the trauma, my own memories from my early childhood are also blurry, and she’s 3 years younger than I am. Besides, as far as I know, my father never hit her. As it turns out (and we figured this out only quite recently), he was abusive with her in a whole different way. After our mother’s death, our father became very intrusive in my sister’s life. She became a substitute wife for him: helping him when he was drunk and depressed, making groceries and housecleaning, cooking for him… He had a very manipulative way of playing the victim’s part, saying for years how he was sad because he lost his wife, calling or even visiting in the middle of the night completely drunk to complain… he never cared about, or acknowledged, the fact that we had also lost a mother. Help was always a single-way lane with him. It was all so fucking selfish and self-centered. And this weird, incestuous power relationship with my sister prevented her from having a healthy private life, from healing as she was always dragged back to our mother’s death’s trauma, and ultimately from growing up as a woman with a husband and family of her own. He wanted her to keep being her little daughter slash make-believe wife forever and ever.

By then, I had already taken steps to keep my father away from my daily life. I was scared that he would be as intrusive and controlling with me as he was with my sister, so I was being extra-distant with him. I made boundaries clear, obvious, and non-negotiable. That was enough for him to stop caring about me entirely (if he couldn’t keep some way of pressure on me, I wasn’t useful to him anymore). He barely wanted to talk at all; when he called me, about twice a year, it was mostly to complain and never to ask how *I* was going (not great, thanks for asking, Dad). But I’ve learned from neighbours that on his daily way to work, he often took a detour to pass by my street. He wanted to see if my car was parked there, if he could see light through my windows. Maybe it was a way for him to gather intel about my private life? He did so for years, and I never told him that I knew.

(part 2 of 3)