For almost my entire life since I stopped feeling so horrible in my twenties, I'd thought that dad's hitting irreparably damaged my self-respect. And I still think the hitting predisposed me to depression. But I've identified two decisions – a good one overlooked and a bad one made – which I believe triggered my horribles in the summer of 1960, and I've stopped thinking about what being hit when I was growing up had to do with who I am. But for more than twenty years now, I've returned to thoughts of whether all the hitting damaged my mother – the physically uninjured witness who didn't intercede. She never intimated to my sister or me that she had tried to convince dad to not hit us, or even that she had disapproved of it. In fact, I remember my mother coldly telling my father about our misbehaviors during the day, when he came home from work, and then him whipping us. But if my mother had opposed him, how could she ever have talked about it to us as long as we lived together as a family, which we did as long as she lived?
No, mother made her deal with the devil in the 1930's when she abandoned the path to becoming a brilliant woman journalist to marry a rich man's son. And when I asked her why daddy did all that hitting – when I was home from law school and we were sitting alone in the living room one day -- she told me that he was tormented by tinnitus, and explained that it was incessant ringing in the ears. Then she told me that my dad's father had whipped my dad when he was a young adolescent and stayed in the bathroom for suspiciously long periods of time.
And the final straw, as they say, must have been dad's never desisting from telling the story about how my mother had locked me out of the house instead of opening the door so I could get in and avoid fighting the bully who had chased me home. Of course I construed mother's refusal to discuss the hitting as continuing complicity. Wasn't it just that?
(Written 2005-2008)
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"How could I fail to speak with difficulty? I have new things to say."
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