The Old Demon - The Irony and the Ecstacy!

Jagged Ironies from the Void…

The old demon has filled my life with several delicious ironies. As his cognitive abilities fade and his memory fails him, they reveal themselves to me.

For example, my father spent most of my young life telling my brother and me how useless we were. “Useless!” he would scream, adding, as if needed to clarify, “You’re no use to anyone at all.”

Yeah, it was a whole thing, but now at age fifty-five, I see how incompetent and lost the old demon has become, and it takes every ounce of my energy not to scream, “Useless!”

I don’t do it, though. I tell myself it’s because I’m the bigger person, but I suspect it really stems from feeling some level of guilt after yelling at someone who is losing their capacity to reason things out.

This irony, which can be filed under the umbrella irony of “parenting your parents,” is nothing compared to the newest and greatest irony I have ever experienced.

Let me explain.

When my brother and I were young, my father was an angry, violent alcoholic. He punished us mercilessly for things we did wrong and many more we had nothing to do with.

Describing this brutality in detail isn’t necessary, but sufficed to say, the beatings were much more than a slap, a spanking, or a stern talking to. These punishments were physically and psychologically terrifying and left us with an intense feeling of uncertainty and fear about life. This awful residue stays with you in some form for the rest of your life.

The psychological component of these punishments, however, was the source of this new irony.

For example, when the old demon saw me putting an electrical plug in the wrong place, he beat me cruelly to teach me a lesson. In my mind, I was exploring connections and naively thought I had made a discovery. When I showed the old man, he took this as his opportunity to thrash me.

As was usually the case, the punishments led to me crying my eyes out and being sent to my room to think about what I’d done.

The punishments delivered to my brother and me were rarely commensurate with the actual crime. It was just the way it was.

So, there I’d be, my head lying on a tear-soaked pillow in my room, when my father would step inside slowly and sit on the edge of the bed.

In movies and TV shows, this is where the parent apologizes for losing their temper and does their best to impart the immortal words, “It hurt me more than it hurt you…”

This was not the way things worked in my childhood home. The old demon never apologized. Apologies are for the weak. In his world, you needed to be strong.

The post-beating chat took a very different tack.

“Listen, you know why I hit you, don’t you?” He asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Why?”

“Because I plugged the adapter into the tv.”

“That’s right.”

At no point did he apologize for his violent behavior; instead, he forced me to validate his use of excessive force. After you repeated back why it was necessary to inflict such physical abuse on you, he would smile and walk away absolved.

It was an incredible thing. Because I am not talking about getting spanked or slapped a little. I’m talking about close-fisted attacks that sent you to the floor and kicks to the body that forced you to wrap yourself in the fetal position until it stopped.

One time, my brother and I were kicking around a soccer ball in the driveway, and it rolled out into the street. I ran out into the road to retrieve it, but I didn’t look both ways before I ventured out into harm’s way.

As I remember it, there were no cars coming, but I didn’t look. When I returned with the ball, my father was standing on the back porch. He’d seen it all and screamed for us to get inside the house.

He thrashed me for it, then attacked my older brother for “not looking out for me.” I’d never seen him so angry. Both my brother and I were crying and sent to our room. As we sobbed into our pillows, feeling sorry for ourselves, we took comfort in knowing the beating was over.

But it wasn’t.

My father returned to the room and continued to scream at us. I remember trying to make a case for myself, but all I remember was my father pulling his set of keys from his belt. The kind that was attached to a retractable metal chain and had a bit of weight to them. He hurled the keys at me, and they connected with the top of my head.

I screamed in pain, but a moment later my father stopped yelling, came straight for me and grabbed me from my bed.

I honestly thought he was gonna kill me. He dragged me out of my room and into the small bathroom in our small rental house in Torrance.

He put my head under the sink and turned the water on. I couldn’t make much sense of what he was doing. I was too busy crying and wriggling to break free.

Then I opened my eyes. I looked down into the sink, and the water was red with blood. The keychain had ripped into my scalp and created a sizable gash.

Looking back, my father must have seen the stream of blood dripping down my face or jetting from the top of my head to act so quickly. I’ll never know for sure.

Eventually, the gash on my head stopped bleeding, and my father sat both my brother and me down to get us to admit why his reaction was not only necessary but justified.

In the end, my father did not apologize. We did not go to the doctor; he administered no medical treatment (besides a rinse in the sink) and not another word was spoken about it.

My mom was not told, nor did I mention it. In the weeks that followed, I didn’t tell anyone at my school what had happened. Not my friends, nor teachers. There was a jungle gym at school you could climb and hang upside down from. I remember hanging by my legs and feeling the blood rush to my head, and the gash on my head throbbed and pulsed with pain. I never said a word. To anyone.

Oh. I was five years old, by the way. Good times.

It took years for me to reflect on these moments and realize that the secrets we kept in my childhood home were not only commonplace; they existed without being told to stay quiet. We just did it.

When I confronted the old demon with this story in my mid-twenties, the best he could manage in response was, “I make no excuses for the things I did raising you. I did what I thought was right.”

Womp-womp…

That was it. It taught me an amazing lesson, though, and one I wish everyone would understand. When you have a crazy parent who causes you great pain and distress as a child, you believe nothing less than a full-throated mea culpa is necessary for you to heal.

Spoiler alert. It’s not.

None of it matters. Not really. If you get that genuine apology, that’s great. I hope you do, but it does precious little to heal the damage that has been ingrained deep in your soul. Real freedom comes from knowing you are the only one who controls whether you continue to hold on to the past. Apologies don’t get you very far. Maybe on the surface, but the deep cuts remain. Only you can heal those. I’m fine, by the way. I survived, and I only tell the story to make a point. Your life doesn’t have to be defined by this kind of trauma, but it definitely shapes the course of your life.

But I digress…

For the record. I never got that apology. Not for the key-throwing, nor the myriad of other physical and psychological attacks that made up my daily life growing up.

Until now…

Believe it or not, the old demon spends most of his days now saying the words, “I’m sorry.” In fact, he says it so often that he probably doesn’t give it a second thought.

Is it a deep well of shame and guilt bubbling up from inside him? Nope. Is it the great mea culpa repeated so many times that it’s lost its real meaning? Not even a little.

No, my father suffers from terrible hearing loss in both ears and spends his days asking everyone who speaks to him to repeat themselves so he can understand what they said.

To do this, he simply leans in and says, “I’m sorry?”

Now, that’s irony.