Why I Canceled My Father
Tags: Hell, Narcissism, Psychology, Meaning Of Life, Heaven

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Monday Prompt

I had absolutely no intention of finally writing this piece today and then I read 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊.’s prompted poem and Georgia Lewitt’s The Pedophile’s Wife so here I am with knotted stomach and heavy chest both of which frankly shock me as I thought I was beyond this but it seems the Universe is calling BS and wants me to write another canyon-carving river in just 24 hours or so or maybe I still haven’t learned patience and is that attempt at connecting a life-lesson to mood-lightening self-deprecation apt or misplaced — please tell me in comments.

The ode to The Sound and the Fury is befitting. The cancelation is a family secret. Not mine though — I have shared — but not like here.

My father is the archetypical covert narcissist. At 53, I finally saw through him. All the contradictions in his life that had been gnawing at me for years finally became clear. I could see every lie when I stopped looking at him as the victim with unusually strong moral standards by which he has always claimed to abide. Once I viewed him through this lens, every contradiction instead easily fell into place like a jigsaw puzzle for ages 6 and above.

I and only I have this view of him. My little sister accepts that he is a malignant narcissist as she experienced it in ways I did not and as an adult. Being a malignant narcissist is not why I have excised him from my life.

Nor is the definitely psychological and possibly physical molestation of me as a young boy. When I first discerned this I seethed with anger and hate. But it was isolated and it was about power, not sex — it was a demonstration of ownership, and now only I own me.

A few months ago, which was a few months after I made my decision, I read Darlene Lancer’s piece The Bane of Sons of Narcissistic Fathers. It helped me articulate my reasons to my sisters. Ms. Lancer writes:

Sons of narcissistic fathers are driven by lack of confidence. Raised by a self-centered, competitive, arrogant father, they feel like they can never measure up or are enough to garner their father’s approval. Their father may be absent or critical and controlling. He may belittle and shame his son’s mistakes, vulnerability, failures, or limitations, yet brag about him to his friends. He may boast about inflated versions of his achievements, while disparaging those of his son. A narcissistic father may ruthlessly bully or compete with his son in games, even when the boy is a less-capable child. Similarly, he may be jealous of his wife’s attention to the boy, compete with him, and flirt with his girlfriends or later wife. [emphasis added]

This describes my father to a tee — everything in that quote happened except flirting with my wives.

In October I emailed my sisters, saying:

I do not think I ever succinctly explained my decision to the two of you. It’s not the molestation. I could get passed that. In fact I have. The first paragraph of the hyperlinked article in the email below describes dad’s relations towards me, up to a point. It validates what I intuited — that dad was jealous of mom and me. But dad took it 100 steps beyond the “normal” bane. Instead of seeking to prepare me for life, he sneakily did things to purposely ill prepare me for life. The specifics do not matter. In fact the worst one I don’t even know how he did it, but I know he did. Dad purposely mal-nurtured me to be dependent person. In high school I read Emerson’s Self-Reliance and it strongly resonated with me. I am a non-conformist. A non-conformist is a very strong personality. I had found my path when I was a junior in high school. I wrote an essay on it that I’m sure I shared with dad. Somehow he knocked me off that path and I’ve been chasing my tail ever since.

Most narcissistic fathers damage their sons, but they don’t intend to — they honestly believe that they are acting in their sons’ best interest. My father purposely sought to damage me because his level of jealousy was outside the farthest boundaries of tolerable.

My theory of why is something that I had thought was the figment of Freud’s imagination — a pathologically unresolved oedipal complex.

Despite all this, for nearly two months I tried to redeem my father. He only dug his heels in deeper. As I have previously published:

There is no hell — there is essentially purgatory, sort of known as the cellar of Heaven — for some people there is Hell on Earth to pay for having been really bad in their last life — this, for example is my father — I do not know what he did in his last life that this life is hell for him — but his soul agreed to it — and he cannot do anything in this life to move up the ladder in Heaven — and one of the things my soul agreed to was the pain to which he has purposely subjected me — purposely because that was the role his soul and my soul agreed to — the contract does not require me to continue to endure the pain.

My father contracted to endure a throw-away life as his penance. That is the basis of my decision.

But that is not what I need to get off my chest.

Father: “Son, I do not believe in premarital sex. The way men treat women is wrong.” [that was a paraphrase of many statements to me in late latency, always when we were alone]

A few years later: Scene, 14ish year old son’s bedroom: Dad opens the door without knocking, clearly inebriated, starts to talk of sexual exploits. Son: “You said you were a virgin when you got married.” Father: “uh uh, oh, well once I got engaged I figured I better know what to do so I had sex with three women.”

Until this summer I thought that was true. This is me, a 53-year old man, crying to my mother: “why, why would he do that to me???!!!???!!!”

Her answer: “I don’t know.”

Deep down somewhere under the co-dependency she has to know, doesn’t she?