All I wanted, all I wanted was for my father to be nice to me. That’s it.
He can’t do that. He is unable. I’ve watched him alienate people my whole life. When I was a child, I watched him bully his parents, call them stupid, and insult them. I watched him bully two wives of his life and countless acquaintances. It never ceases to amaze me that he can’t see this pattern. But he won’t give up his need for control. He needs control and he needs oxygen.
I recently wrote about how my family spent a year in quarantine without seeing my father because he has a heart condition.
Once we were all vaccinated, my dad wanted us to start getting back together again. I realized I didn’t do it. When I brought this idea to my husband and daughter, they supported me. And they don’t want to see it either. The last time he invited my dad over to our house, he yelled at us about critical race theory and other bullshit before my husband asked him to leave.
Related: 27 Percent Of All People Are Estranged From A Parent — But Why?
My husband and I block his number on our phones. I have marked my father’s email address as spam, and I am grateful to end the stream of racist filth he loves to spew. I didn’t bother telling him we were done with him, because I knew the conversation would be completely useless.
I also know that cutting him off like this will eventually lead him to our front door, when he has no other way to contact us.
I’ve seen him do this to others. When my mother divorced him, I was eight years old. Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I would stare out my bedroom window, and I still remember seeing his blue and white truck pass by our house over and over again as he circled the block.
Spending a year away from my angry, narcissistic father made me realize that I no longer wanted to see him.
For most of my life, I put up with my father. nothing else. The best I can hope for – from my parents, in fact – is an emotionally neutral encounter with them.
Otherwise, it’s like living in a war zone – my brother and I could never predict what kind of psycho might come our way. You never knew when a quiet day might explode into terrifying drama, with screaming, hitting, false accusations and slamming of doors, from the time we were born.
My father might come to our house and be relatively well-behaved, but he was always full of himself, telling us stories about how great he was. On the other hand, he may decide to try to start a shouting match about politics just because he’s bored, calling you names and pointing his finger at you until he gets you into an argument.
It’s disgusting. It’s also poisoning. It’s the behavior I’m dangerously close to emulating when I lose my temper and act like an online troll and I need to stop it.
I never open the front door without looking to see who it is first. But on this day, our daughter is waiting for her boyfriend any moment, so when there was a knock on the front door, she opened it without thinking. She closed it again, and locked the lock. There’s a reason I always have a bolt on all my doors, and it’s not just because of thieves and rapists.
Related: Men Reveal Why They Said ‘No’ To Sex (Even Though They Liked You)
“It’s Grandpa!” I shouted in shock. She is eighteen years old.
“Hey!” My father shouts, knocking on the door, and the sound echoes throughout the house. The dog barks as if ax murderers are cutting us down. I almost never have this kind of chaos in my life unless one of my parents shows up.
I almost want to laugh at that moment, when I think of my daughter slamming the door in his face. It’s worth it, and I always had to seize moments of humor in these explosive exchanges because if you don’t, you’ll lose your mind.
My father was completely puzzled by the door being closed in his face, because in his head he was the nicest man.
“I’m the nicest guy.” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard him say that in my entire life. He believes exactly that, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Despite the fact that two of his wives divorced him (he pursued them afterward), his girlfriend keeps hiding from him (he doesn’t leave her alone either), and a number of his relatives refuse to talk to him anymore, including his brother.
My husband directs me to corral the dog, which will end up completely. I love this dog. I think he would rip someone’s throat out to protect our family. Meanwhile, my father is still knocking on the door.
“one minute!” My husband screams. He tells me to go to the daughter and stay away from the door. He will deal with my father.
My husband opens the door slightly, trying to have a rational conversation with my father about why he can’t come into our house. I love my husband for doing this, but I know it won’t work. You cannot have a rational conversation with someone who is irrational and selfish to begin with.
My husband’s voice is calm and thoughtful. My father is angry. “I have fifteen thousand dollars in her college savings account, and she closed the door on me?”
His mention of money makes me angry. Money is not given without strings in my family. My father has no intention of giving his granddaughter money out of love.
It’s to control. He threatened me several times that he would take me out of the will if I refused to talk to him. At this point, I don’t care. I am tired. He cut me off from the will. Just leave me alone.
“Grandpa, I’m afraid of you!” My daughter is screaming from behind my husband.
Related: 10 Words To Help You Describe Your Experience With A Sociopath
“Well, then your mother must be lying to you about me!” My father shouts from behind the cracked door. Once again I want to laugh. Yes, the reason his granddaughter is afraid of him isn’t because he’s acting like a deranged little boy. It’s my fault. Never him. never.
My husband told him that him yelling at us, insulting us, and being outright racist in our house is disrespectful and will not be tolerated.
“It was done out of love!” He shouts. I giggle loud enough for him to hear. My husband is upset about this because it will only escalate the situation and I know my husband is right. But I’m so aroused that it’s almost involuntary. I’ve spent my whole life fearing for my father, letting him push me around in the name of peace, and now I’m done.
People like to laugh at the word you bring up. Not funny. While my father was there, banging on the front door and trying to get past my husband screaming at us, my heart was racing. My hand is shaking. My blood pressure is through the roof. I can’t think.
I’m in full fight or flight mode but fighting is useless and I can’t escape when I’m trapped in my home. I know in my rational mind that my father is no real threat to me. I know that his screaming and arguing are nothing more than manipulation techniques.
But that doesn’t stop my body and mind from becoming hyperactive, as they have done since I was a little kid. This is PTSD and it is very real. Sometimes I wonder how many years will be stolen from my life.
My husband blocks the entrance with his body, refusing to let my father in. I can see my father craning his neck, trying to look around, but as big as my father is — six-foot-four and 240 pounds in his prime — the husband is even bigger. I never wanted this.
I never wanted my husband to be involved in my family’s corrupt business. He shouldn’t be my protector. That’s why I didn’t cut off contact with my parents all these years because I always knew that would be the outcome.
My husband continues to try to reason with him, even as he dodges my husband’s questions and launches a stream of himself, trying to control the conversation: “I love my children. I love my grandson. Don’t you love your child? Didn’t you love your parents? The happiest day of my life was when your wife was born. Why? I can not log in?”
Every time my husband makes a pointed statement, my father tries to derail the conversation. It’s a textbook stamp.
My dad has been doing this my whole life, but it’s only in the age of the Internet that the seal finally has a name, which is ironic because abusers have been involved in it since the beginning of time, but somehow, we’ve never given it a name. When my husband explained that he would not let my father into our house, my father exploded:
“Okay, then I’ll sue!”
Again, I want to laugh. It’s very childish. My husband stands there for a few beats, stunned, and then responds, amused, “You’re suing us for what?”
I have a guess. See, in my father’s mind, his children are his property. Therefore our property also belongs to him, and how dare we deny him entry.
Although our doors are almost always locked, I don’t know how many times my dad has walked through our back door unannounced as if he owned the place, because my husband and I love to spend time in the backyard.
Related: What His Instagram Photos Reveal About The Kind Of Person He Is
My father is the typical narcissistic man, aka white man. He is the head of the family. And everyone else has to go along with what they want, no matter how insulting or ridiculous it may be.
If he doesn’t get what he wants, he throws a tantrum. He screams, shouts, stamps his feet, gets in your face and tries to intimidate with his massive size.
He also backs down if you stand up to him because he is a coward. My daughter doesn’t know this. She’s afraid he’ll come back with a gun. I know he won’t do that. (I know what you’re thinking, but honestly, he won’t do it. He’s too cowardly to risk prison.)
I’m more worried about him coming to my daughter’s work, like he did to me when I was young and working in retail. Sometimes the encounters were good. Other times, they definitely weren’t, like the time he brought his video camera to the grocery store where I worked and followed me around with it, happy that I was upset.
I won’t let him treat her the way he treated me. She shouldn’t have to deal with any of this.
I didn’t think to turn on the audio recorder on my phone until the end of the encounter (it’s a journalistic thing) and after a moment I wonder why I’m not videotaping the encounter like any other normal person in the 21st century. A century will do, but then I remember that I’m almost fifty and sometimes I forget the miracle of the age in which I now live.
My mind is also full of adrenaline. Capturing assailants on video or recording is beneficial to a person’s safety. Because you can try to explain these encounters to people, but the encounters are so crazy, the person you’re trying to explain them to might start wondering if you’re crazy too, which you certainly are.
In the end, my husband closed the door on my father, when he realized that talking was pointless. Dad bangs on the door a little more and then leaves. We’re all in shock for the rest of the day. My guilt and grief over our daughter being exposed to the bullshit she grew up with is eating away at me.
I may have to file a restraining order to make my father leave us alone. This is not where you want to be. It’s bad and there’s no easy way to deal with it. I’ve known for years that this confrontation was coming. I’m ashamed that my husband and daughter have to go through this with me.
