After years of silence, it’s time to tell the truth about my father

By David McElroy · March 27, 2018

It always started with screaming, but it often ended in silence — for days or weeks.

On this particular night, I was in the kitchen when it started. I was about 14 years old. I don’t remember what made my father angry, but I know it was minor. It was always minor with him.

I might have used a tone he didn’t like. I might have forgotten to take out the trash. I might have forgotten to put a load of clothes into the dryer. As an adult, I now understand these are fairly minor things, but when I was a child, everything I did wrong was a cardinal sin — when he was in this mood.

I always forced myself to be completely calm. I wore a blank expression. Any sign of disagreement with him — or talking back to him in any way — would increase his fury. All I could do was stand like a statue and hope it would end soon.

I remember how red his face would get and how the veins on his neck would stand out as he screamed his rage at me. But I felt numb, because that was the only safe response.

On this night, he pushed me. It was a hard shove that sent me flailing across the kitchen floor. I didn’t fall but I stumbled. He didn’t often push me in that way, but it scared me when he did. I always felt a tremendous fear about what might happen next.

Nobody outside my family ever saw this side of my father. He was a charming and educated man who got credit from everyone for raising his three children all by himself. Part of the time, he was that man at home. On those times, he was kind and loving. But his absolute control over us was always there. Any time he was in a bad mood — when something bad happened at work or something else upset him — he turned into this raging monster who nobody saw except my two sisters and me.

For many years, I didn’t understand what I had gone through as a child. I was so terrified when I was young that I couldn’t even let myself acknowledge what I was going through. It was something like Stockholm syndrome, I suppose. But after I left home and started experiencing the world without his daily presence, I started to realize that something was wrong with what I’d been through, even though I had no explanation for it.

Nothing about my childhood made sense until a psychologist explained narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) to me about 10 or 12 years ago.

I grew up knowing that my mother had problems with depression. I knew that she left us when I was young. What I didn’t understand at the time was that he was the truly dysfunctional one. He drove my mother away — and he created a controlling narcissistic nightmare in which his children lived.

I’ve never wanted to talk about this while he was still alive. Even though I broke off contact with him about eight or nine years ago — because he refused to go to counseling to talk about our relationship — I still haven’t wanted to hurt him by telling the truth about him, at least not publicly. And even though I didn’t want to admit this part of it to myself, I realize now that I’ve still been afraid of him.

Part of me has remained the little boy who knew that bad things happen when I upset Daddy.

He is in a hospital now and hasn’t been able to read what I have to say. (He found this site several years ago and I’ve limited what I had to say about him since then.) It was just eight days ago that I thought he was about to die. Now, I don’t know what’s going to happen to him.

A nurse called me from the hospital Saturday night and said he had had another episode that might have killed him, but he lived through it. As far as I know, he hasn’t been very coherent during this time. I’m told he’s confused for much of the time.

For years, I’ve needed to talk about what happened to me. I’ve been able to tell bits and pieces of my story to a few others, but most people don’t want to know the details. I still have a serious need to talk about it and process what happened — to understand more of it and beg someone to understand what happened to me.

I don’t know why that matters so much to me, but it does.

On the night I described, he demanded I admit to something which I hadn’t done. I don’t recall the details. I just know he insisted I confess to something.

I refused.

My refusals to confess to things I hadn’t done were probably the only acts of open defiance of my childhood. I disobeyed him at times, but I never openly crossed him. Except at times such as this. Something in my little heart refused to admit to something I didn’t do.

When I refused to confess, he quit speaking to me. When he started giving me this sort of silent treatment, I never knew how long it would last. Would he have forgotten about it by the next morning? Would the silence go on for a few days? I never knew.

Sometimes the silence would go on for weeks. When I moved a few years ago, I found a couple of diaries that I sporadically kept for parts of my early teen years. (I kept them in a box that was locked by a combination known only to me.) In those diaries, I found discussion of one of these periods of silent treatment. It had gone on for a couple of weeks, according to what I read, and I finally was able to talk with him and convince him to “graciously” put it aside.

I realize now the extent to which I was the adult in my relationship with my father.

I’ve had a lot to think about over the last eight days, because the prospect of his death has stirred up a lot of painful memories. Although they’re painful, I need to talk about them. Over time, I will have a lot to say.

I need to talk about him moving us to Oregon with no plan and then the conversation on the side of a highway during which I told hm we had to go back to the South — where we knew people and had family, since we were broke. I was about 11 or 12.

I need to talk about the time when he yelled and screamed at my sisters and me all day one time — even skipping work to continue screaming, telling us that he was going to lose his job because of us — all because one of his belts had been moved in his closet and nobody would “admit” having done it.

I need to talk about his lies and the many times when he forced us to lie for him — and how this warped my perception of truth until I became an adult.

There are many things I need to talk about. There’s a lot that I still need to understand and process. More than anything else, though, I need for someone to read about what happened and to understand where I came from and what it did to me. I need someone to say, “I’m sorry this happened and I understand how you feel. It’s over now and I love you.”

Over the last 10 years, I’ve become aware just how widespread narcissistic personality disorder is. I’ve learned just how many people have been hurt by similar childhoods and how many people live with their own secrets and their own feelings of shame.

I don’t know exactly when, but the time is coming soon when I’m going to share the full story of the truth about my father.

Note: My father died three weeks after this was published, on April 17, 2018.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts