M---
It is late --nearly 2:00 am. I picked up Manifest your Destiny at 12:30 and I can't put it down, but I had to tell you why I reacted, what changed. You of all people need to know, because you understand best of all.
First, I have been having trouble in therapy talking about the one central fear that I harbor. You are so right that I have no real tangible fears that I cannot overcome or haven't overcome so far. I have spent a lifetime doing that in both the Athlete and Warrior state.
However, my greatest fear is becoming like my father. You said talk to my mom that things may not have been as bad as I remember, but hun, they were worse. I called my sister the other day to apologize to her.
See, my father was a cop and a drunk; he hated everything and everyone. His life and his work became one, so the anger, fear, hatred on the job became one and the same. He would take his anger out on my mom and my sister, but he would make me watch and say, "This is how you treat women, this is what they deserve." I knew that to always be wrong. I don't know how, but I always did. I went away in fantasy to avoid thinking about his vitriolic and damaging words. I hated him. He would rarely hit me, which made me feel worse, because I didn't want my mom and sister to share that alone. I did everything I could to get him to him me, but he just saw this as weakness and instead of hitting me, would tell me how I would never amount to anything in this life. I would be a stupid laborer, if I were lucky to ever get work.
One time, and this was the worst of it before my mother and father separated for good, my father beat my sister unconscious and my mother ran to get his service revolver. I called the police on my father, which didn't amount to a hill of beans, because he was a cop. I can remember the wreckage he left behind. He destroyed everything that my sister owned from clothes to furniture. It wasn't until my mother came down and pointed the gun at him did he go upstairs. I remember distinctly standing at the bottom of the basement steps where my sister's room was demolished screaming that I would kill him one day given the chance. I was 6 at the time.
I hated him, M--. I never wanted to be like him. I studied and studied to be a good student to go to college. I ran and ran and ran and punished myself because I was so afraid that I would become like him and from the guilt that I felt for not being the one beaten all the time. I called my sister the other day to apologize for not being able to protect her. She said that I was only six, what could I have done. She said that I saved her because I called the police and made him have to talk with them on the phone, long enough for my mother to get the service revolver to stop him. I love my sister very much and would do anything to protect her.
No matter what I did, he never appreciated who I was. He ridiculed me and made attacked everything I did even through college. I hadn't forgotten what he did ever. Many years in the future, he brought me to his farm in Virginia that was very secluded. We went out to the back and he wanted to show me his new gun. We started shooting when he said that he wanted to check the targets. He walked away toward them, leaving me with the loaded gun. I was 19. I never forgot my promise. I was strong then and smart. I had overachieved on anything that he could ever imagine, but I couldn't forget the promise that I made. I took aim and he stopped and called back to me...I paused, finger on the trigger, bullet in the chamber, and I paused. I put the weapon down and followed him.
I always felt that I had let my sister down and had not fulfilled my promise. He died in 1994 of a horribly debilitating cancer that ate him from the insides. I felt no remorse.
I have never stopped trying to be better than him even after his death. I earned more master's because he had one. I never played the sports he liked for fear of some sort of universal transference. I learned the guitar because he played it. I never investigated my artistic ability because he liked to dabble in it.
I worked in women's shelters, I have stopped men from hitting their wives in public, I divorced my wife because one day I found that I was allowing her to make me feel like my father. Now, I also know that she cheated on me.
I have spent almost every day compartmentalizing my life because I feared the potential that chaos and him would enter in: he was in the army.
That week that you said everything changed and you wonder why the desire to change my appearance. You backed away, and I didn't understand that you wanted your space. I really didn't. Very well constructed walls began to fall away inside. Calling my ex-wife and her confirming her affairs caused even more self-doubt then calling R- and hearing that she was getting married pushed me over the edge. I could no longer stop being Greg and military Greg. I realized that they were one and the same and I thought immediately, even though you didn't give this indication, that I had become him. He was 39 when he did those horrible things and I am 39. I was the monster that I always feared. I wanted it to go away. I tried very hard. I thought that you saw only him and I only heard that inner voice that screamed over rational thought trying to counter that inclination. I absolutely freaked. I so desperately wanted you to tell me that I wasn't and the more I tried to get you to talk to me, the further I pushed you away. I didn't get what you were telling me because I wasn't listening: I didn't intuit it.
At about 1:50 or so it struck me.
I can forgive myself. I was only six and I could not murder anyone then as I could do it now in cold blood.
I am not like him. I am successful. People like me, I have lots of friends.
I have gotten thanks from battered women for helping in their shelters. I have gotten thanked from women from protecting them from their husbands or boyfriends. I really do like life. I enjoy all the things that make other people happy, but I have been refusing to let myself really enjoy them because I felt guilty about who I thought I was in part. I am a kind, gentle, wonderful man, who is also a skilled warrior.
I am not my father, I never will be. I will not become a hopeless drunk, who beats women and dies alone amidst a desolate, bleak end of days.
I am Greg. I have a great life and future ahead of me.
In time, I would like to introduce you to him. He likes you and misses your company very much, if not for anything more than to laugh and make you blush. I am confident that it will happen because I am thinking about it happening all the time.
Greg
