Speaker for the Dead

I have daddy issues. To start with, I have two (dads—my issues are legion), so I’ll have to start by defining terms. My mother was not married when she had me and I did not meet my biological father until I was almost twenty-nine. Although bringing him into my life was a source of tremendous stress for many years, he is a very good man and I have a good relationship with him now, and have no problem calling him Dad. Meeting him for the first time was directly correlated to being pregnant with my first child and having stress, for the first time, about half of my genetic makeup that I’d never really bothered about before. My entire growing up I had never been curious about him, or wanted to find him, or resented him, or really thought about him at all. I didn’t pine for him, I wasn’t angry with him, I didn’t wonder why he didn’t want me, nothing. He was a non-entity to me. If anything, I actively wanted nothing to do with him, but not out of any negative feelings toward him at all. I was a teenager when my mom told me he had curly hair. It was quite a blow. I always thought—and told everyone—that I got my curly hair from my grandpa. One of my aunts has curly hair and the other has very wavy hair. My mom’s hair is perfectly straight, as is all of my siblings’, and it was devastating that my grandpa’s curly hair hadn’t skipped this entire line except for me. I was in my early twenties when my grandma told me his first name, and I was terribly annoyed with her for doing it. I have always been fascinated by names and I didn’t want my brain to start obsessing over something that it had happily not thought about before. This was the grand total of what I knew about my biological father until I met him.

My mom got married shortly before I turned six. I distinctly remember life when it was just the two of us, and I’ve got to say, my memories are happy ones. I don’t remember Mom dating, as such, but I do remember the wedding and being their flower girl. I had a daddy now, and though I somehow vaguely knew that he wasn’t the daddy like other people had, I knew that he was mine and I was his and that was the way things were. He was a little more strict than my mom was, and he had certainly changed my world by enlarging it from two to three, but I think I was happy with him. Though I remember, even after years had passed, telling my mom that I wasn’t quite used to him yet, and now I wonder what was actually going on.

He adopted me and it was all official. I really was his girl. He really was my daddy. I never heard the word ‘step’ used in the context of my family. For that matter, I was in high school when a therapist asked me about my half brothers and sister and I honestly had no idea who the hell she was talking about. When I finally figured it out, I was livid and informed her that there was no ‘half’ about it. She very calmly and condescendingly corrected me and told me that technically, that’s what they were, and I told her she was wrong and never went back to her again. (Idiot.) For the sake of my sanity, and my childhood, he was my dad. Only now, as an adult, when I talk to people who might meet my biological father and think that he did the things I’m talking about, do I refer to him as my step dad. But I never called him that, never even had the thought in my head, as a child. And for the most part, my relationship with this man only existed in my childhood.

Ten months after they got married, my family was twice what it had been a year before. My first brother was born, and though I love him, I know with absolute certainty that his arrival was met with intense jealousy. I was kind of mean to him, and I remember feeling resentment toward him that I didn’t necessarily feel toward my dad. Six days after I turned eight, my second brother was born, and while he was still a baby we went to the Logan Temple and were sealed together as a family. He was my dad, more completely than he had been before. My dad.

My mom says that at some point after my first brother was walking, around the time my second brother was born, my brother and I stood in the doorway to our living room, screaming, and watched Dad beat her up. I would have been between seven and eight, depending. I have no memory of this. At all. But I can’t help but wonder if that didn’t contribute to me being ‘not used to him yet’.

We lived in Klamath Falls, OR, during fourth and the first half of fifth grade. My mom says it was while we were there that I first told her Dad was touching me. I have no memory of telling her this and I have no memory of him touching me while we lived there. However, to this day, I have a deep and abiding revulsion for Klamath Falls. The thought of Klamath Falls sickens me even more than Washington, and moving there was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. I had some very good friends while we lived in Klamath Falls, and my third brother was born while we lived there, so it’s not like I don’t have good memories from that time. But the city itself felt dirty and dark to me. It was when we were living in Myrtle Creek that Mom asked me if he was still touching me. I remember being utterly confused how she could possibly know that. She said that I had told her about it in Klamath Falls. I know the subconscious is a pretty tricky thing and I think it blocked any real memories of what happened there but left me with a dark, icky feeling for the place where it happened.

If you ask me where I’m from, where I grew up, I will tell you Myrtle Creek. We lived there from the middle of fifth grade to the not-quite-middle of ninth grade. That house was my home. I loved it. I loved being in that town. I met one of my best friends while living there, my first ever close friend that was a member of the Church. My first and only sister was born there, and my fourth and last brother. It was home.

And I desperately remember all of the shit that happened while we lived there. I remember the touching and the watching. And I remember becoming more aware of the fights. One night I was lying in bed and I could hear them arguing, I have no idea about what. And then I heard my mom say, “Don’t you hit me again.” Again. That meant that it had happened before. My dad sometimes spanked us with a belt (my mom spanked us with a wooden spoon) but I don’t remember him ever hitting us. I started asking my mom if they were going to get a divorce and she always said no. Until one time she said ‘I don’t know,’ and I realized I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

On a Sunday morning in April when I was fourteen, I was making hot dogs in the kitchen for lunch. The kids were downstairs watching TV, and Mom and Dad were in the office talking. Dad hadn’t come home the night before and we had all gotten up early when he did come home and gone on a drive instead of going to church. I knew that tensions were running pretty high, but they weren’t even arguing, there was no yelling, and I was trying to feed the masses so that hungry, whiny kids wouldn’t add to it. The next thing I knew, Mom was crawling out of the hallway on her hands and knees, gasping for breath and saying that Dad had hit her.

It turned out that he had spent the night with his friend’s wife, playing with their little boy while his own sons were at home crying for their daddy. He didn’t like Mom asking him about it, and he hit her. He ruptured her spleen and bruised a lot of other things and she spent the next month in the hospital, almost dying more than once. Us kids spent the next week being shuffled from house to house, mostly strangers, until a restraining order was in place and then arrangements could be made for us to go home with our grandma to northeast Oregon. I spent the last month of eighth grade living with her bishop. It was unspeakable.

Once Mom finally made it out of the hospital and we were able to come home again, Dad didn’t live with us. But Mom hadn’t given up on him yet. She spent that summer going to counseling with him until the day he acted like he was going to hit her, and then laughed because she was scared. At that point the counselor told her, right in front of him, that there was no point in trying, she had to get a divorce, that Dad would kill her if they stayed together. And so I started ninth grade knowing that at some point we would have to move. At first it was going to be at the end of the school year. Then it was going to be at Christmas break. Then November came, and my fifteenth birthday, Friday the thirteenth. Dad called from his parents’ house in Eugene to wish me happy birthday and Mom and Dad talked on the phone for a long time. Suddenly it looked like we were going to be moving the following week. Then he called back again around 11:00. When she hung up, Mom looked at me and said we had to move the next day. Grandma and Grandpa would be bringing him home on Sunday and he wanted half of everything. Half of the beds, half of the dressers, half of all the stuff. Even though his apartment was fully furnished and Mom had six kids to provide for. So the next morning ward members came over and packed us up. We left our home at 9:30 that night, clothes still in the washer and dryer, and moved to Washington.

These are all true things about my dad. There are more true things about him. He is a Vietnam vet with PTSD. He got remarried shortly after the divorce and has been with his wife ever since. More than thirty years. She had a couple kids, he had six, but they never had more kids together. A few years ago he contacted my mom and asked her if she would write up something about what he was like when they were together, the nightmares and such that he had. His wife had had enough and told him he had to go to the VA and get help for his PTSD because she couldn’t take it anymore. He needed documentation to take to the VA that this had been going on since he got home from the war. I don’t know what it was his wife was dealing with, if he ever hit her or if he was still having nightmares or what, but I do know that PTSD is real and my heart breaks for him. I also know that we have been given the gift of Agency. We can make choices. Sometimes the choices have been narrowed to only a few, and sometimes they are very difficult, but they are there. I had heard my whole growing up that the abused become abusers. It terrified me. It was pronounced with the finality of a diagnosis of terminal cancer. I was abused. I would abuse. That’s all there was to it. And I would rather die. Which was the choice I was very willing to make instead and have talked to God about as an option. Because I can, and do, choose not to pass this on. It is a diagnosis I refuse to live up to.

My dad was molested by his scout leader growing up. His parents suspected that something was going on, but he was “such a good scout leader.” Dad’s an Eagle Scout. He worked with this scout leader for a long time. Other boys were molested by this scout leader too. Bishops were told. Still more boys were molested. Nobody listened because he was such a good scout leader. When I was a freshman at Ricks my mom called and told me that a seventeen-year-old boy had just shot this man dead in his living room. The kid couldn’t take it anymore. Nobody would listen. This man had been molesting boys for more than twenty years. My mom called the boy’s lawyer and told him about my dad, about what had happened to my dad and about what my dad had done. When I started seeing counselors in high school, they told me that he molested me because I was his step daughter. That killed me, because there had never been any step involved. He adopted me. I was sealed to him. He was my dad. Then after the divorce he started molesting my siblings, and they really were his, there was no denying that at all. Forgive me, but as much as I wanted to tear him apart for doing that to my siblings, part of me felt better. He didn’t do it because I was his step daughter. He did it because he was messed up. And when you know what his scout leader did, it isn’t hard to figure out why. Again, my heart breaks for him, especially because his parents knew and did nothing. My mom at least tried to protect me. Once I had told her what was going on, I was seldom home with him if she wasn’t there too, and I was never left alone with him.

My dad is not dead, though last summer, just days before my siblings were to gather together at a beach house on the Oregon coast to spend a week with him, he had what they initially thought was a stroke. It wound up being a brain tumor, followed by the discovery of lung cancer. I don’t know exactly how he’s doing, but ‘well’ isn’t it. Despite that, this whole process has felt not unlike Speaker for the Dead, which is a book I haven’t read in many years, but the idea is to tell the truth of a person, both the good and the bad. My dad is not a favorite person in my home. In the nine years he was married to my mom, he laid many landmines. I don’t deal well with angry men, even ones who have never been physically aggressive toward me or any other person. There have been intimacy issues that have come up unexpectedly during my marriage. He has never met my children, and for a long time I was uncomfortable knowing he had even seen pictures of them when he visited with my siblings. It’s easy to say that I could not risk him doing to my children what he did to me, and that is certainly true. However, the deeper reason stems from something that came when I was older.

I didn’t tell him anything about going to Ricks or where I would be living while I was there. Although it was ridiculous to think he would travel to northeast Idaho just to bother me, there was this small ember of fear that wouldn’t completely die out, burning in the pit of my stomach. For the most part I didn’t think about it and I loved being at Ricks, but every now and then these little waves of panic would wash over me when I realized I was away from Mom, away from anybody who knew what he looked like and could give me a heads up if they saw him hanging around. I took a bus with my best friend down to BYU for Thanksgiving. She was going down to see her brother, I was going to see my uncle. We got back Sunday night and found that Rexburg had been dumped on while we were gone. There were mountains of fresh snow everywhere. It was already after dark and I was cold and tired, so I spent the night with my friend in the dorms. In the morning I hauled all of my stuff back to my place with just enough time to get ready for my first class. All of my roommates had already left and lying on the table was an envelope addressed to me. I recognized the handwriting, and the little ember burst into full flames of terror. Somehow he had gotten my address and sent me a card. I don’t remember any of the trivia he wrote in it, but I remember distinctly how he signed it:

I like you

Your stepdad

I was devastated. ‘I like you’ was just insulting to the point of practically being comical. I had mostly stopped seeing him when he came up to Washington to visit the kids. He had supervised visits now and I didn’t see much point in sitting there while somebody else watched him while he had awkward conversations with people he had hurt and abused and terrorized. He didn’t even know me anymore. It was absurd to think he ‘liked’ me. But he had to make a point of not saying ‘love,’ which people toss around so casually it doesn’t even mean anything. He had written it to be mean, but it was so ridiculous it hardly even hurt. The pain came from ‘your stepdad.’ Kids get mad at parents all the time, but that doesn’t mean their relationship ceases to be. As much as I didn’t like him, he was still my dad and I still called him that. He was a jerk, but he was a jerk I was stuck with. I thought. Now here he was disowning me, and the betrayal left me sobbing. I called Mom and cried and cried. It was the first time I missed class all year.

Two years later I had graduated from Ricks and was living at home, working, and trying to decide what to do next in my life. My brother had been seeing a counselor for a while, and once or twice a year, as he worked through something, Dad would come up and have a meeting with my brother, with the counselor present to kind of referee. One of those meetings was coming up in a day or two and Mom suggested that maybe I drive my brother to the appointment and then I could talk to Dad too. I wasn’t exactly excited by the idea, but I agreed to do it. We didn’t tell Dad about the change in plans and he was surprised to see me there, but went along with it. We talked about the things that he had done to me, which he admitted to, even telling me other things that had gone on that I had been unaware of. This was sickening on several levels, not the least being that after the divorce we had gone to court to get supervised visits and I had been questioned by his lawyer, who was pretty much a bastard. Dad had, of course, denied everything, and though we did manage to get supervised visits, they were MANDATORY supervised visits, which meant that the younger kids HAD to see him whether they wanted to or not, or Mom would be held in contempt. Even though one of my brothers threatened suicide if he had to see him. And here Dad was now, freely admitting to all kinds of stuff. (Also, I hate lawyers.)

It was time to go. There isn’t much you can say when someone is so open about crap they did to you and even brings up stuff you didn’t know about. So I asked him one last question. I asked him if he had ever loved me, even when I was little. (I was a stinking cute little kid. You would have to be a cold heartless bastard not to fall in love with me back when I was a Shirley Temple lookalike.) He looked up at the ceiling, thought about it for a few seconds, kinda shrugged and said, “Yeah.” And that was when I knew it was over. He is the king of I’m-going-to-say-all-the-right-words-but-EVERYTHING-ELSE-will-say-otherwise-and-that’s-the-real-truth-but-I-can-deny-it-because-THESE-ARE-THE-WORDS-I-SAID. Either he really truly had never loved me and our whole relationship had been a lie, or he was lying now, just to hurt me. In either case, I was done. I told him I didn’t want anything more to do with him, and for the most part, for nearly thirty years that has been the case. And that is why he has not had access to my children. Anyone who can willfully choose to hurt another, especially a child, is denied the opportunity to try it on my kids.

Part of me looks at all of that and wonders why I even bother. That’s quite the track record, and if he wasn’t my dad I would have walked away a long time ago without ever looking back. But the crap isn’t the only truth about him. There are reasons I wish things had been different between us, evidence that the possibility existed.

He would perpetually fall asleep reading me stories when I was little, which was both frustrating and fun. I wanted to hear the story, but if I didn’t complain about it then I could stay up later because Mom didn’t know I was just hanging out awake in bed while he was sawing logs. Often I would wind up reading to him (since he was asleep) and reading out loud is something I love doing.

He loved to dance. I guess one of the things he used to do with Mom before they got married (and then before they had too many kids) was go dancing. We have more than one home movie of him dancing with whichever baby happened to be the baby at the moment.

He’s tall (6’3”?) and my love of tall men started with him.

When we would arrive home after a road trip (usually to see his parents) I would pretend to fall asleep in the car so he would carry me in. Looking back, I think he must have known I was faking, but he carried me in anyway. I loved that.

When I was about seven or eight he had been out fishing and he came home and piled us in the car and took us way out in the country. He parked next to this little river then carried me and my brother through the tall grass to the bank. He told us to be really quiet and there through the trees was a swan’s nest. It seemed like it was as wide as Dad was tall and it had a dozen huge eggs in it. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.

When I was little he cut a stick off of a tree and worked some magic with his pocket knife and made me a whistle. When I asked him to make me one again he said he could only do it in spring when the sap was running. I always told myself to remember to ask him again next spring, but I would forget, and then he wasn’t there anymore.

He sang silly songs with us. Mom is the queen of silly songs, and of serenading people with them. He brought a few of his own into the mix and was willing to stand on friends’ doorsteps and belt them out. There’s a verse of Clementine that I’ve never heard anywhere but in my family, and I think it’s from him.

He played church basketball, and watching him play was one of my favorite things to do. Basketball is still my favorite sport to this day (though I’m lousy at it).

He had EPIC arm-wrestling matches with his younger brother whenever both of them were at my grandparents’ house at the same time. They would sit at the kitchen table and everyone would clear the room. We literally watched from the hallway, as these matches would go on for ten minutes or more, and the table would scoot around the room. It was awesome.

He majored in forestry and would often go places during the week up in the mountains and then on the weekends take us there. We had a year’s supply of elderberry jam from berry patches he took us to, and I still cringe at the thought of a tree-farmed Christmas tree. They’re supposed to grow wild and be cut down personally. (We don’t cut down our own trees now, but we do get them from a man who gets them from the forest, not a farm.)

Between my mom and dad, we had incredible gardens. I’m not sure which one deserves the credit for it, but we had tomato bushes taller than my dad, we had more than one crop of beets per year, and in our house in Myrtle Creek we had three separate garden plots.

He’s the hardest worker I have ever known. When we lived in Klamath Falls he worked swing shift at a lumber mill, slept for a few hours then washed cars at a car dealership until he had to go back to the mill. When the mill in Myrtle Creek closed down he started his own window washing business. I know that money was tight, but he supported a family of eight washing windows in a small town in Oregon. One Saturday he had been washing windows all night and then had a church softball game in the morning. He was running to the game and was just hurdling the chain around the parking lot to keep cars off the field when he realized he was too tired. He wasn’t going to make it. His foot caught on the chain and he came down hard on his knee. What he didn’t know yet was that he had broken his kneecap. It wasn’t until he tried to sleep that night that the pain was so bad he decided he’d better see a doctor. They had to do surgery and put a screw in his kneecap, and then, of course, he was supposed to stay off of it. But he didn’t have sick days. He had to wash windows. Long before the doctor said he could, he decided to go back to work. The problem was the truck he hauled his equipment around in was a manual and he couldn’t bend his left leg to work the clutch. When we had moved into our house there was a veritable graveyard of lawnmowers in back. They had all been cannibalized through the years to keep at least one of them going. Now he took the handle off of one of them, drilled a hole in the clutch, bolted the handle to the clutch and was able to shift with his right hand while working the clutch with his left. Back to work he went.

A week after we moved to Myrtle Creek he decided to check some paint the previous owners had stored in the eves. My baby brother was sleeping in the crib on the other side of the wall when he crawled in and saw that the stove pipe, that was inches away from the paint, was on fire. He yelled for my mom to get the baby and the rest of us out of the house, called the fire department, and started hauling pans of water up the stairs. The town had a volunteer fire department, and by the time they showed up he had put the fire out all by himself.

My name is Kathryn Michelle. My mom named me that with every intention of calling me Michelle, not Kathryn. I often forget the Kathryn is even there. A year or so after the divorce I realized that my dad was the only person who ever acknowledged the Kathryn at all. Only my dad ever called me KatieMick. Not having him call me that can still make me cry.

These are not all of the truths about my dad. My sister has a very good, supportive relationship with him now and I’m happy for her. My brothers have been salmon fishing with him in Alaska but they have also been belittled and berated by him. He is not only good, just as he is not only bad. He has had horrific things happen to him in his life, but he still has the ability to make choices and some of the choices he has made have been horrific themselves. We have grown far enough apart that I don’t actively miss him, just as his hurts to me are no longer open wounds. But if those hurts become the only truth of him, what will become of the swan’s nest?