I was born the 4th child in a family of 5 in a community of 5,000. My older siblings were 4, 5, and 7 years older than me and my younger sister was 5 years younger.
My Dad was raised on a Wisconsin farm during the depression, the youngest of 6 children. He served in the Navy in WWII and then began a career as an electrician in a paper mill, moving onto a mid-level manager role for a major business corporation. His family was very tight knit, and I remember grandma as a very intelligent and caring woman.
My Mom was raised in the Fox Valley area, the youngest of two daughters. She graduated high school, married my Dad, and became a stay-at-home mom. Her family upbringing was marked with a very violent, caustic environment. Her dad owned a bar out in the farming area where my dad was raised. My mom’s dad was a raging alcoholic that used to beat his wife and threaten violence against the family. There were times they had to lock him out of the house as he had a shotgun and in his drunken state would threaten to use it against them. When he was sober, he would treat my mom as his favorite. This would incur the anger and resentment of her mom who would verbally berate her.
I remember growing up as a young child, watching my mother sitting around in the house, with the shades drawn down, watching her soap operas all afternoon, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee all day. I remember Dad coming home from work, smelling of alcohol, but usually in a good mood, willing to shoot hoops in the driveway or play some catch with the baseball, then he’d head into the house to get ready for dinner. Dinner always involved cocktails for them before dinner. Dinner at our house was a combination of some decent conversations about the day, with Dad telling some jokes. Then there was a regular routine of critiquing going on by mom or dad about manners and the proper way to eat, as well as a run down of our days, what we could have done better, how we needed to improve on anything from our posture to our hair, to our friends we had, to our study habits… all done in a condescending or sarcastic air that left us feeling inadequate, stupid, or humiliated.
There were regular times where Mom would tell Dad anything we did wrong or didn’t do that she thought should have been done. Or she would have us tell him by saying, “tell your father what you did today”. Dad would then determine what the punishment would be if Mom hadn’t already meted it out. This would range from extra chores, to groundings, to spankings scheduled for after dinner. Most meals involved a mental pressure of hoping the spotlight wouldn’t be shone on me.
I recall the stress of waiting to be excused so I could get away from them to a safe place, like my room. We had to ask to be excused from the table; we could not just get up and walk away. For as young as I can remember, from 4 or 5 onward, spankings from Dad were hard, usually involving the use of a ping pong paddle, and ended with me wetting my pants to some degree. There were several occasions when the paddle would break off in his hands while he was spanking as he was doing it so hard. I always had to be on my guard around the house with Dad, because I would never know what would set him off when I was younger and he would swing with his backhand, or kick me in the rear end, or just simply grab me from behind and shake me so hard my head would be snapping back and forth and I would almost pass out. I remember a couple of times when this happened, I would end up dropping to the ground as I was about to lose consciousness. One of the times he did it to me in our front yard when I was playing with a neighbor kid. I remember the look of shock and horror on their face as they watched what happened. I remember looking up from the ground, seeing their face and feeling so humiliated and ashamed. I think I was 6 or 7 at the time.
As I grew older, I became a little more savvy and learned to read and avoid the situations that would set Mom or Dad off. What also took the pressure off a bit on me was my older brother was 4 years older and much of the violence was turned on him from when I was 10 to about 13. Those times were full on beatings where my dad would be swinging both hands at my brother, slapping him in the face, head, and then him throwing some punches to his body when he would cover up with his hands to protect his head. These physical episodes would happen once every couple of months or so. In between would be a cooling off and then you could start to feel the tension build back up with verbal beratings and put downs by both mom and dad, and “regular spankings”, until another explosion would happen on us. As I watched it happen to my older brother an anger started to grow in me toward my father and what he was doing. I knew what was happening was wrong, and my brother didn’t deserve this to happen to him, so when I was 13 – 14 and my brother was 17 – 18 I started to step in to deflect the violence away from my brother and onto me. I was a pretty bright kid, top in my class, so I knew how to provoke a situation to get it over and diffuse it. My oldest brother was out of the house by this time, off to college, and did not know what was all going on. As soon as my middle brother turned 18 in May of his senior year, he enlisted in the Air Force and was out. My oldest sister got married that following spring and she also got out.
I felt I was the last one standing from my freshman year onward, and it felt like a war. I was able to keep the peace for the most part in the house by placating my mom and dad. But inevitably, they would begin arguing with each other after dinner and after a number of drinks. I would be up in my room, listening to the arguments escalate, waiting for when Dad would then come up the stairs to my room. I would feel sick to my stomach with fear as I knew what was coming. He was coming. He was coming to beat the shit out of me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I just had to wait for it to come. I would hear him coming and would be dreading the outcome. Sometimes he would charge up the steps, fling the door open with a bang, and just lay into me. Other times he would come in the room with a look in his eye and would start asking questions of me, looking for a reason to go off on me. He always found one. Then it would be the full armed swinging of the hands, hitting/slapping me about the face and head, and as I would cover up, the punches to the body would begin. It would stop when he grew tired and would walk out.
My dad had been a boxer when he was in high school and in the Navy, and I used to say he would use me as his body bag. He was careful enough to never leave bruises on my face, that’s why he used open hands on my head.
Sometimes, when I was age 13, he would come back in afterward and be very sorrowful for what he had done. I really wanted to believe him so I would forgive him. But by the time I hit 14 – 15 and it was still going on, I was in no mood to hear his hollow apologies. I would just glare at him with hate, not say anything and wait for him to finish his apology and walk out.
What was layered on top of dad’s physical abuse was my mom’s ongoing emotional abuse. She was a depressed woman with demons from her own past. She just always had a negative outlook on life, always criticizing or critically commenting on our behavior through a normal day, or saying things like, “well, you never thought you could do that, did you?” when I would fail at something I was trying. She would also tell my sisters, when dad was beating me, and they cried to her to make dad stop, that I “must have deserved the punishment”. Many times she would be chastising me and if I responded with what she thought was an impertinent response, she would slap be across the face, then wait until Dad got home so she could tell him what I had done.
When the beatings would happen and my dad would walk out of the room, I would lay on my bed, review what had happened, and promise myself that if I EVER had kids of my own, they would NEVER know this kind of treatment. I also knew that no matter how much both of them tried to beat me down, verbally and physically, I was NOT going to let them win. To me, it became a fight for me, my survival, my future. When I was in the house, I was mentally strong and fighting for what was right in life.
But, I took every chance to be out of the house and doing whatever I could to stay away throughout the day and into the evening as I got older. When I would come home, I would pause at the door, take a deep breath, and wonder what kind of craziness I was going to encounter when I walked in. I was a 3-season athlete on the starting teams, class president, Key Club president, Distributive Ed Club vice president, had a job after school and sports, was in the top 10 of my class and a National Honor Society member.
No one outside of the home knew what was happening. A couple of my close friends had some idea that my parents were “strict”, but I never told them about the abuse. This was stuff that was not talked about, and you didn’t air your dirty laundry. In the community, my dad was an upstanding citizen, on the church board, helping out with scouts, youth baseball, a great guy. He always had time for the social clubs and community status, but little to no time for his family. With Mom being a recluse due to her depression and anxiety, this was the cause of many of their arguments. He wanting to get out and to do more, she refusing to go out almost at all, except for grocery shopping. At school, I was engaged in my classes, upbeat, and friendly with all of my peers. It looked like I was thriving, but by the second semester of my senior year, I was dying inside. I was at the point of seeing very little reason to continue to live as my parents portrayed this hypocritical lifestyle. As a result, I did a number of things on a fairly regular basis that could have killed me and it would have looked like a tragic accident. But none of them turned out.
Toward the end of my senior year, there was a night my parents were both on me for something at dinner and the argument continued to escalate. I left the table and went upstairs to use the phone in their bedroom to call my friend about an event coming up. They both came up to the room and I knew what was coming. It was really difficult to calmly end the phone call, hang up the phone and turn around to know I was going to be smacked in the face. So, I took a deep breath, hung up the phone, turned around and thought to myself, “you will not win”. The beating from my dad commenced with my mom standing to the side, watching it all. The slaps to the face blinded my eyes, rung my ears, and as I covered my head with my hands and arms, the blows began to fall on my body. I was pinned against a wall on one side and a bed on my other side, with my dad in front of me. There was no way out. I started going down, blacking out, not really feeling the pain at this point because my senses were so over-loaded. I held on because something inside me rose up while I was slipping down… there was this grim satisfaction down deep in me that knew he was wrong, what they were doing was wrong, and that they were not going to win.
Then he tired out, stepped back away, and started walking out of the room. I looked up to see him go, then looked at my mom still standing there, not saying a thing, not doing a thing to stop any of this. A rage came sweeping over me and I stood up, and made up my mind I was going to kill my dad, right then and there. I knew he would be at the landing at the top of the steps, I knew I had at least a 15 foot run at him and that I could take him down the 15 remaining steps by spearing him head first and dropping him down the steps. All of this flashed in my mind in about 1.5 seconds. I took off from around the bed. I saw the look of fear in my mom’s eyes as she read the intent on my face. She yelled out, “don’t you dare!” and tried to grab me. It was enough to snap me out of my blind rage and I stopped at the far end of the hall. I stared him down as he looked back at me. He saw the intent in my face as well. I don’t recall the words said, because there was so much adrenaline flowing. But I was fully ready to kill him that night.
For the rest of the Spring and Summer, I found a way to pick the lock in my bedroom door as it was an old fashioned lock but very strong, as was the door. I started locking it when I was home and if Dad got in a rage he would try to get in but could not; the first couple of times he tried to break down the door, but it did not budge as it was solid and the hinges strong. I finally had found some place of safety in that house.
I went away to college that Fall, as far away as I could get from them. I enjoyed my classes and classmates and found a friend who also had an abusive dad. We would compare notes and laugh at how stupid our dads were. But we were pretty emotionally scarred individuals. Then in my Sophomore year, I had a born again experience with Christ. I had never felt unconditional love before and it literally transformed me. I was in love with God and everyone. I came to a place of trying to forgive my dad and mom for what they had done. They didn’t understand me and thought I was a little wacky with all my talk about the love of Christ. Any reconciliation was really a one-way deal, coming from me.
I was living away at college, then moved to Milwaukee after my bachelor’s degree in psychology, and started working at a psychiatric hospital on the adolescent unit. I did this for 3 years, then went on to get my master’s degree in counseling. It was during these master’s studies that I learned that I had been raised in a caustic, dysfunctional family. I spent many nights grieving the loss of never having parents who cared nor were invested in me or my siblings, and the emotional and physical abuse they had inflicted upon me. I suffered from flashbacks and nightmares on a regular basis. I struggled with bouts of rage toward them that would keep me up all night at times. I would stuff the feelings and memories away in a compartment in my mind and would get busy living my life as I wanted to be successful.
But, as I studied, I learned from my classes I needed to embrace my past, not run from it. I learned from my faith that forgiveness was necessary for me to ever have a productive life. So, I forgave my parents, time and time again, as the flashbacks would occur and the feelings of rage would well up. I would self talk myself through it, because there were few people who either wanted to hear about my past nor would they believe what had happened. This included my first wife who thought I was embellishing the events because she had met my parents and found them to be “nice people”. She couldn’t conceive that they would have acted the way they did.
I had forgiven my parents, but as I had my own family started, I was busy raising my 4 kids and didn’t have a real motivation to see them often. When I did, they would be happy to see the kids and me, but I still didn’t know how to develop a real relationship with them, so it stayed pretty superficial until my mom died at age 63 in 1995. It was at this time I sat down with my dad and point blank asked him, “do you ever regret the things you did to me?” He looked at me and said, “there is not a day that goes by that I don’t regret what I did to you Joe.” This was a very big step for us to have more of a normal relationship going forward as it gave me validation for what had gone on was legitimate and he recognized and acknowledged what he had done was wrong. My dad and I had a better relationship after that, but he really never actively engaged in my life or with my kids, so they knew my wife’s parents as their real Grandpa and Grandma.
It wasn’t until my divorce in 2012 that I realized I needed to do more forgiving of my dad, as he never initiated any interaction with me; it was me always calling or visiting him. Because of this, resentment had been growing for years as I thought, “what good did the reconciliation bring as things remained awkward and strained whenever I did see him?” With my divorce finalized, he called me a couple of times and that kind of opened a window for us to talk real once again. (It had been 15 years since my mom had died and we had that original talk.) It was during one of those talks he said, “I know I was hard on you Joe when you were younger” and I interrupted him and said, “no dad, you weren’t just hard on me, you used to beat me.” I did not want to sugar coat what had happened. It was real pain, real ugliness, and we needed to look at that together.
That moved us forward in our relationship, but what also helped me was my girlfriend showed me the power in focusing on and loving people for what good they do have in them, recognizing what they are capable of being rather than what “we” think they “should” be. Everyone has limitations that they can’t seem to overcome. I came to the realization that I was punishing my dad for not being more involved in my and my childrens’ lives, of not being proactive in building a new relationship with me. I needed to accept the fact that he would never be what I would want in a father, but he gave me what he could. That is when I came to a place of complete forgiveness for him, recognizing that was all he was capable of giving.
I also came to the place of forgiving my mom for all she had done, as I realized she was a tormented soul from her childhood and she just passed along the same parenting style she had been raised with. I did not, nor do not excuse what they did to me back then. That was inexcusable and they need to answer to their actions, but I will no longer be their judge. This was very freeing for me, as I was able to let memories and flashbacks come, but they no longer overtook me. Me completely forgiving them enabled me to set down the rage when it came upon me. I had control of my life and could look at any part of it without avoidance and choose a path of peace. I wish I had come to this place decades ago.
What I DID do right, was how I raised my four children from my first marriage. I was there for them, emotionally and physically throughout their childhood. I provided a stable, stress-free home that was full of laughter, adventure, and loving acceptance. My house was the house all the neighborhood kids wanted to come and hang out. My kids actively showed their love to me and their mom as we did to them. They were treated with respect, were listened to, and were able to challenge decisions I would make as a dad and influence the outcome. Their friends would often say, I wish I had parents like yours, or a family like yours. For me, I had succeeded in completing the promises I made to myself as a teenager, lying in my room in pain emotionally and physically after the beatings. I had built a home that was a place of peace and rest for my kids, they felt loved, supported, and believed in. And, I have come to a place of peace with my Dad. All due to the power of forgiveness.
Jesus said, “blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy”. Forgiveness is freeing. It moves you from the place of torment, agony, despair, rage, or hopelessness in dealing with life’s circumstances to a place of peace, empowerment, and hope for a better future that you get to make, whatever you want it to be! Stop letting the abusers from your past define who you are, stop letting those painful memories keep you frozen in place.
You are worth fighting for. You have a right to a future of joy, peace, and fulfillment. You are loved.
