Or rather, more aptly put, the Syndrome.
Depending on who you ask and their level of both comprehension and education, you’ll get the following definitions for this syndrome:
- a condition that was coined in the 70s after a bunch of people got held hostage and developed an uncanny defense of the bank robbers who had threatened their lives, even becoming scared of their would-be saviours;
- a situation wherein someone who is held captive develops romantic feelings for the assailant;
- when an abused person believes their abuser to be their knight-in-shining-armour.
I fit into none of those situations, yet a few weeks ago, it hit me that Stockholm Syndrome is very nearly the most perfect parallel to describe my relationship with my father prior to his death – and the lack of grief afterwards.
Today, May 8th, 2009, is the third anniversary of the day that my father died. I’m not sad. I’m not grief stricken. No memories flicker on my peripheral slide projector. There’s no wistfulness or what-ifs. It is what it is. He’s dead. Whatever.
The day he died, I lied to him, telling him that he was the best father, ever, and that I was so glad to have known him. I curled my little body, swollen with Isobel and shaking with tears, around his silent, cancer-riddled one. He’d let out his least breath and last sound, and it was over.
I also told him that he was the reason I was who I was – I thanked him sort of, for that. That part was honest.
A week later at his funeral, people cried out of grief for him and grief for me. I cried out of…I don’t even know what – the pure taxation of my body and mind for the past week, month, year, decades? I cried, because I knew that those people thought they (and I) were losing someone great, and I knew the opposite was true. I cried because a force of evil had left the world, and with it, even though I didn’t know it that day, so would evil’s hand at developing me as a human being.
Every post I’ve written, wherein I’ve made mention of him or the crimes he committed against me, every essay and any conversation, there’s been a measured amount of truth let out. As I moved further along the calendars, I’ve become wordier, more honest, more bared and obviously broken down about it.
But I’m not really.
Because a few weeks ago, I identified some thing that I didn’t know existed about myself: I felt like a survivor. Not of his abuse, his emotional raping and scars. Not because I was at any point wherein I could see marks on my skin and associate them with anything other than him. Not because I suddenly woke up and thought, “you are not a worthless piece of shit, who does nothing but cost people. You are beautiful and worthy of love. You’re a great human being and deserve to think it about yourself.”
Because I realized that when he was alive, even on the night that I considered killing him when I was 13, I was protective of him. Because I developed this fixture of attachment – construed our fucked up togetherness as a form of closeness. I honestly thought, for years, about most of my life, that he was my best friend and that I’d brought everything upon myself by being not good enough.
A few weeks ago, I woke up and instead of telling myself everything that I’ve always seeked out others to tell me, to momentarily fill the gaping void of normal human development that he left in me, I checked myself for grief. I realized that it wasn’t rage about him dying I felt. It was purely anger that I had been so misled, for so long, into believing that I was unworthy of anything greater than him.
I’ve thought about how to phrase this post appropriately. How to convey the message that finally, I’m starting to heal. There’s no proper way to do so – how to you hold up scars that everyone can see and say, “hey, I’m doing better, I’m fine, I’m better than fine”? You can’t.
What I can do is look inside and realize that most of the voices I hear, the ones telling me how wrong I am for fill-in-the-blank, and how I should be more fill-in-the-blank, and how I’ll never be fill-in-the-blank enough, are just memories, recycled. What I can do is stop repeating his messages of wrong and the habits he required of me, lest punishment ensue, and move on. Choose to only hear my own voice.
A week ago, I started leaving cupboard doors open. Two days ago, for the first time in a decade and a half, I left a spoon on the counter, concave side up. There was no ghostly father, gripping my neck at my incorrigible inconsiderateness. No one was struck in the back of the head with a closed fist. No summoning of an other-worldly monster shouted in my face.
Life went on, and I got okay about it.
Today, the person who played the role of my father has been dead for three years. Today, I stop playing the role of his daughter.
