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Trauma

I couldn’t have been more than seven years old when my father burst into the bedroom that my sister and I shared, waking us both from a sound sleep with the noise and sudden brightness of the kitchen lights. “Come on out here, children,” he said lightly. Though raised for 13 years in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky, my dad had lost most of his accent, but he still has certain bizarre affectations you don’t often hear in suburban Chicago.

Bleary with sleep, my sister and I slowly got out of bed and wondered what, exactly, was going on. We had a rather odd childhood, with my father being an unruly alcoholic, so being awakened in the middle of the night for strange reasons was — well, still strange, but not as questionable as it maybe should have been.

“Where are we going, Daddy?” my sister asked through a yawn.

“We’re goin’ down to Kmart, getcha some toys,” he said pleasantly. Excited, we slipped on our snowpants, boots, coats, hats, scarves, mittens, and were ready for a trek out into the winter night. The idea of toys made us dismiss any potential concerns we may have had at the fact that it was after 11 o’clock, long past our bedtimes.

We followed Dad outside, and he walked right past his rusty, red pickup truck. My sister and I exchanged confused glances. “C’mon,” he said, gesturing for us to follow without stopping or looking back.

“Are we walking?” my sister whispered to me. I shrugged; she was the older one, so if she didn’t know, I figured I should be concerned. Kmart was at least 20 minutes away by car, so walking in the middle of winter seemed like a silly idea.

We followed him up the slope behind our house to the big soccer field where the Park District usually held games on summer Saturdays. He continued, huge footprints in the deep snow, until he reached a tall lightpost flooding quartz illumination all over the white field.

“Get down,” he said when we caught up.

“What?” I thought in my Daniel Stern, Wonder Years internal monologue. “Why are we out in this field? What’s happening?”

“Your mother says you been bad again,” he said. It was true; we were often caught sneaking out of the house or watching television when we weren’t supposed to. In this particular incident, I don’t remember what we did; I just remember the gory aftermath. “Get down,” he repeated sternly.

We got down, sitting Indian-style, as we usually did in school.

“Flat on your bellies,” he instructed; we obeyed. “You know how to do push-ups, right?”

My sister and I exchanged nervous glances. Sure, we had done push-ups in gym class for the stupid Presidential physical fitness thing, but neither of us were particularly athletic. My sister was generally more concerned with her hair and clothes, and I was concerned with not caring about sports. So yes, we knew how to do push-ups, and at this point it had dawned on us that maybe we weren’t getting the Ghostbusters firehouse playset after all, but would we do well enough to please him?

“Gimme 10 push-ups,” he said.

We set our hands down on the cold, hard-packed snow, making prints in it. And we started doing push-ups.

“One!” he called after we had — eventually — completed the first. “No girly ones, son,” he said to me.

“Two!” he called after the second. “Come on, we got all night, and you’re doin’ a hell of a lot more than 10 — this’s just a warm-up.”

“Three!” We continued, I don’t remember for how long, but eventually he was satisfied, and our faces had turned a pale shade of blue, so he trudged us back to the house and sent us to bed, freezing and probably dehydrated.

The next morning, whatever we had done, my sister and I made a pact never to do it again. And it’s really one of those childhood traumas that stick with you because, yeah, my dad was probably drunk out of his mind at the time, but that doesn’t stop the fact that this brought out the absolute worst in who he was. Was he normally — when he was sober — a caring, loving father? Yes, but if you crossed him, he’d take you to the dark side, which in this case involved a seven- and nine-year-old doing manly push-ups in the snow in the middle of the night, for something that was most likely as simple as refusing to eat peas.

It was this incident that really made me lose my trust in most people. Yes, I still trusted people, but this caused the downward spiral, and as more and more people — adults in places of authority, in almost all cases — began to betray my idea of who they were and show me their worst faces, I pretty much lost faith in humanity. Consequently, few things make me happy, as anybody who’s given even a cursory glance at this blog knows. I get depressed a lot, and I isolate myself a lot, because I don’t want to blindly trust somebody and end up doing more push-ups in the snow.

Posted by Stan on May 1, 2005 4:15 PM  | Permalink | Family: The Horror… | Digg It