"Mentally Scarred"

There in my room I see him stumbling, screaming at me! "You little piece of shit, why have you locked mom in her room?"
I can still remember how he beat me that night, when I refused to give him the keys by throwing them away into the garden bushes. Mom screaming for me to run to the neighbors and call the police.

These are hurtful memories to write upon this page, when mom and I ran away to her folks on the farm, where I was so happy to play with my puppy dog, a present for my tenth birthday to lie in bed with him the clown who loved to bark at the moon while jumping around chasing his tail. Then I wake to a new day, remembering that my father was sent to fight a war and returned two years later as a stranger to me, drunk from drinking with his buddies at the naval base on the east coast, where we now live.

Can you imagine a lonely child repeatedly seeing his beautiful young mother, thrown around like a ragged doll with nowhere to hide her son, now aged twelve from being treated like a dog and locked outside for the night, all because he ran away from another beating while his mother tried to protect him from his father?

I still cry about those lies, to my dear mother and me for saying he cared for us.
But he still returns home drunk to argue and shout for his supper not being warm and me without a gown on, like today knowing trouble is brewing in the kitchen before I can run away from him, lunging and pinning my hand behind my back while he takes his belt off to beat me to the ground, my mother screaming at him. “You maniac leave my boy alone, I will phone for the police patrol.”

Before I can protect myself he punches me in the face, then swings around to grab my mother to throw her to the ground. "Who the hell are you, trying to be the man of the house where I will do as I please to smash you and this bastard son."
“Jack, no not again, you’re insane.” I can feel the pain in her voice as I scream hitting him against the head with the chair in my hand over and over again, until he lets go for us to hold onto each other and run to the front door to escape out into the streets searching for safety.

My mother successfully filed for a divorce but lived her life in fear, scared like me that he may return one day to hurt us again. Granddad became my dad to send me to farm school until I graduated when I turned eighteen and then allowed me to work the farm, there were I remember being a child, now with my puppy old and grey lying on the porch wagging his tail at me for a bite to eat.


There are times when I still wake up in a sweat smelling his drunken rot gut whiskey breath, cursing me to be a bastard son of a wife who should never have had me as a child to take care of. On days like this, the demon dreams return to haunt me where I’m so afraid, like today to tiptoe to my mother’s room where I see her lying and staring at her picture of an Angel above her bed, while she holds her bible waiting to fall asleep.

“Mom, I’m having that dream again.”
“O my Son! Come let me hold your hand and tell you a story, to remind you of the happy days we shared down by the dam before your dad was sent to war. Do you remember the little ducks swimming toward you for the bread in your hands, that dad taught you to throw near the reeds and how you laughed as they spun around in a circle, hiding under the lilies from your puppy, trying to bite the water?”

”Yes Mom, now I remember how he would run around chasing his tail and me falling over him, trying to hold him down so that the ducks could eat the bread that you said would make them strong enough to fly away.” Mom, tell me why do the ducks fly away?” “My Son, they fly away because birds are not safe from men with guns.” It is then that I realize she is referring to my drunken father, the man with a gun that we had to run from to a life of safety here on the farm.

Sometimes when I return home late from working the farm, Granny is sitting there with her child, my mother in her arms waiting for me with tears in her eyes as we stare at each other, unashamed of the emotions flooding this room in our abused scared and scarred minds, crying in frustration for wasted years. There to be a loving family with a house and a car, a fire in the den and me to be studying for a higher degree to make her feel proud to have a learned son. Not like the mad man, posing as a saint when courting and marrying her, with the promise to love and hold her dear and look after his son to be a happy family.

I’ve tried my best to keep her from remembering the past, but all she asks of me is to read her bible to her in the evenings, until that final morning when I found her, as if sleeping peacefully with a smile on her face. I cried for joy that day knowing that her prayers had come true in the note she left me. “God is with me in Paradise here waiting for you. I will pray for you every day my son.”

I vowed that day to change my life to believe in myself. My mother’s comforting words of faith to know I am a child of God, who loves me to meet Sally the Sunday school teacher in church for my mother’s funeral. Six months later I proposed and we were married a year later to have four healthy children, Maggie and May the twins, then Stephen with a smile and our new baby, the adopted orphan, Simone always pointing her fingers to the cookie jar where she knows she will be spoiled for a cookie or two if she behaves in the bath for mom to wash her hair.

“Dad can we go down to the dam and feed the baby ducks today?”
“O yes my boy! Mommy will bring the bread and a rug to sit on, while you and your sisters can play your silly games that make us laugh and sing, there on the banks by the pebbled brook where the shy daisies grow under the weeping willow, for the ducks to fly to the waters edge for the bread in your hands to feed them.”

As I see our children playing there, images flash through my mind of me the child holding my mothers hand, there where my father played games with me so long ago before he started drinking. I turn and walk away from Sally and the children to hide the bitter tears of confusion that is tearing me apart because of my drunken father, who I now somehow wish could be sober enough to see his grandchildren, playing there by the reeds and teach them how to feed the new born ducklings.

To anyone who can relate to the trauma of alcohol abuse, my prayers are with you. I don’t have all the answers, but now that I’m not ashamed to write about it, my life has changed to be an example to others who are struggling with this dilemma –
Is alcohol abuse hereditary or a manifestation from the terrors of war or other situations that leave the victims unable to cope with it? Like my father, who when sober loved me as a child, but returned from a war to be the drunkard that beat me and my mom.

With this in mind I contacted the Navy for his address, but was advised that he was discharged medically unfit, leaving no forwarding address.
Sad to say that since my Mother’s funeral, I never found the courage to try and contact him, until now when it is too late to try and help him.

May I share these words from the book of Proverbs?

“Show me a man who drinks too much, who has to try out some new drink, and I will show you someone miserable and sorry for himself, always causing trouble and complaining. His eyes are bloodshot, and he has bruises that could have been avoided.
Weird sights will appear before your eyes, and you will not be able to speak clearly, thinking that someone beat you up, but don’t remember it. Why can’t I wake up? I need another drink.”

For me it is the destruction of family life that creates the misery of this world today.

1528-Words