That Horse

Originally published in Lunch Ticket Magazine, Issue 28, Friday Lunch Weekly Blog (link below).

It would be cliché to describe my dad as complicated. What cis man isn’t being raised in a culture that denies them emotions and softness and compassion? But I’ll say it anyway—my dad was complicated. He was one of the most emotional people I ever knew, and he wasn’t good at hiding it. Like most cis men, his emotions came out as rage. And he regretted things, like most people, but they weren’t things I wish he had regretted.

My dad had trauma—and loads of it. His mother left his father and took my aunt and uncle with her, but my dad stayed. He told me once that he didn’t want his dad to be lonely. I wonder if he regretted that decision.

Before my grandma left, I heard my grandpa used to beat her, once so bad she ended up in the hospital. He beat my dad, too, just for being a kid and doing things kids do. I didn’t hear those stories from my dad, though. He would never have admitted to something like that. He was too hung up on his dad dying to ever be able to think about how his dad wasn’t a good man or a good father.

When my dad was twenty-six, he and my grandpa went to a bar, and a fight broke out. I never heard the details of how the fight started exactly, only that my dad said he was mouthing off. All I know is that my grandpa, who was sixty-one, was involved, and while my dad was fighting someone else, another guy got my grandpa on the ground and kicked him in the head. He died later, in the hospital. My dad has talked about that experience with very few words, but I could always see the guilt and regret. It was a visceral thing, clinging to him. How could he have ever felt the pain of his own abuse when he had guilt gnawing away at his memories, poking holes in his life’s narrative so that there wasn’t a clear picture anymore? They say ignorance is bliss, and I think my dad had just enough ignorance to pretend his trauma didn’t happen or at least nullify it enough to keep living.

My parents knew each other for about a month before getting married. I guess that’s how things were in the 1970s, because a woman’s purpose was marriage and kids, and a man’s purpose was to provide the money to support the marriage and kids. I think a lot of people had kids back then because they thought that’s what they were supposed to do. My mom always wanted to be a parent, and I think in some ways, my dad did too. But it probably would have been best if he had sat that one out. He didn’t know how to be a parent, and I share enough of his traits to know that I shouldn’t be a parent. I think about that sometimes—about how maybe he was better than his dad, but not good enough to spare me some of the same bullshit he went through.

When I was born, my parents lived in a trailer on a small property in Prosser, Washington. My dad always considered himself a cowboy, and he loved horses, so naturally he had an old mare, who he called Sis. He used to say she’d follow him around the pasture and nip at him. There’s a picture of me as a baby sitting on her back. When I was about a year old, we moved to Rupert, Idaho, near my mom’s parents, and my dad had to sell his horse. I think it was a massive loss for him to lose something he loved and treasured, and he mentioned her throughout my life and even nicknamed me Sis. To this day, I’m not sure if I should have been honored or insulted that I, his human child, was, at the very least, as well loved as a horse.

I knew from a pretty young age that my dad had abused my mom before I came along. She told me once that he would hurt her and she would be upset and deny him sex, so he’d be kind again until she gave him what he wanted. It’s odd to me that he could understand consent to a certain degree but couldn’t understand why unleashing that rage on those you love is a shitty thing to do. Or maybe he knew all along and didn’t care, though I doubt that’s the case. He was far too emotional to not care about things, but not emotionally intelligent enough to deal with everything he felt. After my brother and I came along, my dad didn’t hit my mom like he used to, but the intimidation and multifaceted abuse continued.

After dinner one night, when I was about eight or nine, my mom was cleaning up the kitchen. My younger brother (four and a half years my junior) and I were still sitting at the table. They were arguing about something, but that was nothing new. My mom knocked over Dad’s full can of beer, and said something like, “Go have another one.” It spilled all over the counter and soaked his shirt. Everything happened so fast, and then he was on her, choking her. My brother and I started crying, and I got up and pounded my fists on his back and pulled at his shirt until he let go. I have no idea what would have happened if I had stayed at the table. I do know that once when I brought it up, my dad deflected it and said, “She kicked me in the balls!” And I screamed back, “Good!”

Talking to my dad used to be a battle of wills, and my parents loved to remind me that I have always been strong-willed. Maybe that’s why my dad and I clashed so often, at least in part, or it could be because he was an asshole and an alcoholic who didn’t have any business raising kids, if you could even call it “raising.” I learned a lot from him, though—mostly how not to be. My brother has said that his motto growing up was, “Don’t be like Dad,” and that says it all.

Despite that ongoing tug-of-war game my dad and I played, despite the push and pull of the battle of wills, and the way he made me feel like shit about myself and didn’t know how to be vulnerable or give praise, despite all of it, I miss him. I miss those talks, which sometimes were just, “shootin’ the shit,” as he’d say. Oftentimes we were two very strong-willed people trying to take the top spot. There were a lot of those. Yelling, screaming, seeing red, wondering if this argument would be the one where he finally took a swing just so that I’d have an excuse to hit him back. After all, Dad said, “Never start a fight, but you make damn sure you finish it.” And there were times when I felt the rage in me that he must have felt his entire life, that rage and generational trauma that has been laced into the core of who he was.

A couple of months before my dad died, my brother and I were sitting on folding chairs in the small living space of my dad’s studio apartment, the one our mom had built for him when she decided to take care of him as he aged. I still can’t understand why she wanted to take care of the man who made her life hell for over twenty years, who divorced him in 1999. But I don’t have to. I’m just grateful she did because it gave us all a little more time together.

My dad was lucid that day, which was unusual. He was on a high dose of knock you the fuck out so you can’t feel anything which meant that most of the time he was passed out in his chair, pissing himself because he was too drugged up to notice that he still had bodily functions. Every time I think of it, I also think—what a miserable existence.

My brother and I never knew what to say because communicating with a man who is barely conscious is like playing by yourself on a playground. Sure, you can talk to yourself and make up whatever games you want, but no one is there to care. And that’s how it felt, trying to talk to him. It had felt that way for a long time, so we just sat. He wasn’t saying much, so we didn’t either.

“You know what I regret the most?” he asked us suddenly. I’m still not sure if he was talking to us or the space in between, but my brother and I still looked at each other in shock and had a silent conversation between us.

“Did he really just say that?”

“Is he about to actually apologize?”

“Oh my god, what is happening?!”

So, we listened, and we waited, our hearts pounding, breath held. Just waiting.

“I really regret selling that horse.”

And the moment was over. My brother and I laughed, and I said, “Really? That’s what you regret the most?” I don’t even remember the rest of our time together. I don’t remember anything I said to my dad, or he said to me after that. All I remember is that brief, tiny sliver of hope vanishing with, “I really regret selling that horse.”

I think about that conversation often. I sometimes tell that story to anyone just to get a laugh, though most of the time, they don’t laugh. If they do, it’s an awkward chuckle because they don’t understand. The other part of that story, the one I mention that makes people really uncomfortable, is that my brother and I were very close to putting it on Dad’s plaque in the cemetery. But “He really loved that horse” wouldn’t fit, so we settled on, “One tough son of a gun”, something Dad said about himself over the years. And it wasn’t a lie. He went through hell in life, and he came out of it alive and whole—mostly.

Memories live on even after people are gone—the good, the bad, the terrifying—but we keep going. We still remember. We remember it all. My dad tried to bury his pain by pretending it didn’t exist or by drinking or whatever hidden methods he might have used. He buried it so deeply that his greatest regret was selling his horse. But I know the truth. My brother knows the truth. There was pain behind his eyes, and not just the physical that was numbed by the medication. There was real emotional trauma that he didn’t have the language to talk about, or the emotional capacity to understand. So, he used his rage and unleashed it out into the world to push that pain away, and I’m not sure I can completely blame him for that. Who knows the horrors my grandpa suffered and my great-grandpa, and so on.

My dad did one thing right, and I feel this in my bones. I know this to be true. He raised two intelligent, self-determined, strong-willed kids who were able to put down the rage and feel all the things life throws at us. As my brother said, Don’t be like Dad, and I’m grateful that I can say we are not. My dad died in 2016, but he lives on in our memories, and in the positive traits we inherited that I know came from him. He lives on.

Losing him wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever been through, but it was one of the hardest things to heal from. Losing my dad meant facing the bitter truth that I’d never be able to fully reconcile my emotions with him, improve our relationship, and get an apology. Truthfully, there was never a chance of that anyway, but there was the dream that it could happen, and that dream died with him. One of my biggest regrets, if you can call it that, will always be never knowing if he regretted hurting me.

I will never forget the look on my mom’s face when he choked her, or the way he called me a slut in front of all my friends, or how he beat my self-esteem into the ground because he didn’t know how to be kind. I can’t forget those things because they made me who I am, shaped me into this imperfect being with all the flaws of my father, and his father before him, but none of the follow-through because I know better. I know better because somehow, my dad managed to make me into the kind of person I wish he had been. Despite his best efforts, I’m a better person because he was my dad. And I’ve worked harder than I ever have at anything to make sure of it. I’ll never forget, but somehow, I can forgive. I miss you, Dad. Despite it all, fuck, do I miss you.

---