That House is Not My Home

I want to go back, but I just can’t get myself to do it. Just thinking about that house makes my stomach clench. Those memories just don’t get wiped away - as much as I wish they did. He will never understand what those nights did to me, even if he is my father.

It’s taken years for me to get to this place right here, right now. I’m finally able to start letting people in without focusing on what doesn’t matter and to look past my trust issues. I’ve been scarred for life, and he won’t even care. He didn’t then, and he won’t now. 

I want to be able to start over, start fresh. There are days where I feel like something is missing, but then I really think about it and just can’t get myself to go back. That house is a place of torture for me. Standing in the front room literally makes me lose my breath. 

People say I need a mother and a father to function properly in society. They’ve clearly never met mine. My mother is a kind soul who would do anything for you, even if she doesn’t have the means. When I was younger, I wished so badly that I could live with her instead - but it just wasn’t in the cards for me. 

Getting over the controlling and manipulation, my father is a unique individual who mostly likes to hear himself speak and for everyone else to stay quiet. Everything is his way or the highway and he’ll make sure you remember that. If people go against what he says - he’ll immediately correct them. Too many times has he become the doctor, the dentist, and just about everyone with an authoritative title it seems. 

That’s the person, the reason for staying away from the house - is that I grew up there. I grew up having to have my homework checked on a nightly basis. This seems harmless enough - maybe some of you are even going, well sure, that’s a parent’s job. This experience, however, had a different effect on me. I always said or did the wrong things - which led to me being punished by doing exercises (being conducted by a real-life army sergeant). If it wasn’t this, then it was by standing in the corner and staring at the wall - which was for hours but felt like decades-long.

I was never good enough. As if the punishments weren’t enough of an incentive for me to stay quiet and nod and smile, I have also succumbed to insults that I still hear till this day in my head: “You’re a moron” and “You will never amount to anything” and my personal favorite: “You can live in a cardboard box for all I care!”

That last one hit home because it was at that particular moment that he truly felt like that. He didn’t care one little bit about me and from that moment, him being viewed as my father and that house I called my home - was over and lost their existence.

After that tipping point, I decided that maybe it was for the best. Maybe not having either of them in my life was a good thing. I could finally live the life I wanted - without someone breathing down my neck and hovering just for the chance to speak down to me. I could finally be free of all of those negative feelings forever and just look forward to a new life. 

But, life isn’t like that, is it? It turns out, unbeknownst to me, that this way of life would have to hold off just a bit longer. It turns out that even as an adult, those experiences never left me. They just lingered in the background ready to pounce on the first available victim. 

Of course, it’s not fair to him, but I have to work this out on my own. I would get into one of the most real relationships I’ve ever had, and yet, he is also one of the first to receive my issues full-blown. It turns out that I’ve been embedded with the unique ability to harbor anger issues that cause me to lose patience at the smallest of things - but turn it into an “end of the world” scenario. I have also gained the misfortune of getting jealous for no reason and only caring about myself and as my father puts it “looking out for number one”.

It’s amazing that I have not heard these words or spoken to this person for years, but here they are affecting me as they do. He, himself, is the loneliest person I know, and I foresee that for the rest of his life. He is simply incapable of having actual human emotion and therefore unable to create or sustain for that matter actual relationships with people. 

I don’t want to become like that. I want to be my own person and have long-lasting relationships with people that are not to gain anything but actual friendship. I fear that if I go back, I will begin to make these ways of life even more pronounced. I fear that I will be closer and closer to the way he is and I won’t be able to escape it. I fear that I will have no choice in the matter and I will inevitably lose myself.

That house may be where I grew up, but I did not grow up from that house. I learned how to be my own person and how to become caring and empathetic towards others after leaving that house. I learned to think before I speak and to be open-minded towards other ideas and opinions - which I can’t in all honesty say the same for him. 

I know what kind of life I want to live. I want to live a life full of purpose and meaning. I want to live a life full of compassion and understanding. I know what kind of life I want to live - and none of it involves going back to that house, ever again.