Missing Home

(TW for child abuse and homophobia)

I’ve always hated arguments, especially when it’s justified with one stupid, useless, overused sentence. “I just wanted to.” or, “Because he said blah, blah, blah.” My least favourite is “because I said so.” I hear it so many times in my own home, if you could call it that. It’s the only place I’ve ever lived in, but I never felt happy or safe here. My father is a control-freak, to the point where if me or my brother do anything ‘without his permission’ we get an earful. Our mother left us when we were young, my brother being the oldest remembers it better than me, but I was only three while he was five. I’m not sure when the problems began, maybe because I’ve lived with it for nearly as long as I can remember. Maybe it began when I brought some friends over to play board games when I was six. I can remember the clear image of my father seeing my friends and I, then his face turning red and storming down the hallway. Because of his outrage, my friends wanted to leave immediately afterwards. As soon as the front door closed, my father was screaming at me. I don’t remember what he said, I can only remember lying on the ground, my hands covering my ears as I cried. My brother heard him screaming and ran over to protect me, saying to my father: “Stop yelling at her! She didn’t do anything wrong!” This started my brother’s downfall in my father’s eyes. I always knew my brother was the favourite, he’d get special treatment from our father while I would always draw the short straw. Perhaps it was because I looked like my mother, that was what my brother told me years later, but I still couldn’t understand our father’s behaviour. The abuse went on for years, luckily I was never hit by my father, but my brother wasn’t as lucky. When I was fourteen, I became suddenly aware of the treatment my brother was receiving. He never told me what he did to enrage our father so badly as to beat him, but I guessed it was because of my brother using the money he got from working in a supermarket to buy clothes our father perceived as ‘too feminine for men’. It was a year later that I finally stood up for my brother the same as he stood up for me. Our father told us he was going to a business meeting and wouldn’t be back until the next morning. My brother, seeing this as a chance of freedom, invited his boyfriend he met the year before to our home so he could meet me. My brother’s boyfriend, Sam, immediately gained my friendship with his humour and kindness that could rival my brother’s. We spent that day playing old board games, watching YouTube on Sam’s computer, since neither me or my brother had any electronic devices. I was happy, we were all happy, but the happiness was short-lived, as our father came back that night rather than the next morning. He walked into the living room and saw us watching YouTube, and saw my brother’s arm across Sam’s shoulders. His face went red and began screaming again, this time words I hadn’t heard before. Homophobic slurs, death threats and all manner of filth came spilling from this man I called my father. He shrieked at Sam to get out of the house and for my brother to go to his room and stay there for the next month. In a trance of rage and adrenaline, I stood up and told him that my brother won’t be listening to anything he has to say anymore. My father fixed his rage on me, his daughter who he viewed as meek and pathetic, now standing against him. He and I argued back and forth. Him screaming about how what my brother is doing is unnatural and should be punished, while I’m telling him that as a father he should accept all of who we are and love us. “Felix is a freak of nature! What he’s doing goes against everything we know! I won’t allow him to live like a freak!” My father screamed. “Who says what he’s doing is wrong? All of what you’re yelling about is you being pathetic and stupid!” I yelled back. “It’s wrong because I said so!” He screamed the last words so loudly I was surprised someone wasn’t yelling back at him from down the street. This time Sam was the one who stood up. “Well guess what!? I heard from Felix about your abuse and took pictures of the marks you gave to him, and now I have the proof you’re nothing but an abusive piece of shit!” Sam showed us his phone and we saw that he was filming the whole thing. “I’ll be calling child protective services and the police, so if you don’t want to be in even bigger trouble, you should let us leave without any problems.” My father did let us leave, we walked by while his face was a portrait of shock and anger at letting me and my brother leave and not having the last word. The second we were outside, I crumpled to the ground as the adrenaline wore off. My heart was beating so hard and so fast I thought it would explode. I didn’t realise it until Sam offered me a tissue that I had been crying the whole time.

Less than ten minutes later, the police had arrived. There were police Sam had called and others that one of our neighbours called because of the yelling. Our father was arrested and sentenced to jail. Child protective services managed to locate our mother. We met her a few days after our father’s trial, and she embraced us sobbing profusely, saying how because she abandoned us, they wouldn’t let her and our father have a trial and it was even more difficult since they were never married. I still harbored some negativity towards her for abandoning us, but it was drowned by the happiness I felt at finally having a parent who loved us. She had found a new boyfriend, who later became her husband that me and Felix viewed as, not a father-figure, but our dad. Me and my brother finally had a home.