Michele Lee

“My father is a sexual predator.”

I’ve said this aloud before, but in the deep of the night to friends, never while sitting in a therapist’s office. I thought I’d come to terms with that. But still the words are thick and heavy in my mouth. I’m an adult, an adulty adult, with two kids and a job. But I don’t feel like it.

“I don’t have memories of him actually touching me,” I say quickly. “But there are other things.”

I struggled with this for years.

When I was in college a friend then told me I showed hallmarks of being an abuse survivor. Well, yeah. I knew my dad was an alcoholic by that point. I’d cleaned up after him when he was drunk. I’d seen him blitzed out of his mind more times than I could count. I knew he sometimes spontaneously stop being a parent, stop doing parent things like making sure his kids had food and clothes that fit. But I didn’t remember him touching me.

“You know you don’t have to remember anything to still know, right?” the therapist says. I nod. “So tell me what makes you think that,” she asks.

When we first move in with him I’m a little stunned that, for someone when said he was “getting ready for us” he’s done…nothing. We three siblings were separated for five months and isolated from the person who was supposed to be our caregiver so he could “prepare”, but nothing seems to have been done. He moves us into a tiny two bedroom apartment on the side of a mountain next to a highway. It’s not what I’d imagine, even now, as a kid friendly place. Maybe I’m a little spoiled because I’ve never had to share a room with a sibling before. And, he’s sharing with my brother, right? So it’s not like he’s just neglecting us by cramming us all into his tiny bachelor pad. He’s suffering too, right?

But still, for the first time I have access to cable, and no one tells me when I can and can’t watch it. Or when to go to bed. No one tells me to go play outside and then locks the door behind me. We eat out all the time, and there are so many more restaurants than I knew about. On the weekends we go to the park while he walks, and sometimes we go to see movies–even R rated ones!–or we go to fun places like the mall and tourist traps like Rock City and Ruby Falls. Zoos and aquariums. I’m getting all kinds of new fun experiences, trying new food, listening to new music, reading new books without someone looking over my shoulder and telling me I can’t because that is inappropriate or evil.

My biggest irritation is that my dad doesn’t clean, like at all. Dirty dishes sit in the sink for a week until I clean them. I have to wash my own laundry, but apparently some apartments don’t even have a washer and dryer? New experiences. I try to keep up, but cleaning for a whole family is…not easy. Or terribly pleasant. I’m not sure I’m doing it right. But when I bring that up, first he tells me I’m doing great. Then later, when I get mad and frustrated that the apartment is a mess, he tells me, “Then you should clean it.”

Sometimes, and eventually, I just give up. No one cares if I wear the same clothes over and over, but if I wash them I’m expected to wash other people’s clothes too, and fold them, and put them away, and clean other things. So it’s the path of least resistance to not care.

Something doesn’t quite add up, but I’m not entirely sure what. Shouldn’t seeing me eager to help encourage him to try to do better? Shouldn’t my siblings also start to naturally want a cleaner space and try to help too? Should they also be expected to have chores and clean up after themselves?

“I noticed something was wrong in middle school,” I tell the therapist. “Sometimes when we were out to dinner or at stores I felt this weird need to outright say he was my dad. ‘Hi Dad.’ or something like that. I needed to use his title a lot, to reinforce that relationship between us, and then I started thinking about how weird that is. Do normal kids have to convince their dad he’s their dad?”

“What did he make you feel like?” she asks.

“His wife.”

I remember the first time I really saw my dad drunk. It was New Years Eve, and we were still in that tiny apartment. He never moved out until a girlfriend told him us kids needed better. But more on that later.

He was going out on a date. I thought that was awesome. I could stay up as long as I wanted, watching tv. Nickelodeon was having a Nick at Night marathon and I loved a lot of those old shows. We had two tvs by that point so we didn’t even have to fight over who got to watch what.

Having separate spaces was the only real thing that kept us kids from being at each other’s throats. I wondered a lot why my siblings didn’t obey me, if I was the mom, and why they seemed outright hateful toward me at times. I wasn’t happy to be babysitting them, but there were upsides.

Later the rivalry between us would get real bad. It hurts to admit that I once tied my sister up with a jump rope when she went on a destructive binge around the house while my dad was gone. I remember an incident from before. She was throwing an unholy fit in a Kroger, I don’t even know why, but my dad dragged her out to the car, told me to stay with her and watch her. He said he was holding me responsible for her.

He did that a lot. He held me responsible for their behavior. Hell, I held me responsible for their behavior too.

My sister’s fit did not end at my father’s screaming and locking us in the car. I cried and cajoled and begged her to stop. She flailed and tried to hit me. I protected myself by putting space between us, which put her in the front seat. She raged and began kicking the windshield. My mouth opened to warn her it would break and the glass spiderwebbed under her foot. We both froze. When my father came back out he was livid. And blamed me for failing to control her.

So years later I resorted to tying her up until she calmed down and stopped trying to break things, visions of broken televisions and those huge sliding glass patio doors in our apartment in my mind. But that New Years we were getting along a lot better, probably because she was already asleep in the chair in the living room.

When someone knocked on the door and I answered it, I was surprised to find my father’s date leading my very very drunk father into the apartment. His eyes bugged out, he stank. I thought he’d gotten sick because he was so out of it. I thought I’d never seen a drunk person before. But I’ll get to that in a moment. She assured me she would take care of him. He’d just had “a little too much”. Teehee.

She locked them in my room and was gone before I woke up in the morning.

Sometime later I would remember the first actual time I’d seen him drunk, before I even knew what drinking was.

I was at the church my mom worked at, in a class with my brother and we were talking about a fundraiser we were about to do. I was seven or so. My parents were divorcing, but no one really told me why. I looked up and my dad, who I hadn’t seen in some time, stood in the doorway. I was so excited! I ran over to him with hugs. So did my brother. 

He told us we were going to go with him, on an adventure. I loved when he got to see us on weekends and took us places. To get to do it on a weekday sounded awesome. We went with him. He seemed like he was in a hurry.

We came out of the door on the opposite end of the church and a police officer pulled up and blocked the way. He drew his gun. My heart pounded in my chest. What was going on?

“Step away from the children.” he said. My heart plummeted to my feet. 

My dad crouched down to us, behind us. We stood between him and the gun, which I had also never seen before. Suddenly a police officer was pointing a gun…AT ME.

“You can’t believe anything your mother says,” my dad said to me. His breath stank, and his eyes were popping out of his head in this weird way. He looked sick, and wasn’t acting right.

“Step away from the children,” the officer said, more desperately this time.

I started crying. My dad shook me. “Do you understand me?” Shake shake. “You mom is lying to you. Don’t believe her.”

We both started crying and the officer advanced to the bottom of the stairs. “Daddy, please don’t do this.”

He seemed angry with me. He shook me again, then stood up. Both my brother and I were crying by then. He said something, then stepped away from us. The officer immediately pulled him from our side, and another aunt pulled us back into the building. But I remember hearing him being arrested and seeing his arms being handcuffed behind his back. I had no idea what had just happened, and no one really ever explained it to me. Those were not the  kinds of things The Family talked about. Ever.

I didn’t understand until that New Years that he’d been drunk. And I didn’t understand until years after that why his date had locked us out of the room.

“Parentification,” the therapist said. I hadn’t heard it before. She explained and I realized there was a single word that explained so many situations and feelings I’d found myself with.

I wasn’t talking to my father, or most of my family by then. I didn’t know why things always went wrong when I was in contact with them. I was in therapy just trying to figure it out. I knew somehow I was happier when they had no influence in my life. That somehow being around them turned me into this version of myself that I hated. Defensive, emotional. Scared!  But I dreamed of a life where I had a family, like my partner did, and where my kids had the same connection with a family I’d had growing up.

“He is an alcoholic,” I told my therapist.

“But there’s more than that?”

I nodded.

When I was thirteen he started encouraging me to drink. Things were a mess by then, because I’d stopped trying to clean or convince others to. It wasn’t just cleaning either. I’d stopped trying to convince the household to be decent people. I went back and forth between trying to convince him to be a parent, and being depressed and isolated. Our house was disgusting, physically and emotionally. The only love I found was in pets, and…I had many more than a young teen can take care of. Especially a teen dependent on a flaky, drunk father to keep the supplies I needed to take care of them. When I was in middle school I sometimes stole from his change tubs to buy candy to gorge myself on. By this point I sometimes stole handfuls to walk up to buy dog food to feed my hamsters and cheerios to feed my guinea pigs.

We’d graduated to a three bedroom apartment, but other things had gotten worse. There was rarely any food in the house. A Cousin (and actually a cousin as well) told me many years later she remembered how after we went grocery shopping my brother would invite his friends over and spend all night eating all the food, then my dad would refuse to replace it for a few weeks.

At that point he was also refusing to give me money to get lunch at school. I would come home and eat a box of mac and cheese and nothing else. My sister sometimes just sat and ate a bag of sugar.

We had bugs. And mice. The neighbors complained about us. My classmates constantly said I smelled. I didn’t care enough to bathe myself or wash my clothes. What was the point, after all?

I laughed at the idea of drinking. I saw what he did every night, how he refused to make sure we had food. How my sister wore size 3 T panties until she was 7 and they literally fell apart because he would get drunk instead of getting us clothes. I still live with permanent effects to my body from growing up like this. Drinking was his excuse. His reason why he couldn’t function like an adult. 

I wasn’t going to be like him. But a year later he started doing the same with my brother. And my brother drank.

Years later, in high school, it became a weekly thing. My dad would buy a box of liquor, my brother would invite all his friends and their girlfriends over, and everyone would get drunk. “I’d rather they drink here, where I can watch them, than out there.”

But does that still seem as altruistic when you are the one furnishing all the alcohol?

“My father encouraged my brother to drink, a lot.”

“Why do you think that is?” the therapist asked.

“Two reasons. One, it enables him. He’s the cool dad. He’s excused for drinking too.”

“And the other?”

“My brother brings young teenage girls to the house and gets them drunk.”

I’m seventeen and everyone in the house is drunk again. Maybe even my sister. I’m not sure anymore. And I just keep to my room mostly to avoid them. There’s not really any food in the house, not that I enjoy being in the kitchen at all, with its piles of trash bags, some open and spilling out and the monster that is the pile of dishes that’s taken over all the counter space.

But I can’t just ignore everyone either. I check on them. No one is sick, no one is breaking stuff yet. But my dad is talking to my brother and his girlfriend in his room. He’s wasted and laughing drunkenly. And, I realize, he’s flirting with her. She has got to be horrified, I think. So I walk in, right when he’s talking about what an amazing lover he is to her. How he treats women right, because that’s what she is, he insists, she’s a woman and she deserves to be treated right.

She’s a year younger than my brother, who is two years younger than me. And this isn’t a rare occurrence.

My brother and his girlfriend make their escape. But my father continues, to me, talking about how beautiful all these women my brother keeps bringing around are. And about all the things he’d love to do to them. About how these boys don’t know how to treat them right and really satisfy them. But he does.

I feel nauseated.

“He liked us to touch him sometimes,” I tell the therapist. “It wasn’t directly sexual. He’d sit on the bed and we’d watch tv or a movie, or whatever, and he’d ask us to ‘tickle’ him. It’s pretty much just petting him, usually his legs or back. Like you might rub the back or feet of a friend or loved one. But sometimes he talks about how if he had money he’d pay a hooker or two to just ‘tickle’ him for hours. He insisted it wasn’t sexual. But now that I’m an adult I know damn well I find it sexual when someone does it to me.”

“How did he react when you stopped doing it?” she asks. “He wasn’t happy. He gave me some shit over it. But then he just had my sister start to do it instead.”

“How did it feel when she was doing it?”

“It made me even more uncomfortable. I realized it was really, really inappropriate. Especially saying the bits about hookers to my sister. Or the stuff about my brother’s female friends.”

“He said that stuff in front of your sister?”

“I mean, I don’t know if he said all of it. But some of it, yeah. And he said it all so easily in front of me and my brother and his friends. They all acted like it was funny. So why wouldn’t he say it to my sister too?”

The talking doesn’t end when I start branching out, when I start, finally, developing my own friends, and eventually start a relationship of my own. In fact my partner at that time remembers having his own conversations with my dad that disturbed him. Unlike me, who just stood awkwardly and horrified, my boyfriend then actually timed the drunken “I could be a better lover to these teenage girls” speech.

Forty five minutes before my boyfriend tells my father he’s gross and leaves. I don’t know, when I hear about it later, if I want to die of embarrassment or kiss my boyfriend for saying what I’ve always wanted to say.

“That all sounds very inappropriate. You know a sexual predator doesn’t actually have to touch someone to abuse them, right?”

I’ve read it. But no one who is a professional has ever told me that before. “Maybe,” I answer.

Grooming. It’s called grooming.

“Sexualizing children is sexual abuse.” The therapist watches my reaction.

So I tell her about the day with the porno. I’ve managed to not cry at all up to this point. But I can’t get past telling that without tears.

“One day…”

On Saturday afternoon, after a Friday night bender, my brother and a few of his friends come up to my room and ask to borrow my tv/vcr. I’m 18 and I generally avoid their shenanigans. They don’t want me there, I don’t want to be there, so it works out well. But there’s a history of them breaking into my room and stealing or ruining stuff. They’ve used my tarot cards to play strip poker. They’ve stolen my hidden candy stores.

Them asking for permission is weird. Fine, but I’m watching them like a hawk. No problem. They’re setting up an impromptu home theater. All the chairs they can find in the living room and a little table for the tv. They pop in the movie. “This is going to be hilarious,” I’m told.

There’s close to a dozen of us; my dad, my 15 year old sister, my brother, a number of his friends and their girlfriends. The porno comes on. I want to leave right then, but I’ll probably never see my tv again.

The main character–because it’s one of those plot porns–is turning 18, and she gleefully decides the best way to celebrate is by having sex with her whole family. Dad first, then her brother. Then a threesome with her dad and mom…

I am told later that I missed the best parts when I leave. I want to puke. I can’t even bring myself to care about one of my most valuable possessions at the time when it means sidelong glances at me while watching faux incest porn with an audience of family members.

Something irreparably breaks in me that day. I decide to get the hell out as soon as I can.

The therapist hands me a box of tissues. “That was hard to talk about wasn’t it?”

I nod. 

“Can I say something?”

Another nod.

“I absolutely think your father was a sexual predator.”

It is a relief to hear an adultier adult than me say it outloud. I tear up again.

I’m ten. We’re in daycare and we’re doing arts and crafts. I adore this part. The woman tells us we’re going to be making Mother’s Day cards. She comes over to me, after giving instructions, and tells me she knows about my mom and I can make whatever I want instead.

I tell her I’m going to make a Mother’s Day card for my dad, because he’s my mom and my dad. After it dries I put it in my backpack and take it home. Later than night I look at it and think about it.

I’m really tired of trying to convince my dad to do the right thing.

I put it in the trash instead.

I’m nine and sitting with my aunt outside the funeral home at what feels like the second week of my mom’s funeral. I’m numb from shock and I feel like a marionette, a child still young and slowly growing from my family lines.

I’m not sure what they expect from me. I’ve dressed up, sat as quietly as I could manage through visitations next to the waxy shell my mother left behind. I’ve tried to console my younger brother. Tried to take care of my three year old sister. I’ve cried, then made myself stop because I feel my family needs me to be slightly less sad so they are free to cry out their emotions and pity me. This is their ritual, not mine. This is not how I’d choose to remember her, or grieve.

I feel like a prop. But that’s nothing new because I’ve felt like my mother’s understudy for most of my life.

Then, out of almost nowhere my aunt says, “You’ve got to be the mom now, Michele. Your little sister and brother need you to raise them. Your dad can’t really do it.”

It’s uncomfortable then. It makes me feel like I lost more than my mom only a few days ago. My childhood is now over and from here on out I’m the adult in my household’s life. I straighten up, like she’s issued a challenge.

Thirty years later those words aren’t any less sinister or traumatizing. Now I’m on the other side of ten years trying to parent my alcoholic, likely clinically narcissistic father and another twenty of trying to recover after I left his household. I see, logically, how most of my family, with their own traumas, came together to form a system that twisted and damaged those of us who grew up in it. How overlapping generations passed on problematic gender roles and religious ideas, passive aggressive and gaslighting communication styles. How those of us who tried to cut ourselves free (I call us The Cousins regardless of how we’re related and regardless of where we are in our recoveries) became the rejects of the family safety net. It’s a hopeful sounding ideal, but we were so scared and isolated from even each other that we still can’t find the strength to sit down and compare notes.

The aunt that told nine year old me that I was the mom now was herself a foster child of my aunt and uncle, who I grew up with as my uncle’s second wife. The good news is she’s a Cousin now too. She escaped the tangled net of the family and, from the distance glimpses I get of her on social media, found some happiness. But more about her later.

She isn’t wrong. My dad, it turns out, is pathologically unable to be a healthy parent. His own behavior ruined his marriage, but like he couldn’t ever admit his own responsibility in his life, for the next ten years he’ll continue shucking parental responsibility off on any woman he can, very often me. In discussions with friends I’ve been asked if that might have been healthier for my siblings. Maybe. But was it healthy for me is also a fair question to ask.

I have a complicated relationship with my memories of my mother. In the good column; she tried to be joyful, she was stubborn and determined. She was strong. When she kicked my dad out she chose to stand up for herself and her children and when he abandoned her, both financially and as a co-parent to punish her for having the gall to stand up for herself, she never took me aside and damaged my views of him. My father never said a kind word about my mother after her death. But my mother fiercely protected us from the nasty fall out of their divorce, and protected us from seeing what kind of a man he was. She believed hard. She was fiercely independent and learned how to manage a household on the fly, often spending hours every Sunday planning menus and shopping lists down to the penny over the Sunday ads. She hid her struggles from us, trying to protect us from the world.

On the down side; she was a perfectionist and left me with the permanent feeling of inferiority. I remember the first time I received a B on a report card. It was by only a few points and at the end of second grade. And I cried like I’d died because she’d be so upset with me and I would never be a perfect A in her eyes again. She had ideas of what her family should be, and who I should be, ideas that I couldn’t live up to, no matter how hard I tried.

She was dedicated to her religion, so much so that she once made me “break up” with a friend because her mom allowed us to listen to “Manic Monday” while driving in the car. When I asked the family across the street why the boys in the family wore that same little hats on their heads and they invited me to Temple to learn about their way of worshiping, she confronted them and I was never allowed to play with them again. She systematically isolated me from the world around us, in the name of religion, which had lingering effects to my sense of self worth and ability to feel like part of the community. At times I felt stunted in my emotional and social growth.

She dreamed that I would be a wife and a missionary one day. I dreamed that yes, I would get to travel far away from where I was and meet someone who loved and supported me, no matter who I was.

I have a letter she wrote me not long before she died. In it she says that divorcing my father, the very thing I admire her the most for, was her biggest mistake in life and she wished she could take it back. She also says that she hopes I die before I wander off of the Godly path. 

Imagine being a teenager and reading, in your mother’s own handwriting, that she wished you dead rather than be someone she didn’t approve of.

I had just as much of a troubled relationship with her very mainstream religion. I stopped believing in it, the way she saw it, when I was six and the pastor explained that animals don’t have souls and won’t go to heaven. Even then my little brain dismissed the ludicrousness of that. Souls were one’s worth. They taught, she taught, that if you didn’t keep yours clean and pure and perfect, you weren’t worth anything. And other living creatures didn’t even have a chance. They were never worth anything. I keenly felt the weight of Original Sin, only to realize how much it was my mother and her religion who made me feel it.

After she died I thought that the world would end, literally. She believed so hard and so thoroughly that I didn’t see how any god would allow her to leave the world so painfully. I didn’t understand how the object of her obsession didn’t stomp right down to her funeral and put her back, because the whole act was merely a test of our faith.

I struggled a lot after her coffin slipped into the earth and we turned away.

To begin with my father abandoned me again right away. He wasn’t there for her illness. He wasn’t there to console us or support us. He arrived for the funeral, I saw him a few times, less than I stared at my mother on her silk pillow. Then he was gone again.

When my mother found out she was ill she went very far to avoid depending on anyone else. She taught me, at seven, how to help her clean and flush her PIC line, the tubes that allowed for the doctors to send chemo directly to the organs trying to kill her. An aunt was a nurse and tried to help, but my mother insisted I could do it.

I’ve been told a story, many times, by two of my mother’s sisters about the point at which they realized something bad was going on. They came down for a surprise visit and found my mom too sick to get out of bed and me, at six or seven, trying to cook macaroni and cheese for my 4 year old brother and baby sister. I don’t remember that night, but I do remember that they moved in, because they, unlike The Family (my dad’s side of the family, who we lived close to and engaged with much more often), recognized that it wasn’t a child’s job to be a parent.

Parentification is a psychological term for a toxic relationship where the parent is unable to or unwilling to fulfill the role of being a parent and instead makes the child the responsible party in the relationship. This can be a side effect of Codependency. Parentification is most common in situations where the parent is a Narcissist (in which case the child is held directly responsible for the emotional well being of the parent), or in cases of the parent being an addict (in which the child often becomes the responsible party both emotionally and physically for the parent.)

It happens in situations like mine, too, where the parent is ill in some way and completely rejects outside help. My mother refused adult support, foisting responsibility on me instead, and I wonder sometimes how much longer it would have gone on if my aunts hadn’t made a surprise visit that night.

They moved in with us in revolving shifts, much to the dislike of the other half of my family, who seemed to have almost a possessive view of my mom. She wasn’t their blood, but after she divorced my dad they threw in with her. Ironically, they also weren’t overly eager to help her–and her children–in this time of great need. Until after my mother’s family moved themselves in.

When things began getting real bad The Family–my father’s side–tried to take control of the whole situation. My mother’s side of the family were blocked from access. They were pushed out, lied to, and things were hidden from them. Many of my aunts have told me as an adult that they didn’t even know when her funeral had been until after it happened. And they were systematically cut out of my life as well, with my father’s relatives refusing to answer calls or pass on numbers or addresses that would have enabled that side of the family to reach out to and support us kids.

The Family also decided, as things became terminal, that it was best if we kids didn’t see the bad things going on with my mom.

I hadn’t seen my mom for two weeks. I just knew she was sick and in the hospital. I thought she was having another surgery. Then I was taken to see her. She gave me a cheap Valentine, one of those little cards you get by the dozens for a whole class of kids. Two days later they woke me up and told me she’d died. But I already knew.

I barely saw my mother in the last year of her life. For my own good.

And then, after the funeral my dad breaks the news that he’s going back home, to Georgia, where he lives 800 miles away from us…alone. To “get things ready for us”. Only hours after I was told I was the parent now, it was snatched away again, and I was shipped off to live with a cousin who didn’t want another child in the house. I shouldn’t have been their responsibility, truly. I was not a good child. I was hurt, scared and confused. I was packed off like the Little Princess, the once loved and depended on daughter whose father died and who is locked in the attic, suddenly unworthy.

Much of my identity growing up was in pleasing my mother. I was a sinner and had to cover it. I didn’t believe what she wanted me to, so I had to fake it and pretend that her greatest dreams for me were something I passionately desired too. I had to earn her love and prove I was worthy of her attention and effort. Then I was alone with my memories of who she wanted me to be, and my knowledge of who I actually was. 

And I hurt. 

I tortured myself with her memory for many years. First in that cousin’s home, where I just existed, lost, fluxing between anger at my situation, anger at the people around me for not just loving me, and numbness. I didn’t see my siblings for almost 4 months. Something had irrevocably broken between us in that time. None of us were family anymore. We were angry with each other, at our forced abandonment of each other. We were angry with the family who isolated us, the dad who abandoned us in our time of need, and angry that we had to pack up every bit of the life we led in a four bedroom two bath big house and squeeze into the 2 bedroom apartment my dad kept in a state so far from everything we knew.

Anger wasn’t making me feel good. So I tried to channel some of the joy I remember my mother for. I held myself, and everyone around me to her standard, at the ripe age of nine. I tried to be who she wanted me to be, who everyone said I should be happy to be. Maybe by being that Michele I could be happy again? I embraced my aunt’s words. I was the mom now. And I was going to force everyone into being what they should be, myself included, rather than the sad little things we’d become.

That was the mom’s role, after all. To form and uphold the ideal of the family, and to fight, blackmail, guilt, control, and coerce the family into meeting that ideal. No matter what.

Happy Release day to Survive This! Fantasy from Bloat Games! Both my daughter and I did some writing on this one 🙂

Both the Core Rules and Game Master’s Guide are live at DriveThruRPG.