Missing the Point of Everybody

June 21, 2023 7:54 PM

I want to tell you how this unfolded without judgment, but every sentence is an arrow pointing somewhere. Already, this, as if there were one thing; unfolded, past tense, as if it has ended. The subject of the November 2017 email: your father raped me #me too.
posted by latkes (16 comments total)

Thank you for sharing this essay.
posted by maxwelton at 8:36 PM on June 21, 2023

Yes, thank you.
posted by janell at 11:04 PM on June 21, 2023

This hits me from several directions.

Imagining sending such an email to the families of my rapists. It's not something I've ever thought about before. Possibly because in at least two cases, I knew their kids were victims too, and I assumed they knew that I was. It was that kind of family.

The battle over the possessive pronoun for an abusive parent. I settled years ago on "the mother". When questioned on my usage I state simply that my biological female parent had lost her right to any maternal connection to me. People rarely ask for details if my tone is even and dispassionate.

She retired from her teaching position before she could be fired for grasping a student's hand and physically forcing him to write sentences. I've always wondered if there were other kids too scared to report her before that. I hope I would respond with empathy and grace to any communications from her other victims.

I don't think I have a point other than, thanks.
posted by Vigilant at 11:38 PM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

Good essay. Thank you for posting it. I'm sorry so many of us have to deal with so many men of that stripe.

I have too -- not as a harassment target, not as family of the harasser, but as collateral damage. No details, as I'm not undoxable here, but I sure did vibe with the sense of sick betrayal all through the piece.
posted by humbug at 2:28 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thank you for posting this Latkes. It is so poetically written and I love the way she references other texts and threads each of them into her own sense of meaning making. I had forgotten all about ‘The Affair’ and how that series grappled with the women’s reaction to their husband/father’s predatory behaviour, for example.

My father is not a sexual predator, but certainly was a raging, drinking, violent, cruel narcissist to his family. Over the years since I have ceased being in contact with him, so many people have sidled up to me in conversations and disclosed to me some of the terrible behaviours they experienced from him, from way back when he was a child to more recently. It is a complex set of feelings to have a sense that what went on in the family, and from which I suffer much mental damage as a consequence into my adult life, is something I now need to almost nursemaid others through as they grapple themselves with some dark truths about this person.

The value of reading others’ writing on complex realities and thus seeing others unpack their confusion and reactions to such complexities is profound.
posted by honey-barbara at 4:51 AM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Describes the complexity of living with awful imperfect whole people so well, and also why grief is so variable and consuming. “ I want people to ask me. I don’t want people to ask me. I want someone to say something. I don’t want anyone to say anything. I hate the silence. I hate the noise. It is nothing to do with me. It is everything to do with me.”
posted by Peach at 5:08 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oof, the narcissistic apple does not fall far from its tree. At least she's not hurting people.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:00 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Well, that was long! (picks up purse, pats my hair) Anyone want to grab a coffee?
posted by kingdead at 8:40 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

outgrown_hobnail, I had a number of reactions reading it, and some of them matched yours. Because I share little to nothing with the experiences described, I don't know how to share my mixed reactions constructively, or if that's even possible. I suspect that some MeFites--particularly those who do identify with the emotions in the piece and who have said so above--would hear our negative reactions as personal attacks.

I guess my attempted contribution, then, is this: As someone without a matching experience to draw from, I found the piece challenging to read because there were many points where the meaning of the writing seemed to depend on information I didn't have. Which I intend as comment, not value judgment, because not every piece of writing has to cater to me and people like me. I especially appreciated the extra context from honey-barbara's and Vigilant's comments.
posted by PresidentOfDinosaurs at 10:58 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think it was excessively discursive, but there really isn't a lot out there written about the experience of being a female family member of a publicly-known sexual abuser, especially one who one isn't fully estranged from. I guess it's not surprising that it's somewhat fumbling and flailing.
posted by praemunire at 12:26 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

I liked the article.

I have a friend who molested a young girl (a relationship with a 14 year old when he was 23) and none of us knew, and I was friends with him for a number of years. So like it or not, he was 'my friend'. I also knew his brother, he's still 'his brother' even if I can cast him off as no longer 'my friend'. Obviously a friend and a dad are very different circumstances, but the confusion resonates, with the person you know in many good ways also being a very bad person.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:03 PM on June 22, 2023

Positive shout out to folks in this thread. I appreciate that although there were a couple negative comments, that was followed by a more nuanced acknowledgement that this is an issue where those negative comments may land very badly for some. Clearly this piece is not for everyone! I found it quite compelling most specifically around the experience of maintaining a commitment to a family member for you whom you can see the harms they have done.
posted by latkes at 3:13 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

In various capacities (educator, athlete, parent, harassment counselor), I have known quite a few people who turned out to be abusers, stalkers, or molesters. Some of them were people I had liked and some were people I had known since they were children. One was my husband’s relative who had molested my husband—and my husband still saw him at family gatherings and they even chatted sometimes.

These were often everyday people. You probably know someone personally who has done something awful and you don’t know it.

One of the things that keeps people from reporting abuse is unwillingness to disrupt the vast and complex network of social relationships that are involved. It’s natural to “other” the offender, but I can guarantee you they are also part of everyday life in ways that are hard to disentangle.That’s part of what I found interesting about the essay.
posted by Peach at 3:57 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

It is also that it is easier to reject a monster parent on behalf of other victims than for oneself, at least for me. I don't know if it was the author's intent, but I read the piece as non linear narrative - the email reaching back into the writer's mind and pulling forward scenes of service to the broken monster. And the writer, who could not cut lines of duty with her own trauma, but would have helped another victim.

Thus it was with me. Broken bones were not enough to break the mother's hold on me, but the break started when I learned she was starting to cross lines outside the family home, and it was only the need to rescue my father from her that finally allowed me to cut all ties, duty be damned.

I know how this might read to people who didn't grow up with a monster that everybody else loved. It is navel gazing, but it is necessary in order to break the cycle of abuse in families. I grew up being told that I was a liar, and everyone who didn't live with her was utterly charmed by her, and those who did had long since hunkered down into our own survival silos. I had to figure out what was real, and from there figure out what my duty really had been, and where I had failed, where I simply had no power to change anything.

It isn't neat, that process. It's long and messy and very boring in the way that much deep emotional work is. How something can be simultaneously so painful and so boring, even to oneself is maddening.

My situation was rather different from this essay. But I felt seen in a rare way by it.
posted by Vigilant at 4:34 PM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

This was a difficult read. Her circumlocutions were often interesting, sometimes not, but I felt taken on a Zen-like journey around things too awful to express directly. The spaces between the lines leaned directly over the abyss.

Not so opaque was her excruciating movement, trying to distance herself from the father she adored to accommodate the complex situation inherent in the amorphous nature of collateral damage. You can remember the winter light but then come ripples on still water. We are creatures of our society, and society exerts terrible forces that form who and what we are. For better or worse, we are always, in some way, indelibly layered over all we ever have been.

Who we will be is only partially up to us. Obtaining closure is a pleasant fiction. Peace is not always attainable. Only endurance matters. For many, even endurance fails.
posted by mule98J at 1:32 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

"I am that eldest child who imagines herself to be exceptionally dutiful, deferential, but I am not alone or exceptional in the bone-deep feeling that I want in some way to help see my father off this earth."

I should finally get around to watching some of Agnes Varda's films.
posted by harriet vane at 8:38 AM on June 29, 2023