A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

by Alicia Elliott

  At the time this seemed the most logical thing I’d ever heard. Of course she had an inferiority complex. Of course. It made so much sense. The world had finally slid into focus.

  I looked at my father, wondering where he’d learned this. His quiet demeanour revealed nothing, but it didn’t have to. The knowledge was enough. I turned and watched the blackened streets fly by my window, a calm settling my anxious gut. I held on to my father’s words every time Sam cut me down after that night, which happened with disappointing regularity until my family moved two years later. I held on to his words throughout high school and university, through workplace issues and relationship blunders. I still hold on to his words now. Sometimes you’re not the problem. Sometimes it’s another person’s insecurity that’s the problem, and that person decides that rather than fix the problem, they’d rather take everything out on you.

  After reading the anecdote above—a story of my father alternately praising and counselling me; a story I cherish and will always remember fondly—did you assume my father was the villain I was writing this essay about? Why or why not?

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  Memories are strange. After a certain point you don’t remember the actual event you experienced anymore. You remember your memory of that event. Certain details fall away while others loom large. Dialogue distorts. Cause-and-effect chains tangle and twist.

  To further complicate matters, people have a tendency to filter out memories to reinforce certain ideas. In those cases, what stands out and what gets buried depends on the story you’re crafting with your memories. For example, if I wanted to tell you about how much my father supported my dream to become a writer, all my memories of his abuse and neglect would fall away. I’d bring up one of the countless times he’s sent me links to contests or writing opportunities, things he researched specifically for me. I’d go into detail about the way he used to talk me up to the editor of our local rez paper, using his friendship with her to try to help me get my foot in the door. I’d tell you about the time he was sitting in a doctor’s office reading one of my essays from a literary journal I sent him and the man next to him asked about it. I’d tell you how, when the man said he was interested in writing an autobiography but didn’t know where to start, my father put my essay in his hands, made him read it, then told him I could help him write his story—for a considerable fee. My father has always expressed his love by offering unsolicited, unconventional opportunities to me, the type that can only be dreamed up and brokered by the best, most innovative salesmen. My father is nothing if not a salesman. His unshakable faith nourished me, made me believe in myself and my talent when life gave me so many reasons not to. That’s love.

  But loving someone also means letting your guard down around them. It means revealing the harshest, angriest, most wounded parts of yourself. Sometimes that’s ugly. Sometimes it leaves bruises. Sometimes it draws blood. Not just metaphorically. If I wanted to tell you a story about that, I’d tell you that one of my earliest memories is my father holding me against the wall by my throat, my feet dangling above the cold cement of our basement floor. I’d tell you how my older sister screamed at him to let me go and how my father, surprisingly, listened, dropped me, turned, then backhanded her, sending her to the ground. The memory ends there. There’s no resolution, no deus ex machina that swoops in to save us. We were hurt. We were alone.

  The strange thing is my father never abused people he didn’t like. He never snapped at the racist manager who promoted the less talented white salesmen around him. He never choked my mother’s brother for stealing his beloved, expensive stereo system. He saved that for us—for the ones he said he loved. Did he still love us when he hurt us? Or did he hurt us because he loved us? Maybe for him love was a fire that could both warm and burn, encouraging him to become both his best self and his worst self.

  Have you ever hurt people you love? If so, please explain why.

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  When I want to remember the good things about my father, I must forget the bad things. When I want to remember the bad things about him, I must forget the good. There’s no space for me to hold both of these realities at the same time, no grey logic in this black-and-white world. There are either heroes or villains. Victims or abusers.

  These dichotomies must remain intact.

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  And yet.

  Anishinaabe and Métis writer Gwen Benaway writes, “The truth about survivors is that we come from other survivors, are woven into a history of violence and rupture as long as we have stories for.” My father is a survivor. He survived his father. He’s surviving colonialism. He’s also currently surviving a particularly brutal battle with prostate cancer, for which he has refused chemotherapy in favour of things like hemp oil and a more balanced diet. I know he’s in pain because I’ve looked it up. Prostate cancer causes dull, deep pain in the lower back or pelvis. Sometimes the pain reaches down into your thighs or up into your ribs. There’s weight loss. Appetite loss. Nausea. Vomiting. Swelling in your feet. Dad never lets on that he’s hurting. When I ask him about his health, he mumbles a dismissive line or two, waving concern away with the flustered annoyance of an over-mothered child. He knows how to survive. He’s always known how to survive. Why should I bother him with my fear or doubt now?

  I wonder whether he’s treated his own trauma the same way. We’ve never talked about how his father abused him, for instance. I only know about it because my mother would make vague comments explaining away Dad’s outbursts or rationalizing his anger. In these conversations, abuse created a butterfly effect; a ripple in childhood could create a hurricane in adulthood. If Dad’s experiences of abuse made him hurt us and our family, how were our experiences of abuse going to make us hurt our own families? I watched Dad for hints that he was still hurting from his childhood. Watched him in the car while he was driving. Watched him while he set up our inflatable pool in the backyard. I never saw what I expected to see. I only saw him.

  Once, while Dad was cutting down a tree for firewood, the chainsaw stopped working. A small piece of wood was trapped in the chain. Dad pulled the wood out with his fingers. As soon as he did, the chainsaw started up again, ripping into his flesh and nearly cutting off the tip of his index finger. He’d forgotten to turn the chainsaw off. When he came into the house, damp, dark red fabric wrapped around his hand, my mother screamed. Dad insisted he was fine, became annoyed when Mom insisted on driving him to the hospital. He was obviously hurt, but his face was calm. His face showed no fear, no pain. It was the face he always wore.

  It wasn’t until I was older that I considered what this could mean. Maybe I couldn’t map the pain on his face because he was always in pain.

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  Last year, a friend asked me about my father. I told her a condensed history of the way he treated my loving, brilliant mother. I explained how my father’s physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial and verbal abuse of her influenced the way I viewed her, the way I viewed myself, and the way I viewed mental illness. As the words came out of my mouth I could see my friend trying to mask her disgust. Still my voice was steady, nonchalant even. I detailed some of my most painful memories as though they hadn’t affected me at all, even when I was explaining the precise ways they had. Apparently I had taken on his impartiality to pain, as well.

  When I was finished, my friend asked me why I still spoke to him. I didn’t know what to say. Why did I still speak to my father? It seemed insufficient to merely say that I loved him, though of course that was true. I did love him. I do.

  But is my love for him, my continued relationship with him, enabling him to continue the same abusive behaviours that hurt our family? Should I cut him off for the things he’s done—things he’s shown no remorse for? Would that teach him to be better?

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  How long did it take you to come up with an answer to those questions? Or did you come up with answers at all?

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  I recently stumbled across a blog post analyzing the ways estranged parents interact with one another on message boards. Apparently, none of them have any idea why their children have decided to cut off all contact with them. Or at least that’s what they initially claim. Slowly, though, the story trickles out, revealing that they do, in fact, know why their children don’t want them in their lives anymore.

  The problem is that these message boards are run by other estranged parents. They’re supposed to be “supportive,” but their idea of “support” is much different from my idea of support. I would have assumed a supportive message board for estranged parents would be a space where they could help one another identify and change their own abusive behaviours so they could eventually repair their relationships with their children.

  Instead, the users of this message board spent a lot of time reading one another’s stories and reinforcing the idea that none of them have ever done anything wrong. They rarely questioned another estranged parent’s account of events. They didn’t acknowledge contradictions in the statements they made to one another, or point out the ways they held their children to standards they refused to let their children or anyone else hold them to. If you were to read the comments they made to one another, you’d get the impression that all of their estranged children and grandchildren were selfish, ungrateful, illogical, even abusive.

  I felt sick reading the posts, wondering if those were the sort of things my father would say about me if I decided to cut him off. He’d hold up all the good he’s done for me, hide away the bad, and I would suddenly become another selfish, ungrateful, illogical, even abusive child in what appeared to be a sea of such children.

  The blog showed that, for these estranged parents, context didn’t matter. Their children’s feelings and boundaries didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was what they felt at any given moment. It was as if these people all lived in an alternate reality where nothing they did had any repercussions but everything everyone else did had outsized ones. If you told them that they made you feel bad, it wasn’t their fault—it was your fault for misunderstanding what they had meant. And at the same time, telling them they were making you feel bad made them feel bad, and there was no excuse for your treating them so terribly. In other words, being held accountable for abuse by the people they’ve abused was, in fact, abusive.

  Have you ever encountered a person who thought being held accountable was abusive?

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  Have you ever been the person who thought being held accountable was abusive?

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  Is the line between abuser and victim becoming more blurry to you the more we discuss this? Why or why not?

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  Gaslighting is an abuse tactic by which a person manipulates another person into questioning their own sanity. Since I learned the term, I’ve realized the extent to which my father used this tactic on my family. He eventually took all of us to an abuse shelter on the rez because he claimed our mother was abusing him. The shelter believed it and let him in.

  Part of me knew this was wrong, but the other part believed my father. He was so good at making sure we saw what he wanted us to see. The only time my mother seemed angry at my father’s abuse was when she was manic. She’d point at him while spitting her testimony, thrust her index finger into his chest or shove him backwards with a hand. As soon as she did any of these things, Dad would yell, “Owwwww! Stop it! You’re hurting me!” and we’d rush in, yelling at Mom to leave him alone. Sometimes I’d push myself between them, sure that she wouldn’t hurt me on her way to him. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but he only ever seemed to feel pain at these exact moments. In this way, my dad used my mother’s mental illness to make her seem like the abusive parent. He even convinced me to write a statement about a fight they got into when she was manic, which he used to get full custody of us while Mom was in the mental hospital. I was thirteen. I had no idea what that meant. I had no idea what it meant until it was too late.

  I never saw my father hit my mother. I came close once when we were going to church. Mom was so depressed she was scared to leave the house. Dad, furious, rushed back in to get her. I didn’t see what happened before he took off and left us at home, but I did see her head bleeding at the hairline. I saw her glazed eyes. I heard her whimpering.

  I don’t know if my father remembers this. I don’t know if he remembers any of it. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he only remembers the emotions he was feeling when my mother wouldn’t leave the house, or the emotions he’s feeling now that I’m bringing this memory up. Maybe he can’t do anything but gaslight me.

  Does this feel like an explanation, or an excuse? Is there a difference?

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  In writing about the ways my father gaslit me, and offering only select memories and one perspective, does it feel like I’m gaslighting you? Manipulating you?

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  If we can’t even get abusers to acknowledge the ways they’re abusing others, how can we ever end abuse?

  This is not a question I expect you to answer. It’s just a question I’ve been asking myself. Particularly since so many discussions around how to deal with abuse tend to focus on the individual. If you’re a victim of abuse, you simply need to get away from your abuser and you’ll be fine. You simply need to cut them off and you’ll be fine. And perhaps you will be.

  But as a society, does telling abuse victims to get away from their abusers really address the causes of abuse? Does it stop the abuser from abusing others? Does it feel like it’s solving the problem, or ignoring it?

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  The books I’ve read about abuse usually present domestic violence as an individual problem instead of a societal problem. The authors will explain that abusers usually started off as victims, but when they say that, they tend to mean the abuser was once a victim within an abusive family. That’s where the analysis ends. They don’t take that logic a few steps further to situate domestic violence within the larger historical context of state violence, looking at the ways that the state specifically victimizes and abuses homeless people, racialized people, LGBTQ2S+ people, women, children and gender non-conforming people, disabled people, mentally ill people, poor people, and those who embody all possible configurations of those identities, in order to further its own agenda. The authors rarely investigate or interrogate the ways that Western cultural values actually encourage these abusive behaviours, even if Western laws (technically) discourage them.

  Do you see where I’m going with this? Am I moving too fast?

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  Okay, let’s back up and unpack that. I’ll use my own experiences, my family and my nation’s history as an example. As I’ve mentioned, my family experienced violence and abuse, but that violence and abuse didn’t start in my family, or even in my parents’ families, or their parents’ families. You need to follow the thread back.

  So let’s go back. Way back. On Turtle Island, and specifically within Haudenosaunee communities, domestic violence was not an issue before contact. Our clan families lived in the same longhouse together, so you couldn’t hide the way you were treating your wife and children. Everyone knew. In addition, after marriage, men would move into their wife’s family longhouse, so her family members were continually monitoring the relationship and looking out for the wife and children. If you were found to be abusive, your belongings would be left outside of the longhouse and you would have to return to your clan’s longhouse. For the worst offenders of violence in the co
mmunity, one of the harshest punishments was expulsion from the community. That was almost always a last resort.

  At the same time in Britain, then eventually in Canada, families lived in private homes. Every member of the family was considered the personal property of the man of the house. Things that happened behind closed doors stayed there. It would be considered rude to ask a man how he treated his family, since that was his private business. After 1850, domestic violence slowly began to be outlawed, but arrests still remained rare. Even today only two-thirds of those who are charged with domestic violence are convicted—and that doesn’t even take into account the 47 percent of sexual assaults and 40 percent of incidents where women are beaten, choked or assaulted with a weapon that are never reported to police. Because Canada is a carceral state, those who are caught committing domestic violence are put through the court system. If found guilty, expulsion from the community in the form of incarceration is often the first resort, not the last, and can last a maximum of five years. In jail, abusers are not rehabilitated and taught better ways to deal with their pain, how to be better partners, or how to deal with the abuse they’ve experienced in their lives. Instead, they’re treated as subhuman, and told this is what they deserve.