Cal was, emotionally, an adult toddler.
For Cal, feelings were facts, so his skewed reaction to events became his reality.
It took many years of abuse and hundreds of hours of therapy to understand what I was dealing with. To comprehend the man-monster that I’d married.
One of the last conversations with Lilly that I’d ever had about Cal happened in front of her school. We were sitting in my car outside the doors, and she was nearly hyperventilating. The panic attacks were usually triggered by a slightly stressful event, like attending school in a decade when active shooters were as frequent in our world as nuclear power plant melt-down drills were in our little town.
She turned to me and asked, “Why is Dad like this? Doesn’t he know he’s hurting me?”
Lilly was egocentric. Lilly was my only child left who had trusted Cal, and because of that, she was most like him. In the past, it hadn’t hurt her as much when Cal mistreated her brother and sister or me, but when Cal hurt her, it was the end of the world.
I sighed deeply, knowing I was going to be late to work- again. But Lilly came first. Lilly needed me. The guilt that I always felt pooled at the surface as I thought about what she’d been through.
Watching her father spit in a woman’s face.
Watching her father choke a woman.
I needed to make sure she understood everything so that she didn’t become a woman who sought out this behavior in other men or women. I also felt a responsibility to guide her not to become a person who behaved this way.
I looked at my child in the passenger seat, not surprised we were both exhausted from the inside out.
“Lilly, look at my steering wheel,” I said, tracing my finger over the wheel of my Jeep. “See? It’s like a pie chart. This big, open part at the top, and then two open sections at the bottom.”
“Twenty-five percent, twenty-five percent, fifty percent,” Lilly answered. I smiled at her, nodding. She’d always loved math, and though it was simple math for a thirteen-year-old at the time, I was proud of the way she’d inserted numbers into my example.
“Yes. Exactly. So, imagine this steering wheel is your dad’s mind. Up here, in this fifty-percent portion, is narcissism. It’s a personality disorder. He’s got sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies. All the things your therapist has talked to you about. Mental illness, Lilly.”
She nodded.
“Down here, in this twenty-five percent segment, is alcoholism. In this twenty-five percent segment, it’s PTSD from the war.” I drew my index fingers in lines upwards towards the larger, open segment. “These are the three things happening in Dad. They all feed each other. They’re all hungry vampires living off each other. You know where we are in all of this? Me and you and your brother and sister?” I asked.
“We’re in the middle,” Lilly whispered, sniffing back tears. “We’re the horn.”
“We’re the horn,” I agreed, tracing the letters in the word Jeep. “Me, you, Clay, and Leah. And we’re being so loud. We’re honking at your dad with all that we have. But he can’t hear us. Because the other parts of the wheel are so much bigger and louder.”
She nodded, pointing to the portion I’d labeled WAR. “And being in the war made it worse for Dad,” she said.
“It did.”
“And so did alcohol,” she added, pointing to the other portion.
“Yes.”
“And Lana is an alcoholic too, so she just fits over here,” she added, pointing to the wheel.
I lifted my eyes. “Good observation.”
“But all this,” she said, referring to the narcissism. “This is how his brain developed.”
“You’re incredibly smart,” I told her. “His brain developed this way, yes. And it wasn’t your grandma’s fault. She didn’t teach him to become this way when he was a little boy. It’s something that happens to little children when they must cope with things that are very serious or traumatic. And sometimes, when you’re trying to cope, your brain lights up and says, protect yourself. Make yourself number one. Trust only your own emotions to be facts.”
“But now I’m coping,” she said. “Am I going to be like that? Like Dad?” Lilly asked, her eyes narrowed and angry.
“Not on my watch,” I whispered, wrapping my arm around her. “That’s why we talk about this.”
She balled her fist against the window, and I realized then she was just as much like me as she was like Cal. “I get it, Mom. But I don’t care about his excuses anymore. He had lots of years to fix himself. Instead he just keeps hurting everyone because he doesn’t think anything is wrong with him. He doesn’t get help because you can’t get help for ‘nothing wrong with me’ syndrome. I’m done with him.”
I knew they were strong words from Cal’s biggest fan.
In my dreams, Cal needed me, and I helped him. Every time. I guess that’s what he saw in me from the beginning; the girl who would always help him, no matter how far he strayed from the path.
But the further I moved away from Cal and distanced myself from him, the more I realized that I was helping him by not feeding him. He was used to a Lizzie snack here and there, whenever his ego needed a boost or his rage needed an outlet. When I stopped making myself available for his abuse, he needed a new outlet.
The terrible choking and spitting night was Lilly’s interview. Lilly was quickly becoming Cal’s snack. Cal’s audience. And Lana was his four-course meal.
I’d floated in and out of my memories of the last two decades during my healing process after the divorce. It wasn’t until 2008 when Leah began showing signs of extreme Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder when I finally had my own breakdown.
Cal’s abuse was hard for me to describe to therapists because it varied in subtlety and severity. I was lucky to find a doctor who understood what was happening to me. When she first pulled out the laminated “cycle of abuse” chart, I read it with wide eyes. It was as though someone had mapped out our entire relationship, from the extreme highs to the extreme lows.
And for ten years, I’d lived it with my eyes closed.
For the next six years- six years- I slowly began to wake up. When you’re still in the cycle, waking up is especially hard. It’s like a dream within a dream. It’s a balance between knowing the truth and feeling like you’ve gone crazy. It’s teetering between filing for divorce and bailing him out of jail for a DWI. Pieces of a mangled person, scattered in the path before you, and you are the walking dead.
I was a young parent, but I’d read everything I could find about early childhood. About discipline and about education. When Leah was suffering at the peak of her OCD, I took her to intensive counseling and therapy.
Cal came with us- at first. Eventually, he stopped. The more I talked to Leah’s therapist, the more I recognized what was happening.
Cal was abusive.
Cal was an alcoholic.
Leah was the oldest child in the family and her anxiety had manifested into obsessive compulsive disorder.
Cal didn’t want to hear that he was the problem. “I’m always the fucking problem, Lizzie. Why don’t you take responsibility for yourself? Oh, it has nothing to do with you? The way you scream at me in front of the kids? You don’t think that has any effect on them?”
Six years passed.
Six.
Years.
Clay became a picky eater with upset stomach issues, and Cal decided he was just a brat who wanted junk food. One night, while I was working the evening shift, Cal force-fed Clay the ground beef in the spaghetti he’d made and refused to let him leave the table until he swallowed.
When I found out, I quit my job and stayed home to protect my children. I babysat out of my home for income, but only during the hours when Cal was at work so that he wouldn’t be around other people’s children.
It took Clay almost eight years before he would touch ground beef again.
Cal was better for a while after Lilly came along. I went back to work at my company, needin
g more consistent income.
Cal turned on Leah next. She became a headstrong teenager, yes, but more importantly- Leah was educated. She knew what Cal was doing and called him out on his abusive behaviors. She protected her brother and sister at all costs.
Cal grabbed her by the throat and shoved her against the wall. When she wouldn’t listen to him and go to her bedroom, he grabbed her by the hair and drug her down the hallway.
He was nailing her bedroom door shut when I finally got home from work after Clay’s tearful call. I broke several laws driving home at ninety-five miles an hour.
Lilly stood next to her father, holding a handful of nails in her three-year-old palm. She informed me she was being Daddy’s big helper. Leah had already slipped through her ground-level bedroom window and ran to her best friend’s house by then.
I told him I wanted him to leave. I wanted a divorce. I wanted him out of my house and away from my children, but he refused.
“You leave!” he screamed. “I’m not leaving my fucking house,” he replied. “How do you expect me to discipline her? She’s mouthy and talks back, and she refuses to listen. She wouldn’t go to her room. All she had to do was go to her room. I didn’t hurt her. She’s being dramatic, Lizzie. I barely touched her. Did she tell you that she was flailing at me? Oh yeah, she swung at me. That’s what set me off. I won’t have my own kid swinging at me.”
Leah started cutting herself with a razor blade. Small cuts in hidden areas of her body.
I asked for a divorce. I demanded a divorce.
He was sorry. He was so sorry. Beyond sorry. I never told my mother or sister the most terrible details, and certainly not any friends. But my mother knew. She used to say that he was the “sorriest son-of-a-bitch that ever existed.”
He was the sorriest.
The most wicked.
He turned on Clay again. Clay immersed himself in video games. Clay stayed in his bedroom in front of his PlayStation and drowned Cal out. He became the most nervous child, constantly checking on me and his sisters. When Cal would slip into a fit of rage, he’d put on his headphones and live in a make-believe world.
Cal would call his name, but Clay couldn’t hear him, which would infuriate Cal. He burst through the boy’s shared bedroom door one evening, glaring at Clay. “Turn off your goddamn video game and get out here for dinner,” he snarled.
I happened to be in the next bedroom and jumped to my feet.
“Just a second, Dad, I’m almost done with this,” Clay explained.
“If you don’t turn off that fucking video game I’m going to smash it with a goddamn hammer,” Cal threatened.
“Go ahead then!” Leah screamed from behind him, rushing to her brother’s defense. She disappeared into the garage, returning with a hammer in her hands. “Smash it! Go on!” she urged, utter hatred burning in her ice-blue gaze.
“Fine, I will!” Cal grabbed the hammer, and I wrenched the tool from Cal’s hand.
“Jesus, what in the hell is wrong with you?” I shouted, turning to see Lilly sitting on Clay’s bed, staring at us with wide, four-year-old eyes.
“Give it to me! I said I’m going to smash it, and I am!” Cal shouted.
“I’ll smash you with a hammer,” I hissed, under my breath, so only he could hear.
His eyes widened to blue-black orbs. He grabbed my upper arm and wrenched the hammer away from me, and I ran to Clay as he began to cry.
“Go ahead!” Cal screamed, throwing the hammer at me. I covered Clay and dodged out of the way as it hit the drywall and landed at Lilly’s feet. “Smash me with a fucking hammer, just try! Just try it, Lizzie! Threaten me? Did you hear that, kids? Your mom is threatening me. Mom. Is. Threatening. Me. Who needs help now?”
He got in his car and left.
He came back hours later, beyond sorry.
The sorriest.
Finally, I went to see a lawyer. I told her I wanted out, but I wanted to protect my children. I couldn’t imagine Cal having shared custody of my children and them being left defenseless, without me there to protect them.
It was always that thought that prevented me from leaving.
The lawyer looked at me sadly. She shook her head, reading over my information.
“Did you ever call the police? File a police report?” she asked.
I was used to talking to therapists, and I was taken aback by her cold, hard questions. Usually, my decisions to not file police reports and not tell anyone was met with understanding. This time, my ‘no’ was met with a shake of the head.
“He got a DWI,” I reminded her.
“Were the kids in the car?” she prodded.
“No,” I answered softly.
She sighed, looking over my information again. “Lizzie, I can tell you now- most judges would not award you full custody. In Ohio, shared parenting is preferred. The kids could speak on their behalf, but it’d be a grueling process for them. And in most cases, abuse like this is hard to explain. A few isolated circumstances, with no supporting police report, will be tough to argue.”
I nodded and slipped her business card into my wallet.
There were five sides to every story.
I need to wait until they are a little older.
I started writing to escape Cal. I began emotionally detaching myself from him, much like Clay did with his video games. I dove into imaginary worlds with imaginary characters and published a few books myself.
When Cal complained about the lack of attention I was giving him, I shrugged and told him to leave then.
I remembered the last time he choked me. I was writing the first book in a new series, a spin-off series. My character had bright red hair, and she was the girl I couldn’t write anymore because of Lana. She was my kick-ass heroine who would be visiting the salon in chapter one of my next installment.
It was a dark book about a demon. Imagine Dragon’s “Demons” was on the radio all the time. Demons were everywhere in my life. I was choking and drowning with no end in sight, and I told Cal as much.
“You’re sick, Cal. You’re an abusive, alcoholic sick person. And you were right, all those years ago in your old house. You were right. I do hate you. I have ended up hating you. I hate the monster in you because the man is too far away to see anymore. I hate the father that you are and the husband that you are. You’re an awful human being and you refuse to change.”
“I’m the way I am because of you,” he growled at me. “You make me this way. You never taking responsibility for your own actions. Always blaming me for everything. Everything is always my fault!”
“Because it is!” I shouted in return. “Don’t change then! Be who you are! Be what you are! Just do it away from us because you’re hurting each one of us! Go be a miserable human being away from me and the kids! Find someone else to torture and leave me and my babies alone!”
He grabbed me by the neck then and slammed me up against the door in the hallway. All three of the kids had gathered and were shouting at him to stop. Clay was holding his ears. Lilly was trying to pull her father’s leg. Leah held Lilly back.
I shoved Cal away from me and burst into tears.
It was all too much.
He was sorry again. So sorry.
And I couldn’t let him have my children, not even every other weekend.
So I stayed.
I stayed for one more family vacation, tortured by Cal and his abstract abuse. Abuse that couldn’t be bullet-pointed in a court deposition. Events that were droplets of water in the dark cloud that hung over my life.
And then there was the last event.
The one that made me realize that no one was safe, and he would destroy these children one cell at a time for the rest of their days.
We had season tickets to Cedar Point, our local amusement park, and there was only one day left in the season. It was November first, and in Ohio, we were playing the lottery to go to a rollercoaster park on the first day of November. As my bad luck would have it, it was freez
ing, and the first snowflakes of the year swirled in the air. But we went anyway, because Ohio natives rode rollercoasters in the snow.
Cal was excited because Lilly was finally tall enough to ride the big roller coasters. He stood in line with her and Leah, waiting for a half an hour in the cold to get to the front of the line. I stayed at the bottom with Clay because he didn’t want to ride.
When Cal finally appeared with Leah and Lilly on the exit ramp, I knew. Lilly was sobbing and Leah was consoling her. Cal was enraged, and he stalked toward me, leaving the girls behind him.
“What happened?” I asked, glaring at Cal.
“We got all the way to the top and Lilly wouldn’t fucking ride. All she had to do was get in the car and she wouldn’t get in the fucking car.”
“And Dad called her a pussy,” Leah said, holding Lilly tighter in her arms.
“She was being a pussy! Christ, it’s a rollercoaster. You’re strapped in. All she’s done is talk about how excited she was all summer long to ride this thing and here we are in the fucking snow, ready to ride, and she chickens out. Jesus fucking Christ.”
I gathered Lilly into my arms.
I wanted to kill Cal.
I wanted to ride with him to the highest hill, and just as we were about to go over the top and into a series of upside-down spins, I wanted to unlatch his belt.
I wanted him to plummet to the ground.
Because that was the only way he would stop hurting the kids. He would have to be dead. The law couldn’t protect them from this type of behavior. The law couldn’t say that Lilly’s life was in danger because Cal was mean to her.
But Lilly’s life had been in danger.
Lilly’s life had been in danger since the moment she was born.
FIFTEEN
Air left my lungs.
When I stopped talking and looked up, I saw that Virginia had taped Cal’s mouth shut again. I guessed that he’d tried to interject and defend himself several times as I told my story, but Virginia wasn’t having it.
She didn’t give a fuck about what Cal had to say. Cal had said enough over the years, and Virginia was my advocate, not his.
ABOUT HER Page 15