When A Father Becomes A Phantom

When people think of an effective father an image may be conjured of a man who is stoic, caring, boundary-setting, and protective of his family. What happens however when a father becomes a phantom, a mere shadow that roams the halls where his children avoid him at all costs?

My mother told me sternly that if I thought things were bad now, just wait until my father got home. An instant moment of panic set in because I knew what that meant.  I was going to get my ass kicked. I knew that there was no amount of begging, pleading, bargaining, or negotiation that was going to get me out of this. In many ways, the wait was worse than the punishment. It could be hours until he was home but I knew once my mother said those words that it was going to be game time.

My father would barely be in the door before my mother would whisk him away for a sidebar. After a few minutes, he would advance up the stairs menacingly. I would try to plead or beg but it fell on deaf ears. All the anger and discontent from his work day, his trapped marriage, his own unaddressed trauma, his lack of faith, and more was about to come bearing down on me. He was a big man who went to the gym, so it didn’t take much for him once he got a hold of me and the hitting started for the pain to be inflicted.  If I ran away it would only make it worse.

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My father was an unhappy man while I was growing up. He was trapped in a marriage that was falling apart, he was in a job where he didn’t feel valued, and he had a deep-centered anger that would emerge in explosive ways. My mother knew this and would play this to her advantage when she was upset with us. We had to become experts at reading body language. 

When he came home in about 10 seconds we had to read his mood and mannerisms and that would determine if we would stick around, go to the basement, or outside. My mother would tell my father in a very exaggerated & exhausted way what I had done wrong. In return, he would grab me and strike me sometimes in the backside, sometimes in the chest and stomach area. Then he would leave or send me on my way. 

I wasn’t the only one, my siblings were subjected to the same behavior. In a particularly egregious example, I can remember one time he thought I was wearing an article of his clothing and he struck me so hard in the stomach I physically couldn’t breathe. I must have been about 10. I just remember making this awful gulping noise because I physically couldn’t draw the air into my lungs for what seemed like forever.

I remember when my one sibling cut my other sibling's hair as a bad prank and he came in and delivered what I believed was one of the dirtiest beatings we’d witnessed all while screaming and yelling the entire time while we watched horrified, unable to intervene. Then he simply left us all standing there and we didn’t talk about it again. I can still remember the situation like a video that cannot be erased from my mind.

We didn’t trust our parents and it contributed to eventually one of my siblings being sexually assaulted by another family member. This is why parents need to build a family unit where people communicate and trust each other. They were too scared to actually tell my parents because they simply didn’t trust my parents. So the abuse continued for some time until they couldn’t hold it in anymore. I believe that if my parents had our trust this would have never happened. Hindsight is always 20/20.

My father started making good money when he moved up into management.  Then he would purchase nice things for us, but at the end of the day, it was a bribe. He wanted to buy back our affection and our love because he was fundamentally incapable of expressing that to us himself. It was also used to guilt us, ‘how bad could it be when your parents buy you all these nice things?’ His spending habit spiraled out of control and he quickly lost control of his ability to influence the environment around him. 

Despite my father’s aggressive and physical behavior towards us we were not allowed to act out aggressively. We had to resolve conflict through words and mediation/intervention. This sent mixed signals which led to confused aggression. So aggression came out in inappropriate ways like breaking things around the house, explosive fits of anger in minor disputes with friends, and more. 

Probably the biggest hypocrisy was that our father had no problem being violent against his children but lacked the fortitude and constitution to injure/maim the family member who sexually assaulted my sibling. That bothered me for years and sometimes it creeps up on me still.

Things are different now, my father is older, has found God, found a new wife, and developed a purpose that seemed to dissipate his anger overnight. The scars remain which have negatively affected my siblings in many different ways socially and emotionally. 

Yet I’ve chosen the route of forgiveness, that isn’t to say my relationship with my father isn’t strained, it remains almost like a casual friendship. We talk a few times a year and keep up with current events. We’ve grown somewhat closer as he sees all that I have achieved in my life so far. 

My advice for fathers out there is that you shouldn’t hit your children out of anger or spite, lest you too become the phantom that roams the hallways.