ASSAULT

Once my mother had demonstrated to my father that she was utterly indifferent to his feelings—breaking her promise never to take us out of state—he felt no compunction about treating her in kind, neither of them seeming to care how their manifest animosity towards each other—both in word and deed—affected Doug and me.

My mother’s fury at my father remained unabated through the years, stoked by his reneging on his promise to pay for my braces, his tardiness sending child support payments, and the fact that these weren’t adequate and it fell to her to make up the difference. (In the divorce settlement, because she was so sure she was going to remarry, she’d agreed to an unrealistically modest amount in child support.) Rather than ever allow that my father had become as physically incapacitated as he actually was, she chose to believe that he was simply malingering—and never tired of railing against him to me and my brother.

Meanwhile, my father began scrawling all but illegible letters to me, page after page chronicling all his physical pain and problems, as well as his expenses, in exhaustive detail, while repeatedly airing a paranoia about me becoming a “man-hater” like my mother, whom he blamed for any and all of the problems Doug and I had. (Conversely, she would blame him for our struggles.) Years later he would express unabashed glee over how little child support he’d gotten away with paying, again unconcerned about how this might have impacted my brother and me. And so, our parents’ vengefulness towards one another played out over the years.

Still, it be would be a long time before I fully understood the psychological impact that parents despising and disparaging each other is bound to have on their offspring—that because children are, in a sense, composites of their parents, they unconsciously experience the vilification and denigration of one parent by the other as an assault on themselves as well, which leaves their self-esteem in ruins.