Tub Talks

STUPID LITTLE DISCOVERIES   December 1989 

by

Gary P Kroenining 

A Study in Daddy Issues 

What follows is a conversation recorded on a tape recorder while I take a hot bath. I made the recording to document what was going on in my head.

"December twelfth. December twelfth? No. It is December twentieth! 1989. I've got something big going on in my head. It's been going on for a while, like all my life. It's about men, primarily my father. Well, anyway... 

So I'm seeing this guy, Stephan. I mean, I am seeing him; he is not seeing me. 

When I come home and my answering machine light isn't blinking, it drives me up the wall! There can be nine messages on the machine from people who like me, but if none of them is his, then all the rest are void because HE hasn't called, which must mean he doesn't want me.

Well, my friend gave me this book titled Children of Adult Alcoholics. Now, I didn't grow up in an alcoholic family per se, but the emotional breakdown was there, along with the malnutrition of love, which qualifies in my mind as an alcoholic family.

One of the things I always craved, and never felt I got, was physical and emotional love from my father. Children are very impressionable, and they need this. And I didn't get it from him, so I got it wherever I could—the streets had an abundance of love.

 But not getting it from my father left me with a deep sense of emptiness.

I remember being upstairs in my room for HOURS and just not wanting to do... anything. Now, I don't know if I was up in that room because I liked myself and didn't need to play with friends, or because I didn't feel worthy enough to be with them. So I hid from the world because of who I thought I was.

 I hid in my room and remained alone. And I know for a fact that when my dad's truck pulled up to the house and I was sitting in the living room, I would go upstairs so he didn't have to see me, nor I him.

He told me he didn't want me around. 

There was always that feeling that because he didn't want to see me, I must have done something wrong, or that I was so low that no one in their right mind would want me around! You know? 

And even today, if anyone is in a bad mood, the thought "It's my fault" enters the broken mind.

Even if I'm at work and my boss is upset, the first thing I think is, "It's my fault. What did I do?" 

I mean, give me a man, and it has to be a man who can represent my father, someone I can pour my entire life into, so I can try to win his love firsthand. With this effort, I try to make up for the love my father did not show me when I was a kid. 

At this point, all I can do is talk about it into this tape recorder

Do I even want to get to that point? Saying something like this to him: "Dad, you didn't love me when I was little, and now I fucking hate you for it." 

And of course, if I hated him, I wouldn't care, but the fact is I LOVE HIM, AND THAT IS WHY I DO CARE. I care because of who I am, not who he was.

I'm not ignorant of his upbringing either. He was young, married, and had three kids by 21, and he'd had a rough childhood himself. But if that's his excuse, I call Bullshit.

I'm like, "Too damn bad if you had it rough. Like, we’re your punching bag in place of Grandpa? Hell, if you have a gripe, go to the source."

Now, my brother and sister take refuge in their families. They have had their "other halves" for over thirteen years each. They have someone to help them figure this out.

Me? I'm full-on solo. I have been dating people like my father for years, hoping to find someone who will accept all the things Dad disdained.

My brother and sister are in their relationships and building their new love lives. I seem preoccupied with this hurt, playing with it like a loose tooth.

I am healing my childhood, which was lonely in a lot of ways, very lonely. I mean, I am a happy person when you get me going. I'm very talkative, funny, silly, and all that, but overall... lonely.

Inside, where this shows its head, is where I seek out relationships with men who are emotionally unavailable to me. 

I became emotionally independent very early when it came to my needs, not by choice, but for the sake of survival.

 Once I had that "independence," we no longer needed to communicate. I'm sure I reached this point by fourteen.

And when Mom divorced and moved out of the house, that devastated me, even though I played it off differently at the time.

I played it off for the longest time that Mom splitting up with Dad didn't affect me, but Christ, if she was leaving, who was going to protect me from him?

She was going, and I didn't like it. I also didn't show it. So where did that leave me? How did I deal with that? How do I deal with deep emotional pain?

Well,  addiction covered much of it up then. Hell, even now, to a point. And now that I think about it, even fucking today. What I did with Stephan, like making him dinner, and the like—that's exactly what I would do for my dad when I lived with him after Mom moved out

If I knew that he had a date coming over, I would clean the house, light the candles, and leave early so he would be happy with me. 

Shit! I'd do anything for his attention then. 

All that for his affection. Will someone toss this dog a bone? And I did that thinking I could get someone's love that way.

 "Operation Desperation" was in full swing. What kind of quality love can one buy with props?

It's a hollow and empty love.

But I must admit, I enjoy doing nice things for others. What makes it so weird is that when I want to be nice to my Dad, he won't let me.

 So I get the message that he's rejecting me because:

A. I'm not good enough.
B. There is something inherently wrong with me.
C. This proves I am bad.

The sound of Stephan's motorcycle has the same power over me that my dad's truck did.

When I heard my dad's truck pull up, I thought, “Oh God, Dad's home." If I were in the living room and heard his car pulling up, I would turn off the TV and run upstairs to my room.

I would leave the living room so he wouldn't see me.

I would hide because I knew he didn't want to see me, and he didn't want me around. "

I wasn't doing anything wrong; I was just me, your youngest son! What was so incredibly grotesque about that?

“What was so wrong with me that just by being in the same room with you, I could ruin your day? I was twelve then for fucks sake.

 All I wanted was to love you. And I apparently couldn't even do that right.

So when I heard his truck come home, I would go upstairs and sit on my bed in silence. He'd be downstairs, and I would be upstairs wanting to love him, and he wouldn't let me, for whatever stupid reason, and I would have to be alone.

And I didn't feel like doing anything, because when someone doesn't love you, you don't feel like doing much anyway. 

So I would sit upstairs and listen to the radio, or clean, or write—something, anything—to make me think that I wanted to be up there. Not that I had to be there. There's such a huge difference.

I wanted to give my love to a man who didn't want it, and reaching out to a closed heart became my pattern.

"There was a time when I was taking care of a friend's cat, and while I was looking after her, she got pregnant and had kittens. I was jealous of the kittens to the point of sadness.

 The mom cat, Aggie, loved her kittens unconditionally, and it pissed me off that they didn't have to work for it as I did.

 I mean, the mother loved her kids for 'no apparent reason,' and I—for some reason, growing up —thought, 'You’d better do this ot that to get their love.’

Why else would I be a momma's boy if I was so sure that Mom loved me?

 I doubted her love so much that I kept busy cleaning the house and doing things like that to get the strokes. I worked on the strokes because without those strokes I would have settled for a dirt nap.

 So what did I do to attempt to get my dad's love? I guess I got my dad's love, or whatever he was going to give me, by NOT being downstairs when he came home.

I remember the day I stopped being the "sissy boy."

He said something to hurt my feelings, maybe something like "Sissy, move your head," or, better yet, "Go upstairs; I'm sick of looking at you," and I ran upstairs crying as predicted like so many years before.

But I changed that day. I found myself crying into the pillow, saying, "This shit has got to stop. I'm not going to cry anymore; now I’ll fight back." 

I came downstairs and went back to where I was sitting (in that green, nappy, balled-up, fart-soaked chair), and he said,

 "What’s going on?" I looked at him and said, "I’M not running upstairs every time you hurt me. Now I’M going to fight back." 

 His response was, "Well, all right. Finally!"  This moment marked the birth of my gift for sarcasm and flippant coldness toward others. I became a prodigy of him in the most perverted way imaginable.

People are responsible for their actions, no matter how much water has gone under the bridge. At the very least, it is a human obligation to discuss the past so it has a chance to be healed. 

Would I have it any other way? Yeah, I would have it another way. Regrets? A fuckin shitload of them. I would do everything differently if I had the chance. The man he shaped me into has caused so many other souls pain, confusion, and sorrow.

I feel good about talking into this tape recorder because I can listen to this later on. I could have saved a lot of time if I had just taken a baseball bat to their wedding picture.

  I hope this kind of shit helps me in the end, if I'm there for it.

End of tape.