You can see it everywhere nowadays: self-promotion. I stay away from social media as much as possible, because it seems like it is an endless feed of people only showing the good side of their life or trying to show how wonderful they are. There’s even a term for it…
One of the strongest emotions I’ll never forget from my childhood was being afraid. Through my father’s parenting style - he was one to never spare the rod and would punish us in advance for things we didn’t do yet - and the beliefs that I grew up with, I…
Control was a common theme that permeated our house and church. Every aspect of our life came down to who had control and who didn’t. From my earliest memories, I knew there wasn’t much I had control over. Getting older I thought I would have more freedom, but it never…
It had been over two months since I talked to my father. Thinking about it back then, it marked the longest I’d gone without talking to him since he was in prison.
It was refreshing and felt liberating.
Being a father myself, I hope my own son never feels that way about not talking to me. But I will never treat him the way my father treated me.
The longer I went without speaking to him, the freer I felt. My father beat into us kids - literally and figuratively - that listening to him and pleasing him was all that mattered. This led to an odd and strange sense of obligation for me. I don’t think my siblings felt the same. Maybe they did, but we all had such different experiences. Even though I knew logically all he brought me was misery, I still felt some strange feeling of obligation to my father. This meant I would continue to talk to him and have him in my life.
Shortly after I first left, it was much more than that. I was almost afraid of not receiving his approval, even though I had left his church and no longer lived in his house. It caused me to make many decisions I ended up regretting. The choices I made weren’t about what I wanted, but we’re about what I felt would make my father happy.
No, scratch that, I knew he wouldn’t be happy no matter what I did. But maybe he wouldn’t berate me and make me feel even more worthless than I felt almost every day of my childhood.
My father always taught us to think of other people first. But when he taught us this, it wasn’t because he was trying to instill in his children noble values. It was because he wanted us to think of him first and put him ahead of everything else. After all, he was a prophet and spoke to God himself. Putting our father first was therefore the same as putting God first, which was the most honorable and Christian thing to do.
Or so we were taught and led to believe.
But it was all lies. It was all to give my father control over us. And that control remained in many ways for years after I left.
I once tried talking to a therapist about my past. After hearing my story, he said that he believed deep down I still had the desire that everyone naturally has to please their parents. For most people this is fine. But for me, he said, it was causing me pain and said I should find a way to release myself from this in terms of my father.
At the time, I don’t really think I believed that was the case. Even years after leaving I was still encumbered by this lurking shadow, but I felt I freed myself from it years prior.
Yet, looking back on it, after I was able to stop speaking to my father, I realized that perhaps there still was some vestige of these feelings left deep inside that caused me to still have a relationship with someone who brought nothing good to my life and was only destructive.
It wasn’t as pronounced or harmful to my life as it once was, but it was still there, even if just a little. It’s why I still put up with the craziness that was always around my father.
As time went on, and the further my father was from me, the clearer I could see.
I'm still not completely sure how my parents found Branhasim. They were both very vague about the whole thing, but I think they were introduced to it through some friends or by a stranger at a religious event they went to. My parents were not particularly religious at this time.
One thing that always fascinated me as I grew up was my father's ability to get others to do things for him. I'm not just talking about small things, either. But we can start there.
My father never seemed to want to do even the smallest things himself. I'm not sure if it was laziness or just the fact they he had his family and a church congretation at his disposal, but whatever it was, he always would ask others to do things you or I might not even think of. For example, my father loved to spend time in his library on the first floor of our house. It was adjacent to the steps going to the second floor where all of us kids would usually hang out when he was home.
The worst thing you wanted to do was to go down the steps when my father was in his library. Why? Because he would hear someone come down the creaky steps and, as soon as he heard footsteps, ask who was there. He would go down the list from mother to my smallest sibling until someone answered. I learned later on just not to answer, but when you are young and scared of your father, you would tend to answer.
Once you do, he always seemed to have some menial task for you to do: get him some water or diet coke, even though the kitchen was a 10 second walk away; bring in more fire wood for his fire; bring him a magazine/book/newspaper; get someone else for him; rub his hands/feet/eyes (I always hated this and is why I think in adulthood I don't like getting any type of massage). The list was seemingly endless.
But these are just the small things. I remember him always asking my mother to do his dirty work for him. When I say this, I mean he would ask her to call the landlord for an extension on our rent, to call up someone at his church and ask him for money, or to meet with clients he hasn't filed cases for yet and try to give them an excuse as to why they shouldn't ask for a refund. If my mother wasn't available, he would get someone else in his congretation to do it.
He even would ask one person in our congretation to ask another church member if my father could borrow money from them or get a car loan for him, instead of asking them himself.
Maybe it was his pride combined with laziness and a fear of rejection. But when I was growing up a favorite phrase of his was "Do this for me, would you?".
There was a paging system in my house when I was a teenager.
Each room had a speaker that was connected to one of the main units, one of which was in my parents' bedroom and another that was in my father’s library. Unless the speaker had the mute button on, my parents could listen in on whatever us kids were doing in our rooms through the paging system. The main system could page all of the speakers, and my father would do this whenever he wanted, really loudly through the entire house.
Sometimes he would ramble on about something stupid, or just to let them know some random apparent fact. Instead of actually taking time to spend with his kids, he would frequently page the house and say "I love you {insert kid's name here}."
There was nothing more embarrassing than him doing that while I was on the phone or when one of my friends was over. I always hated this paging system but was always able to live with it. But there were so many times I just couldn't take it and had to leave the house any chance I could get.
Whenever my father was home for an extended period, he seemed to live on the paging system, always talking about something stupid or asking for something from me, my mother, or one of my siblings. There was nothing worse than just sitting down to relax and then hearing your father’s voice really loud throughout the entire house asking you to go get him a glass of water from the kitchen, which was only about two meters from his library.
Even worse, you knew that once you went down the glass of water wouldn't be the end of it. Follow-up work was always involved, some of which was really awful.
It was the winter of 1998. To be more precise, it was my winter vacation from university of 1998-99. I had successfully completed a year and a half of university and I was slowly starting to realize more and more that I really needed to get out of the situation…
If you were just looking from the outside, at the height of my father’s success it probably seemed like we were well-off. We had a huge house with nine bedrooms, four cars, two airplanes, and all sorts of modern early 1990s luxuries.
I use the term success loosely, however, because it was all about appearances and not real success or stability. Sure, my father drove around in his Mercedes and flew in his airplane, but he was on the brink of losing everything at any moment. For my entire childhood.
One thing he would do was buy us kids a lot of gifts for Christmas. Looking back on it now that I am older and wiser, I realize this was more a combination of compensation and selfishness than it was about making his children happy.
The compensation was for all of those times he was never there as a father. Never there as his children needed him.
The selfishness is equally as simple: knowing my father, he probably just wanted to make himself feel better and also wanted his kids to think he was a wonderful father because he bought them a bunch of stuff with money he actually didn’t have.
One year, he decided to take one of his missionary trips to Africa. He had been to Namibia a number of times and was going again. My mother also went and they decided to go over the Christmas and New Year period. Some church members lived in our house with us, and they would manage things and watch us kids while my parents were away. We were always happy, to be honest, because any time away from our father made our life easier.
My father always loved Christmas, but not enough to cancel his trip and spend it with his family. He didn't want to miss out, though, on all of the Christmas festivies. Instead of having an early celebration, he decided to make the family wait until my parents returned in the second week of January. But he wanted to make sure that the tree was full of presents.
Being only 8 years old at the time, I was conflicted. I was happy my father would be away, but it also felt like cruel torture to see all those presents sitting under the tree for weeks and weeks. We couldn't touch them, and if we did anything wrong while my parents were away, we wouldn't get to open them when they returned.
You may be thinking - what's the big deal? We were lucky enough to have a roof over our head and presents under the tree, so why should you complaing?
You're right, it's not a big deal, but I provide this as an example about what I felt was true at the time but couldn'd express, and so clearly realized was true when I became older: my father never really cared for others and his actions were only to benefit himself.
He could have celebrated Christmas with his family before he left. But he didn't want to. He wanted to make everyone wait for him, so he could have the celebration that he wanted to have on his own terms, regardless of what his family thought or felt.
From small and mundane things to big decisions, my father's first thought was always himself.