Boy's Face by Mateusz Stachowski of Poland courtesy stockXchng

I can handle sticks and stones.
But those words still break my bones.

Dr. Raines (my psychiatrist) and I have begun to talk about my stepfather. Yes folks, I didn’t just get one abusive father, I got two! I won the bad dad lottery! Ahem.

My stepfather (man, I got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do here) was basically a very smart, cowardly drunk. It is the special, sick joy of the bright failure to rain doom on the young bright potential I think. Sexual abuse damages the nerves by twisting them out of true; verbal abuse damages the mind by planting weeds in the psyche that won’t die, won’t be stamped out, and won’t be silent. The sins of the father are visited on the . . . well you know the rest.

And so my stepfather’s sins, perhaps, in his mind, not living up to the brightness of his brother, an artist who died young; perhaps not living up to the expectations of his own father; perhaps seeing in me the young daughter of his who ran far away and descended into drugs and an unknown underworld – the reasons are quite unknown to me – spewed forth onto me, warning of a darkness looming that would cover all of my brightness. And I was a very bright little girl. I learned to read, so the story goes, when I was just eighteen months old. In first grade I won a state prize for finishing more Scholastic readers than any student in history – the entire collection, in fact. I painted a picture that won a county prize and was displayed in an art museum, sang a song in front of the entire school, and rewrote a portion of the yearly school musical. In second grade I was first sent to third grade math and science before being bumped up to the middle of the third grade, and then eventually the middle of the fourth grade, all in one year. By the next year – fifth grade – I was tested at reading at a collegiate level even though I could not always pronounce the words I understood. I was eight.

And here was the violence he spewed:

• You’re not that smart.
• There are others who are smarter than you.
• When you’re older, you will be exposed for the fraud you are.
• Your smarts won’t get you far in life.
• The world won’t change no matter how smart you are.
• No one cares how smart you are.
• There is nothing you can do to change the world.
• When you get to college, people will see what a fraud you are.
• When you get out of here, people will see that you are really stupid, not smart at all.

For years I prayed for instant karma to come take the words out of my stepfather’s mouth. But karma took another five years to snap back.