as small as a world and as large as alone

6:45am December 8, 2014

“Daddy’s Hands” by Holly Dunn, with lyrics in the video.

Content warning for occasional allusions to spanking children, especially in the chorus, and for discussion of intergenerational child abuse in my family.

I’ve always loved this song ever since it started coming on the radio. By the time we were making 3 hour trips between my parents home and my residential facility (when I got to be “out on pass”) we had it on tape, and I’d always reach out and grab his hand, and he’d get a little misty-eyed (i want looking at his eyes, but other body parts gave him away).

I’m actually glad the way the song portrays spanking and the like because… when I got old enough to tell people some off the violence in our household (much older than most kids would be, due to communication delays and frequent regressions in small specific parts of communication that each alone weren’t much but remove one and the whole Jenga tower shakes or topples), he started going to anger management therapy.

He learned there about the cycle of intergenerational violence. His dad used to pick the biggest board in the barn to hit him with. His grandfather devised a psychological torture device where the paddle didn’t hurt that much, but the mechanism that created this huge banging noise scared the bejesus out of the kids. And I’m sure his father before him, and the one before that, had their own methods. My dad’s were tame in comparison, but because I was autistic, being grabbed, held down, and screamed at in my face… only provoked a screaming meltdown. Which meant he’d go into a meltdown.

To understand how this feit you have to understand that for many autistic people, being restrained and loud noises screamed in your face is worse than being hit in terms of trauma level. So this was a recipe for disaster.

Then a chain reaction meltdown would ensue until finally all I remember is screaming until the world turned white. I don’t think I want to know what happened next. I can never remember, and unlike some psychoanalytic thinking that’s very popular, I don’t think you have to remember in order to get over things like that. Nor do I think forcing recall is always wise. It’s more likely to result in distortions of memory. If something needs remembering for emotional raid, it’s best to put a mental flag over that time period, so you can be ready when and if your brain decides to give you ghost memory back. But you can’t even count on a memory being there: That level of overload can probably prevent memories from even forming in the first place. Which is why distortions or unintentional fabrications may jump in. I’ve seen it harm to others, and myself, especially in settings where every nightmare must be a recovered memory.

Anyway, I’m not writing this to bismuth my dad, although I’m well aware that simply by not being able to erase my memories on command, I frequently run afoul of the “never speak ill of the dead” taboo in American culture. I actually find it far more disrespectful to follow that taboo than to break it. Because it erases from all future generations the ability to get to know one’s ancestors for who they are, not the idealized saint version. I remember the Gregg time someone I knee died and hi had to read the eulogies off her website. It was like,”Who is this person and what had they done to the real lesson I knew?”

But to get back fyi anger management. He learned about the cycle of abuse and decided “This ends with me.” And then, since he knew my anger problems were in many ways worse then his, he proceeded to teach me everything he knew. Along with help from other friends with anger problems, I haven’t hit, scratched, or bit anyone in years. And I rarely self injure anymore.

And all because when he learned about the cycle of violence, he said “This ends with me.”

Which I am incredibly proud of him for doing. It takes strength to admit you’ve done wrong, to face up to it, to learn how to stop, and to pass that knowledge along to those you’ve harmed, so that they can stop too. I’m more proud of him for this than for almost anything else he’s ever done. So don’t take this as badmouthing him. This is one of the most impressive things he’s ever done, in my lifetime at least.

Anyway, I love my father, and I love that this song involves coming to teems with the fact that “Daddy’s hands weren’t always gentle but I’ve come to understand, there was always love in daddy’s hands.” This isn’t true in all families where things like this happen (so please don’t flood my ask box with messages about how I’m trying to force people to forgive people who harmed them, because I’m not — this is my experience and mine alone. And there’s a lot more to the song than the allusions to getting hit.)

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