Recovery

	feb 98 This is section is very much a work-in-progress, to which I will add pieces as the malign energy which I've had on evrything surrounding the events dies down...

The last time I spoke to my father was in September 1989.

To be more accurate: I yelled down the telephone receiver, redialed and carried on yelling every time he hung up, and carried on yelling when he switched on the answerphone.

Twenty years of anger poured out.

What caused me to finally yell? I'd been trying for three days to ring him, and every time I'd got through to him, he'd been drunk. Well, it was August Bank Holiday when I first called: anyone's allowed a few beers on a Bank Holiday? I'd just come out of hospital after a hysterectomy: I just wanted to tell him that the biopsy showed I was OK. I hadn't let him know before the op: after all, my mother had died of cancer, and I thought he might have worried.

But every time he answered, he was too drunk to take in what I was saying.

So finally I yelled: and the anger took over.

I stopped making excuses, not only for his drinking, but for everything else.

I didn't realise it then, but that was a turning point for me.

What I've achieved since has been for myself: every success before that date was basically an attempt to get some form of validation to wipe out the memories of what he'd done to me as a teenager.

back