Daddy's Favourite: An Autobiographical Memoir Of Childhood Abuse

Resentment

He took a lot of things from me, my dreams of children was the end of it but there is no end without a beginning.

He was excellent at physiological abuse, division among the ranks. My two elder sisters were seemingly a lost cause to him but he still manipulated them, verbally and emotionally abused them. He still needed to control them how he could but he spent a lot of time on us youngest three, me and my brother and elder sister. He was an expert at what he did. Manipulation and sowing the seeds of discord and resentment.

He isolated my elder sister, refused to let her play, showed preference to my brother and I. He made her an other, made her understand she was other, made her realize that she wasn't as good as my brother and I. He rubbed her face into it, made her think she didn't deserve to play, to have fun when he was around.

He verbally abused and berated my brother. He wanted to make the 'sissy' a man. He did it so well that at the age of three my little brother told our mum that he was useless and he should kill himself. Our father destroyed his self-esteem and confidence before he even knew what it was but to our father it was what a mama's boy deserved. I won't lie, my brother got the worst of it. He did and I doubt anyone of us would argue that. Our father was horrendous to him because he was painfully shy and hung off my mum due to it.

As my mum once told me, in his want to make my brother a man, he nearly killed him. Took him out fishing with my eldest sister and when my brother wouldn't stop crying for mum he threw my three year old brother overboard.

Without a life jacket.

Our father did nothing, went back to fishing as he left my brother to sink. My sister yanked him back into the boat, soaking and too terrified to cry, before she demanded they go home. When she asked him why, he told her he needed to learn to shut up and be quiet and now he was so it was a lesson well learned.

It makes me sick to think of, to hear what he did to my brother in his want to make him what he believed to be a man. He wanted to make him just like him and when my brother resisted, he berated him continuously.

It wasn't that hard for our father to divide them against me after that. With my sister isolated and my brother verbally abused. All he needed to do was show me the tiniest bit of attention and the seeds he had placed would grow and they did.

I'm twenty-six years old and it took a long time for me and my brother to come to terms, to have a functional relationship that didn't simmer with resentment. As for me and my sister, I don't know. In the resentment she became my bully, I was tormented at school and when I came home she tormented me at home. It was relentless. I had no one to turn to, no one to talk to. It got to the point where even my counsellor I saw growing up told me that I would never have the close sisterly relationship with her that I had craved. She told me I could only hope for civility.

We have that now but I understand we are simply too different to try to be friends, to try to have that bond that I had so wanted when I was younger. This is not the fault of either one of us. Life has simply made it known that while our paths run parallel they will never truly touch, never truly twine together. We can watch each other but we can never truly be close, not now, not after everything that has happened, not after all the words that were said as we grew up.

Some bonds can't be fixed and they can never be forced. It is a sad song to bear witness to but it is there.

It just shows you how deep the cracks go, how large the divide can become when someone uses the mind given to them for the purpose of dividing and conquering.

Even as a child I knew my father didn't truly care about me, wasn't proud of me, because when no one was looking he would do as abusers did. He never needed to be sincere, he just needed people to believe he was and the resentment would do the rest for him.

Just as he belittled my brother and forced my sister to the outside as other, the resentment he planted allowed them to do the same to me. I was othered in my own family by the resentment he caused in my siblings. Those cracks were deep and there are some days where they are all I see. We try to hold it together but the resentment is always there, always lingering around us no matter how hard we try to pretend it isn't.

Each of us hold a shadowy beast of his making and mine whispers to me that nothing I say matters because I was the favourite and that is all I will ever be. Nothing I do in the family is good enough because I will never be anything but his favourite.

It never matters that when the eyes would turn away hits would fall upon my skin, that the abuse would begin. When no one is there to see it, when no one can see what he did, it is my word against what they did see.

I was daddy's favourite.

There was a time I wanted to kill myself for it to stop.