Daddy's Favourite: An Autobiographical Memoir Of Childhood Abuse

Healing

I'm healing now, getting better. It's a slow trek but one I am making all the same. It's hard to realize that you won't ever be normal, that what you went through as a child has destroyed what normal is. I struggled for a long time on my own to try and work through it. I was sent to counselling numerous times as a child but they never seemed to catch all of my problems as a whole.

So my path of healing was rough and had numerous setbacks. When you aren't confronting your trauma as a whole, you can't truly heal from it. So I had been left floundering, doing my best to push everything away because it was easier to shove it away and try to forget it when my father hung as an impossibly heavy yoke around my neck. I didn't want to try and heal what was broken because I believed I deserved it, that I couldn't have anything wrong because I was his favourite.

It took me a long time to start working through it, my molestation was the biggest one. I hid from it, refused to acknowledge it. I was terrified to try and heal from it. I wasn't allowed to have problems, I wasn't allowed to be harmed from my childhood because everyone had it so much worse than me. I had to start though, I had to try.

I don't really know how it began. I really don't but sitting with my eldest sister it slipped out. Perhaps I felt she was safe, perhaps it was something inside of me that couldn't keep it in anymore but I told. It came out, I said what I had held in for so long.

I started small, speaking about my molestation with my heart in my throat terrified that she would shut me down. But she didn't. She saw me. She saw me underneath the burden of my father, saw me underneath the stain he had made on me. She saw me. Lost, hopeless, and forlorn. She saw me and she held out her hand and told me it was okay.

For someone who had never felt they could be helped, that felt like they had to do it alone, having that hand reach out with eyes that could see me as I huddled in a corner without hope, it meant the world to me. I let her pull me out into the light. I stood with her as we talked about what happened, about what such trauma does to your psyche.

We have talked about the molestation numerous times and each time it gets easier for me to speak about it. I don't feel the shame of talking, I don't feel like I will be smack down for even attempting it. It took me a long time to feel alright and comfortable talking about it, it's strange to hear, I know. I speak so openly about everything I went through with you guys. I hold nothing back, I speak about it all as honestly as I can with you but with my family it's different.

I can't speak honestly with them because all I can see are those cracks of resentment that rest between me and them. All I can hear is my sister's words telling me that I don't know anything because he liked me. It's all I can hear and see when I even think about talking about it with them. It's hard to get passed that, especially when it comes to trying to heal from trauma. When it comes to trauma you need to talk about it to heal from it.

So while I felt like I was making progress with recovering from what happened after my mother divorced my father, I hadn't touched the time that I had spent with him. It was hard but once again my eldest sister was there. We had grown close and I finally decided to bring it up with her. I was terrified to talk to her about it and I slid into the discussion slowly, telling her I didn't feel comfortable talking about it with anyone in the family because I was his favourite.

I remember what she said. She was silent for a second and just like before, she looked through it all to see me. She looked at me hurting and unsure and she let out a small sigh before she spoke.

"Being the favourite isn't always a good thing."

Such a small sentence cut through it all. All of the sludge that coated me from my father, through all the fear and shame I felt because of that label. She validated how I felt. She validated how the label 'favourite' had been used to abuse me as a child and how it had continued afterwards.

Being the favourite isn't always a good thing.

These are the words that I hang above me as I seek to heal from what I have endured.

Being the favourite isn't always a good thing.

This is my mantra as I strive and push to become better.

Being the favourite isn't always a good thing.

These are the words that have been used as a platform in how I am moving forward in my healing. I want to get better and in that moment, my sister said something that she might have considered inconsequential but to me it made the world. It opened the path for me, it had allowed me to try and shove off the burden that had been placed on my shoulders from such a young age.

I am not there yet, I know I still have a ways to go, but I am getting better. The shame is still there, it still chokes me at times but I remember what my sister told me and I can feel shame lessening. It helps me remember that I didn't ask for the treatment I received as a child, I didn't ask to be his favourite. That title wasn't a gift, it was forced onto me as a way to control me just as he controlled my siblings.

Abuse isn't always just physical and abusers don't just smack their victims around. It comes out in so many different ways. It's all about control, so whether it is keeping their family so poor that they need to dig through the trash to find food, whether it is threatening the children with serious harm to control their mother, whether it is psychologically abusing your children in various ways that harms them for years to come.

Abuse is about control and abusers will do whatever they need to maintain that control over their victims.

As for me, I was daddy's favourite.

And just like with every other abuse. It wasn't a good thing.