Trauma in 2020

Broken

It is currently Monday June 1st 2020 at 11:58pm 

I am crying silently in my room because I didn't say hello to my dad for the first time in months even though he abandoned me. Yet I lay here crying because the smallest fraction of what's left of him is sitting outside my room, occupying every inch of the basement. Yet I lay here crying. But why?

But why do I feel as though it is my duty, my responsibility to hold up the overweight man who can't even breathe during the few hours he's at home to sleep, who has the sheer audacity to call himself my father? 

The odd night he is home, I hear him sifting through the same movie options outside of my room as the night before, like clockwork. I sift through the same movie options as the night before. We have that in common. Except his sifting is to drown out the noise of that reality of being a father  while my sifting? My sifting is drowning out the thoughts as to why he's so occupied with being distracted in the first place. 

Is it me? Is it the world causing this sifting? 

Is this what I'm supposed to be? 

Isolated in my room, bombarded by pieces of my broken father. How do I deserve love when the very soul, the very individual, who has promised to give me everything, has only provided me with a dimple and toes that look like his? Am I worth anything more than genetics? 

I purposefully left out the car that was gifted to me on my 16th birthday because run the risk of becoming a privileged daughter who cannot see the worth in the money. I would give any amount, absolutely anything to get my dad back. 

I am 18 years old stuck under a roof with the obnoxiously loud ghost of a father and a mother who has been a single mother for my whole life, who is now also forced to live with an uncommunicative man in her basement. She has provided me with the love of two parents, despite my dad's ominous presence lurking in every crack of the house. 

How did we get here? 

My Indigenous father was abandoned by his mother at the age of 12 years old. His mother tore away everything he had, including his bike and his trophies he won in hockey that year. She vacuumed up every last cent and took it away with her when she disappeared from his life. 

She was forced into a Residential School. 

It is not as simple as kicking him out or divorcing him out of our lives, he has no other family to run to. His past is filled to the brim with abandonment. 

Despite him knowing what it feels like to be abandoned my his own flesh and blood, he has abandoned myself, my siblings, and my mom. 

So when I look in the mirror, I see that dimple and I see that ghost my father has left behind, holding a loose noose around my neck, ready to strangle at any single second. 

You see, I am traumatized. I have been left with trauma so severe it has developed into ADHD-like tendencies that cannot be remedied with ADHD medication. I have been left with depression, anxiety, and a dash of OCD that causes me to pick at my skin until my face is deformed as if I'm trying to rip out the parts of me that I wish were never there. 

I have seen, I have felt, and I live through trauma everyday. Trauma that has been passed down through generations as if it were a fucking heirloom. 

Just know that your actions have consequences. Be the change you wish to see in the world. 

I beg of you, do not let intergenerational trauma continue.