An Innocent Question

When my wife and I started dating, I was 18 and she was 15. I had met her at church and formally asked her father if we could "court" after a few months of talking. Two years later, again after formally asking her father for her hand in marriage, we got engaged.

At this point, I was still living with my parents, working at the family company, and building a home with my uncle, who was a home builder. My wife also started working at the family company. My side of the family was fully saturated in and around our relationship.

This was at the beginning of 2016. At the time, my wife was 17 years old. Her tasks varied, but since most of the work environment was in non-conditioned spaces, working with rough men, most days she got to work on her own in an air-conditioned space assembling different kits of product.

My father had a ritual he would go through several times a day, where he would leave his office and walk through the building, stopping at each work area. This is when he would talk to me about many things. To survive with him as your father meant he would apply pressure to you to conform to his will, and he would frequently check that you were doing so.

When my wife was working on the kits, he would also go and talk with her. My father has been morbidly obese for a long time, and I always saw this as an excuse to sit down in a comfortable room for a while. He would sometimes spend an hour or more in there, helping assemble kits and making conversation.

There was one day when my wife (fiancée at that point) was on her lunch break and working on schoolwork on her laptop (because she was 17 and not yet graduated from high school). I was working in another room on the computer by myself. My father was not aware I was in the same space. I heard him get up from his office down the hall, walk into the break room, and slam his hand on the door. This was something he would often do to startle you and then laugh.

This time, I heard him ask her something right after.

"What are you doing, watching porn?" he said.

I froze for a moment, thinking surely he did not just ask her that. Then I heard her say something back, and I realized that yes, that had just happened.

I got up and walked in there. Her face was red in embarrassment, and my father had a big grin on his face.

"What did you just ask her?" I said.

"Huh?" he said. He liked to play dumb.

I repeated the question.

"Just now?" he asked. He made a gesture and mumbled off, as if I was not making sense.

"Did you just ask if she's looking at porn?" I said.

"I didn't say that," he said.

At this point, I was speechless.

"Yes, that's what you said," my fiancé confirmed.

"I was just around the corner. Why would you ask her that?" I said.

My father was not put in a corner like this often, but in more private settings, he would become very angry from this. But there were other people within earshot, and so he was forced to keep it cool.

"I don't even know what I said. I doubt that I would have said that. But even if I did, it wasn't supposed to be weird or anything. Just something you say when you surprise someone on the computer," he said.

I again stood there for a moment.

"You don't need to be asking my 17-year-old fiancée if she is watching porn," I said.

"Yeah, and I didn't," he responded.

"I know what I heard," I said.

At this point, he glared at me with some disgust on his face. Shook his head and walked away - the implied message being that I was in the wrong for assuming he would say something like that.

My fiance wrapped up her lunch, and we both walked out together. I mulled this over for the rest of the day and could not drop it.

Once the day was done, my fiancé and I both went back home with my parents. We would usually either spend the evening at my parents or at hers. On days when she came back to my parents' house, I would drop her off at her home by around 8 pm.

On our way out, my father was sitting in the living room. I was very bothered by his obvious lie to cover up what I thought was an inappropriate question to ask my fiancée.

"I think you owe her an apology," I told him.

He looked up from his phone at me, with a face that said Excuse me?

"For what?" he said. Playing dumb again.

"You know what for. And also for lying about it. She has also mentioned that you have been asking about her weight. I don't want you asking my fiancée, who is a minor, about whether she watches porn, or how much she weighs," I said.

At this point, my mother had walked in. She had overheard that and asked my father what I was talking about.

If I had recorded what unfolded during the next few minutes, it would be a master-class in how a narcissistic & domineering father can control the reality of his family.

He insisted he would not, did not, and would never ask her anything inappropriate, and certainly not ask her if she was watching porn. But maybe that did come out of his mouth, and if it did, it was nothing he meant. The fact that we took offense to something he didn't say, and didn't mean, even if he did say, was the actual problem.

This is the kind of thing he referred to as a "witch-hunt". He explained that what was happening here was that my fiancé and I, in our young and naive ways, are seeing problems where there are none. We assumed the worst of him, and that was because we had sin in our lives, clouding our judgment.

He asked if we were having sex. We were not, and I told him as much. He asked if we were doing anything else. He explained that just the fact that we heard him say "porn", which he didn't say, and didn't mean if he did say, was telling. The fact that we had such a strong reaction to it only confirmed it further for him.

The conversation ended with us apologizing to him, and him praying for us.

You Can't Do It All, Son

I thought that was the end of that for a long time. Years later, once my wife and I had worked through some things and she finally felt truly comfortable with me, she told me that my father actually continued having inappropriate conversations with her for the next ~8 months she worked there. Both before we were married, when she was 17, and after we were married, when she was 18.

At the time, considering how heavily suffocating my father was, and how I was usually angry, she felt like she couldn't do anything about it or say anything to me about it.

It started a few weeks after that initial incident. He was doing his ritual roundabouts and had settled to talk with her for a while. At some point, he brought it up again.

"So..." he said. "Were you actually watching porn? You looked a little embarrassed."

She froze, taken off guard by the question.

"I mean, it's normal, everyone's at least watched it," he said.

He would go on to drop hints about what kind of porn he liked to watch. Just enough to be somehow plausibly deniable if questioned about it, in the way he does.

She told me that in the subsequent months, he would continually bring up porn & sex, each time pushing things a bit further. He was asked first if we were sexually active together, and then he talked about his own stories from when he was young.

He would later assume we were sexually active, and ask her what kind of things we were doing. He would then talk about what he liked, and imply that I would probably like the same things.

Other topics of his conversation included how attractive my mother was, how my wife reminded him of her when she was young, what kind of lingerie he liked my mother to wear, how she was a "giver" and always made sure to take care of him.

In all these conversations, my wife would try to change the subject, get rolled over, and then just stay silent and hope he would leave while he rambled on.

It only stopped because another man had overheard one of the conversations at one point. We can call this man Tom. He worked in his own office, which adjoined the area where my wife worked, and all these conversations happened. Usually, there were doors closed between these spaces. However, sometimes they were propped open.

Tom was a man who had been with the family company since its inception. He was an old-timer type, cussed like a sailor, with a huge beard, and never wore deodorant. He was a wizard of a welder and knew more about metals, engineering, and machinery than anyone I've ever met. He may not look like it from the outside, but he was one of the wisest men I've met.

He was the type of person who was hard to win over. The classic grumpy old man to me, my brothers, and generally any other men younger than him. He was open about the fact that he thought women were just better people in general and deserved better treatment.

My father always talked highly of him and said he considered him his best friend. My father had known him since he was a child. He said that Tom also thought highly of him.

Tom was the one who overheard at least one of those conversations. My wife said at one point, he walked in the room to interrupt them and brought something up work-related, and it got my father to finally stop whatever he was saying and go tend to something else.

Tom would then always make sure that if my father walked in when she was working in the room, he was also there. Around that time, there was another product the family was rolling out that required it to be made in that same room, and it also required at least two people to run it. The natural choice for these people was my wife, Tom, and/or my father.

Eventually, it was just my wife and Tom working on that product regularly.

At one point, my father, my fiancé, and Tom were working together, and my father retold the story of how he triumphed over his in-laws during the argument over how Christmas was going to be handled. The story in which he boasts he had my grandfather admit defeat by leaving the room while my grandmother was on the ground crying. It was a signature tale of how he always wins.

After that, he left for something, and so it was just my fiancé and Tom.

"You know, I've known him for a long time," Tom began. "He's full of shit."

It was a shock to my fiancé to hear him say such a thing about my father. To everyone around, he was essentially untouchable. However, if there was anyone alive who knew him well enough to comment on his character, it was Tom.

He would go on to ask about me and if I talked about my own future. He said it was criminal what my father had done to his sons. The way he had raised us with such a tight grip. Unreasonably sheltered. In particular, around that time, he was putting an enormous amount of pressure on me to learn how to do everything there.

I had already written an e-commerce website for the company on my own time. I had learned the basics of plumbing and electrical work well enough to maintain a lot of the equipment I used. Now, I was being told that I needed to learn PLC ladder-logic code, chemistry, robotics, and how to weld, and that I needed to also learn all these on my own time. The two men who did these were already getting old, and these men were my great-uncle and Tom.

After enough pressure from my father, I asked Tom if he would teach me how to weld. He said no. I was unsure what to even say to that, because my father had made it seem extremely important, so much so that I should pressure Tom into it if that's what it took.

"You can't do it all, son," he told me.

Before I even knew what happened, my eyes welled with tears. There I was, a 21-year-old boy trying to do everything right by my father, and the only other father figure in my life was telling me a truth that I knew deep down, but couldn't bear the thought of.

"I'm old and don't have enough time to teach you anyway. But even if I did, I wouldn't," he said. "You should go out and find something else for you. This place will keep going."

With that, all I could do was nod my head, because I could not talk through the lump in my throat.

The Instagram Porn

I've always taken my time to process things before deciding what to do or think about them. I like to get at least one night's sleep to process. This was no different; I had a lot of things to consider, and I knew that if I were to actually make a move and dive into something like an actual career, my window of opportunity was already slim.

A few months went by. I got married, and things seemed alright.

One day, I was with a friend of mine, and we were watching a movie.

"Uhhh... doesn't your dad run the company's Instagram account?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

He turned his phone to me and showed me what he was looking at. It was a picture of a nude woman. Not just one, but actually a feed of many pornographic images and videos. In 2016, Instagram had an "activity" feed that showed the real-time activity of what the accounts you followed were doing. All the things that they liked & commented on, in real time.

That feed was full of pornographic content that was being liked by the company account. The content was filled with strange hashtags and posted by obscure accounts; the kind of thing that is posted by bots that might somehow make it through the initial content filters, but inevitably get taken down.

My first thought was that the account must have been hacked. Since I worked on the company website, I had the credentials and used them to integrate the account's latest posts onto our website. I expected the account to have been somehow compromised and the password to have been changed. However, I was able to log in just fine.

I went to the Instagram developer dashboard and saw the session history, expecting to see some strange logins. However, there were only two devices in the session history. My own, and my father's.

I was in denial at first about what this meant. I told my father that the account seemed to have been hacked somehow and needed its password changed. After doing so, I monitored the likes history, and sure enough, there continued to be more and more inappropriate content being liked and commented on.

The most troubling thing about this was the age of some of these women. Girls. Not exclusively. But at least half of the content that was being liked was of girls who must have been about 13 or 14. Some of it was questionable, and some of it was obvious and perverted.

I knew what this meant, but I was not yet fully processing it. I showed my wife what I'd discovered, unable to hide the trembling. We were both unsure what to do or what this meant.

I was still hoping that somehow this was not my father's doing. So, I kept it to myself for a while. I decided that if I was going to say anything, I would need to be sure. Over time, I clearly correlated his time spent on his phone with the ever-growing history of bullshit.

During this time, I was becoming disillusioned with a lot of things about him and about the life he had crafted for me. I snooped further into the account and saw that he was also sending suggestive DMs to other accounts, in the name of "marketing". He was reaching out to young, attractive women who had even one post related to the outdoors, and promising free product in exchange for pictures to post on the company account. He would take screenshots of their most revealing bikini pictures and send them requests for more pictures "like this".

When they would send him some, he would act like a 40-something divorced dad who looked at his daughter's friends with shark eyes.

"Yes please 👅" "🤩🤩🤩 beautiful" "You know what you're making me think right? 😂"

Stuff like that.

At that point, I had seen more than enough to confirm my suspicions. He was looking at not just porn, but specifically? Not only that, but he was being stupid enough to like that shit on the company account where it was publicly visible. If I had done any of that, it would be the end of the world.

It was almost Christmas at that point, and I still had not said anything, now worried about the fallout of confronting him and opting to wait until after the holidays.

It all wound up coming to a head in January of 2017 during a business trip with my father, my older brother, and me.

Raleigh, North Carolina

The confrontation

We had a booth at a trade show that one of our main distributors was hosting. It was an 18.5-hour drive from Oklahoma to Raleigh, NC.

We started the drive late at night on a Wednesday and drove straight through, arriving at the business convention center Thursday evening to set up. We were dog tired by the end of the setup, but thankfully, this place was also a hotel, where we had a room.

The next day was a full day of us manning the booth. It's the type of work I hate doing: selling. It was not enough for us to sit behind our table and engage with willing passersby; my father expected me and my brother to be standing somewhat in the aisle and solicit everyone walking past. The attendees were customers who ordered products from this distributor, and our job was to generate interest and get more customers to stock our product.

I'm terrible at salesmanship, or at least the style that was expected of me. If I believe in the product, I can summon some genuine enthusiasm about it and have a natural conversation. However, I did not believe in the product - I knew exactly how it was made and how completely terrible it actually was. The fact that we were even in business selling our crap was surprising to me.

Nevertheless, I tried, and it seemed somewhat successful. By the end of the day, I was socially & mentally exhausted, and the thought of having to do it all over again the next day, and then again for another half a day, followed by breaking down our booth and then driving straight back was enough for both me and my brother to want to get as much sleep as possible once we were finally back to our room.

My father, on the other hand, wanted us to stay up and drink with him. By the time we were walking to bed, he already had a bottle of whiskey out and was sipping a glass, and had one for each of us.

After some coaxing, we agreed to stay up for just a bit and have one drink. We sipped and had some conversation. It was mostly my father giving us shit about not wanting to stay up and drink more.

"Man, I didn't realize I raised a bunch of pussies," my father laughed.

A few minutes of that was enough for my brother to down the rest of his glass.

"I'm going to run this off," he said. He always likes to run on a treadmill after eating or drinking.

"Whatever," my father said, shaking his head.

I downed the rest of mine and got another one, continuing to sip it while sitting in my bed.

My father pulled out his phone and started scrolling. I had done enough recon work to know that literally every time he was scrolling on his phone, he was looking at the same perverted bullshit. I logged onto the same Instagram account and watched as the like history continued to grow in real time.

I was already slightly tipsy from the whiskey. All the emotions I had buried for so long were suddenly brimming inside me.

I heard my father sigh disappointingly.

"What?" I asked.

"I just thought this would be different," he said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

He sighed again.

"I just thought you guys might give a shit," he said.

I could tell he was feeling the whiskey as well.

"Well, we're drinking with you. I do give a shit, I just know we're both exhausted from the day," I said.

He signed again and shook his head.

"Whatever, you don't get it," he said.

He continued scrolling through his phone.

"Well," I said. "At least I'm not looking at porn right now."

I let what I said hang in the air. I realized I probably wouldn't have said that had I been sober. But I also felt relieved to finally have it out there. I then realized the timing of this statement was particularly damaging. I honestly did not know what this meant.

His thumb stopped moving, but he didn't look up immediately. After a moment that felt like several minutes, he looked up at me. It was a look I had not seen in a long time, and it instantly brought me back to when I was a child. The look that meant I was about to get holy hell for something he had found out I had done.

He paused there, looking at me.

"You'd better think real hard about what comes out of your mouth next," he said.

"At least I'm not looking at porn right now, on the company account," I said, speaking slightly slower and fully enunciating the words.

The moment the last word left my lips, he shot up from his seat. He walked over to the side of my bed and raised his fist. As a child, this would have had me cower. As an adult, though, I found it more silly than anything. I expected something more mature than this as a reaction.

Instead of flinching, I didn't move at all and instead raised my eyes to his fist and smirked.

It was at this moment that my brother walked back into the room. The timing could not have been more perfectly timed, and I was glad to have an eyewitness in case this got physical.

"What, you're going to hit me?" I asked.

My father just stood there, face tomato red, more enraged than I'd ever seen him.

"What's going on?" my brother asked.

"He's accusing me of being a pedophile and trying to keep your kids away from me," my father answered.

This was a significant statement, and in hindsight, I think it is even more significant than I did in the moment. I had not commented on the age of the girls he was looking at, nor had I shown him what I had seen. And yet, the very first thing he said was that I was accusing him of being a pedophile.

"What's he talking about?" my brother asked me.

My father lowered his fist and walked back to his drink. He slammed the rest of his glass and poured himself another one.

"He's lost his fucking mind," my father said.

"He's been looking at porn on the company account. Liking and commenting on stuff, which is publicly visible, and has been happening for months." I said.

My father looked down at the ground, shaking his head.

"I want to see what you're talking about," my brother said.

He walked over, and I showed him the account history. After a minute, my brother had seen enough, and we all sat there in silence.

"Why did you bring this up just now?" my brother asked.

"He kept complaining about us after you left. I've had enough of his bullshit." I said.

Again, silence. It was probably less than a minute, but it felt like an eternity. No one wanted to be the first to say anything. The tension was immense, and the air felt brittle.

"I don't know what you think you saw," my father finally said. "But we're here as a family. I already forgive you. Let's just pray and get some sleep."

He prayed, asking God to give me clarity and help us get our heads on straight so we could finish out the rest of the trip.

We went to bed in silence after that. The rest of the trip was the weirdest and most ridiculous time I've ever had.

The Next Day

We woke up the next day, got ready, and made it all the way to the booth in silence. It felt like my father was actually uncomfortable for the first time in his life, and truthfully, I was enjoying the whole situation. I had a morbid curiosity to see how he would handle it. There was no way we could just pretend nothing had happened, and I had never seen him take responsibility for anything before, let alone be genuinely apologetic.

It was midday before any of us spoke to each other. My father paced behind our booth table.

"We need to reset the mood," he kept saying, swinging his arms open and closed like he was doing a pre-workout stretch.

From there, he tried to spearhead acting "normal". He started talking to me and my brother in front of passersby and looping us into a group conversation together.

"These here are my boys," he said. "They get their hands dirty every day making this stuff."

He would gesture us over and slap my back when I arrived.

By the end of that day, he seemed to be practically skipping. There was an almost performative positivism about him.

"What do you guys want for dinner?" he asked. "Anything you want, my treat."

My brother had acted like he'd seen a ghost ever since the night before, and didn't answer. I said I didn't care. He decided we'd get pizza - but not carryout. We would try a local dine-in pizza place.

We arrived at a place he spotted and found our seats. I couldn't get a handle on his demeanor, but there was something uneasy about it.

He was looking at the pizza menu and squinting. Then he mouthed Ah! as if an idea just popped into his head, and reached into his pocket to pull out a pair of glasses. This was not unusual for him - he had LASIK years prior, but still needed glasses to read small text sometimes. The strange thing about this, though, was that from this moment on, he continued wearing them for the rest of the trip.

We ordered our food and sat there waiting. My brother looked down at the table, avoiding eye contact or any other form of potential engagement. My father was looking around rather whimsically.

"You know," he said. "Sometimes kids will do some things they shouldn't, and get into situations they don't know how to deal with. It's a good thing God gives them parents to tell them what to do, isn't it?"

The question was directed at me. I looked at him and pursed my lips, but didn't say anything.

"Don't you agree?" he asked, this time directing the question to my brother.

"Yes," he said, without looking up.

"See, your brother agrees. I think you agree too, you're just not seeing things clearly right now. It's OK - like I said, I already forgive you. That's something you can't understand yet, because I'm your father. I've already forgiven you for everything you have ever and will ever do to me."

Again, I didn't think this needed a response, so I said nothing.

My father did his raised-eyebrow-nod at my lack of response and continued.

"I'm used to not being liked. All of you kids have been on a witch hunt for me for years, and I have no idea why," he said with a slight chuckle.

"I've only ever loved you with everything I had in me. So I'm not surprised you're still doing that. You just got married - I get it. You think I'm too strict, and you and your wife are talking to each other every day about how terrible I am."

He took a drink of water before continuing.

"But I have to tell you, you've gone too far. I don't know what you think you saw or what you think I've done, but clearly you got yourself all worked up about it. So much that you're seeing things that aren't even there. Now, I'm a tolerant man - like I said, I already forgave you for this a long time ago. I have no ill will. But I'm concerned for you, man. You need to take a good look at yourself, because you've got some serious sin in your life that's affecting your mind."

There it is, I thought. That's the angle he's going to take this.

"For years you've had a problem with me," he continued. "And you've also been drawn to dark things. I remember when you were 15 and sobbing because I took away your death metal. Death metal - right in the name! It had such a hold on you that it depressed you. And then you came back and said you could edit out the vocals and wanted to just listen to the music - and I allowed it. But do you think I'm stupid? That I actually thought you were just listening to those weird edits you did? Of course not, but I wasn't going to burst your bubble."

He was referring to the time when I discovered technical death metal. I loved the music, but a lot of the lyrics were about things I knew my father would not allow. I had managed to find several Christian bands that had good lyrical content, and was listening to them. However, when my father found out about it, he took away my iPod and banned me from listening to anything like that.

The part where he had me to tears was when, after taking my iPod away, he denounced the aspirations I had talked about for years about how exciting it would be to start a band. To make music, to do concerts, to tour - what if that was my calling? My ministry?

"You like this music because it comes from Satan, the angel of music. It's alluring because it's demonic. You're lethargic and mopey. All you do is sulk around my house. You will never be in a band. 'Oh, I want to be in a band and have a ministry' you say - that's retarded. That's a fantasy. That will never happen. Babies live in la-la-land. You need to grow up."

That went on for a while, and the rest isn't worth noting here.

My father brought this up like it was some trump card. I had remixed the music together to remove sound waves present in both channels, a legitimate way to remove vocals. It also severely flattened the remaining audio, but it was still enough for me to enjoy. I really did adhere to his commands back then and only listen to those vocal-less versions, but I didn't bother to correct him here.

"Maybe it's that," he continued. "Or maybe it's something else. Maybe I didn't spank you enough. Maybe you have some other secret sin in your life. I don't know. But you tried to ambush me last night, accusing me of things that have no basis in truth or reality."

"Is that right?" I asked.

"Chshh - yeah," he said, his throat bellowing it out.

When I was again silent, he shook his head.

"I'm concerned for you, that's all. I'll be praying for you."

And with that, he decided the conversation was done for now and started asking my brother about how his wife and kids were doing that day. My brother took a moment to shake out of wherever his mind had been, but seemed to be relieved for an opportunity to act normal.

The rest of the night was uncomfortably normal in that way. I was not willing to go along with any of it, so I stayed quiet. My father made more quips along the lines of me being stuck in some rebellious funk that had caused a kind of delusional state.

The Final Trade-show Day

It's remarkable how well my brothers and I can keep a socially self-isolating posture in the midst of a social gathering. It was something we naturally picked up at an early age. My family had always brought a sense of impending pressure to anyone in a lower class within the family hierarchy. Where I, my brother, and my father had oriented ourselves post-confrontation was no different.

It was thankfully just a half-day, ending at noon. We each individually solicited patrons; my father talked up how authentic we were as a family and how dedicated we all were to the company.

I was just focused on the fact that I would soon be back home, with my wife, and away from this horror of a mess I'd found myself in.

By that afternoon, we were finally in the truck, driving back. Thankfully, I was tucked away in the back seat. Playing Super Mario Odyssey and listening to some music.

I saw my father looking at me in the rear-view mirror, saying something I couldn't hear.

I paused my music.

"Can you hear me?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"I could hear your death music," he said. "I think that's the reason you're so wound up."

"No," I said.

A moment passed, and he nodded his head ironically. He still had his old glasses on.

"Hey, you want a so-dee-pop?" he asked.

The way he said that struck a nerve in me. With him saying that - so-dee-pop - looking at me in his old glasses, I realized why. He had LASIK eye surgery when I was about 10 years old, and since that time, he has only seldom worn reading glasses for something with small print. I hadn't seen him wear glasses like this - all day doing normal things - since I was a child. Combined with the particular cadence he said so-dee-pop with, I realized he must be trying to tap into the primal conditioning he had driven in so deep into us as children.

If this sounds like a stretch, it is a good time to revisit some things. He had bookshelves full of self-help books. How to get people to like you, How to get people to do what you want, etc. - those alone, back in the 90's, could be wild enough with some of their psychological assumptions. However, he also had some other interesting books on brainwashing and CIA interrogation tactics.

My father raised us with intense mental conditioning. We were taught that he knew what we were thinking, that God told him everything we did, and that God told him all our secrets. There was no thought we could ever have that was original, because he was inside us. His blood coursed through our veins, his DNA had built our brains.

God had shown him our future. There was nothing we would ever hear from God that would be different than what he said. If it was different, it was from something demonic, or even Satan himself. Anything outside of complete adherence to his doctrine and will was sinful. We had sin and rebellion inherent in our hearts, and it was his job to spank it out of us.

So maybe I was reading too much into his behavior. Or maybe not. Based on my experience, he thinks he is a lot smarter than he is, and I have seen him do plenty of other behavior-based conditioning on other occasions. Sitting in that back seat, my gut screamed to me that this man was trying to work something twisted.

The rest of the trip was a blur. Both my brother and I wanted to just drive through the night, but my father insisted we stop at a hotel, and so we did.

Eventually, I was finally home. Too bad it was mid-day Sunday, and I had to go to work the next day.

Monday

I was not really sure what to think about the whole trip. I like to really process things. I was certainly not going to be engaging in any small talk with my father; that was for sure.

A few hours into Monday, I saw my father walking up to me, clearly having more to say. The man never got tired of his own voice.

"I looked through the like history you saw," he started. "And there were a few things on there that I could see why they would upset you. As you know, I've been trying to grow our social media accounts like you suggested. The way I do that is to go to the 'explore' page and just start liking everything - I scroll so fast that I don't even see what I'm liking. I just scroll-like-scroll-like, too fast to even register what's on the screen."

"That's not possible to do," I said.

"Well, that's what happened," he said with a glare. "I went back and un-liked anything that wasn't family-friendly. Then I showed your mom the like history and told her that was what you reacted to. I told her how, the whole time, there was a dark hatred in your eyes at me. That you just blasted death music the whole time and convinced yourself into believing a self-made lie."

He had a devilish smirk, and I was shocked he was being so brazen.

"So you went back and removed all the porn, and then showed mom?" I asked.

"Mm-hm," he grunted.

"So you went back, cleaned up the evidence, and then lied to my mother about me and the whole thing," I said.

"Nope, I told her the truth. You think something happened that didn't."

A rage was brewing in my chest at that.

I turned away and got back to work. He tried gesturing at me, but I ignored him until he walked away.

I had truly not expected that kind of deceptive scheme to be bragged about so brazenly by him. I felt the last bit of whatever trust I had completely dissolve. I was working for my father, who was openly throwing me under the bus. Suddenly, I realized how stuck I felt working at the family company. I realized this was not the first time he had done this. The whole thing was a sham from the start. I had engineering ability and showed interest in all things mechanical & tech from an early age, and yet was rebuked any time I considered anything like college. Instead, I was forced into a position that had me on my feet, 10 hours a day, with bum knees.

Giving my father absolute trust had resulted in him slandering me to my own mother and keeping me tied to the worst job in the company.

It was enough that I had a breakdown right there in my workstation. I curled up in a fetal position and tears welled in my eyes.

I decided this was the time to pivot. I prayed to God.

I have had my father as an idol. I reject the role of father and mother from my biological parents, and instead ask You to fill it. Forgive me & guide me, please. I need a different life.

I felt a weight drop from my shoulders. It felt right.

My father looped back around a few times to try some more nonsense.

"Don't you think listening to death metal is an open door for the devil?" he asked.

"What about porn and lying?" I asked in return.

That day was the beginning of the end for me there with the family. A few months later, I decided that would be the last season for me, and I got an IT help-desk job that November.

Hindsight is 20/20

This will be the third Christmas I've spent without my family. Even still, there are newfound realizations I am still coming to about it all.

There are a lot of things that happened growing up that I put in a box. I put the box in a dark corner and let myself forget about it. Of course, you can't really forget about that kind of box, but you can get really good at pretending you forgot about it.

Naked public swimming

One of my earliest memories is one of those box things. It was a time when we were all in a hotel's indoor swimming pool area. My older brother and I were stationed by the entrance door, and my little brother was just a toddler running around.

We were on the lookout for any other people headed to the pool. Why? Because my mother was swimming in the pool without any clothes on.

It was a "game" my parents would play when we were at a hotel with a pool. We would all go swimming, and if at some point it was just us in the pool area, we got out so my mom could take her swimsuit off and hand it to my dad while we stood on the lookout for other people.

We stood around, peeking around the corners of the door. Sometimes there would be more than one door to watch, or sometimes one of us would have to be down the hall and quickly run back to let them know someone was coming, so my mother could put her swimsuit back on.

Sometimes, my father didn't feel like giving her swimsuit back, too. There were times when my mother was not allowed to have it back until 5-10 minutes after some other people had also gotten in the pool, and she just had to stay in a corner and make sure they didn't realize she was naked. Then my father would discreetly hand it back to her at some point.

This would happen fairly regularly throughout growing up.

Naked private swimming

We got our own above-ground pool when I was 12. It was fun at first, until the novelty wore off and we stopped wanting to swim for hours every day.

It quickly turned into a whole thing after that. My father would come home, and we would then have to spend at least one hour, usually two, in the pool with him. Bad attitudes were not tolerated.

We would go in to eat dinner, and then usually come back out afterwards again, this time with my mother joining.

It was common for my father to then take my mother's top off, and then the rest of her suit after a few minutes. We were not allowed to get out of the pool or have anything he deemed as a bad attitude. Our only option was to stay in the pool and act normal. Half the time, he wanted her to lie on a floating mat and just sunbathe naked, and the other half of the time, he had her swim around the entire pool, including coming close to us.

Other various box items

Other things strike me as odd now in hindsight. We went to our bedrooms around 8 PM, at which point my mother would also undress to her undergarments (or less). Perhaps this would not be completely abnormal or inappropriate if it were not also for the fact that we were not allowed to have our bedroom doors closed either. Even positioning the door halfway between fully open and closed was initially seen as "rebellious". By the time I was 18, I was allowed to have the door mostly closed. Fully latched closed was still not allowed, but leaving a few inches gap in the door was finally acceptable.

We would often watch movies as a family in the living room. My mother would lie on the couch against my father, and he would slip his hand through the top of her shirt to fondle her chest openly. Midway through the movie, he would move his hand under her pants. I remember that his hand would keep moving, and my mother would often make some noises.

Saturday mornings, there was a whole routine. We knew better than to come out of our rooms before they did, because they would have sex loudly & with their bedroom door open. So we stayed in our rooms and had the TV on. However, we had to time it so that we would be out of our bedrooms before they actually moved into the living room, because if my father thought we were sleeping in, he would get angry and the rest of the day would be ruined. He wanted us awake & in the living room when he left his bedroom. Once he walked into the living room, we spent the next 20-30 minutes sitting in silence as he drank his coffee and had a thousand-yard stare.

Some other things are less clear in my memory, both in detail and in my understanding of why it happened like that at all. For example, I had gotten caught looking at stuff online as a teenager. At the time, all my money was kept in cash in my father's closet, and I had to get his permission before using any of it. I recall one time when I was busted looking at adult content, I was worried about what the punishment would be. Instead, he allowed me to buy a 7x7 puzzle cube I had been wanting.

Final thoughts

I cannot know the reasons why my parents, particularly my father, did the things they did. It seems that my mother was likely swept up into it all when she met my father as a teenager, and then went on to support & perpetuate things that should not have happened as they were raising us.

For a long time, they stayed there in the box, untouched and buried. I think in the back of my mind, I was hoping that getting married and moving into my own home would mean the permanent stowing away of it all, but to my horror, my father was actually forcing it all back up to the surface.