Soul Mosaic

The short version…

One of the first things I understood about life on his schedule was to know and follow “his rules.” No debating them. Also, his “view” on things was the right view.

Indoctrination by confusion

It was very clear, right from the beginning — my life was meant to be hidden. And that indoctrination started at a very early age.

I remember this particular time in that scary cellar. I was very young, but still, I felt so guilty…and bad about what Dad was doing with me. And I was so torn up inside about what it would do to my mother if she found out.

But the worst part was that I was caught between them. I did NOT want to hurt MOMMY. But I didn’t want to hurt him, and was afraid he would be upset. So even though I was nervous, and I hated the cellar, I went down there to talk to him.

Using all my brainpower, I worked to find the right words THIS time that would finally make him understand.

“I don’t want to do this anymore.” I expected anger.

Instead, he surprised me.

“Why? I love you.”

“Because I don’t like it. I…feel bad.”

“You shouldn’t. It’s not wrong. It’s love!”

“But Mom! It’ll hurt her feelings! I don’t like this.”

At this point, probably because I was so young, he chose the velvet glove approach. He was the kind, nurturing, reassuring Dad.

“No, we won’t tell her. But it’s not because it’s wrong.”

My heart sank.

“This is love, and it’s special. It’s just that no one else will understand.”

He just kept reassuring me to trust him and believe what he said and not to worry. After all, I was that sensitive kid who worried too much all the time. And he, being the “wise” and knowledgeable Dad, understood I was upset, but also knew so much more about these things and that it was okay.

Just like so many times before and after that day, I walked away, feeling like I somehow just “lost.”

Given his persuasiveness, I’d always give in and trust him, yet again figuring I was just worrying about nothing. I never quite felt right about it. And the more times we went around this conversation, the more confused I got.

But one of the first house rules I learned was that if Dad was certain about something, I was supposed to believe him. And even if I didn’t, his constant messages chipped away at my perceptions of reality until I doubted everything I thought was right or wrong.

The messages were constant, varied, and at least in the early years, delivered gently. But they always reinforced his thoughts, and negated mine:

• I love you.
• This is love.
• This is special!
• This is okay. It is love.
• This is special. Just keep it between us.
• This is love, and there is nothing wrong with it.
• This is special. It’s just that we should keep it our secret.
• It’s really okay. It’s just that others wouldn’t understand, so don’t say anything.
• Really, it’s a good thing. Just don’t say anything.

Then they got a little more intense and threatening:

• If you tell anyone, it could break the family apart, so don’t say anything.
• Don’t say anything. We don’t want to break up the family.
• Don’t say anything.
• It’s special…..

Over. And over. And over…..

Over time, he added in a few more twists:

• This is for you.
• This helps you.

Now I was really panicking, and that last one was really a mind-f-ck. To me, I didn’t think it helped me. All it did was upset me. And make me feel bad…guilty…dirty…different from everybody else. If it was helping, I didn’t know it.

That’s when I started to question my own perception of reality. DID it help me? Was I wrong and he was right? Or worse, was I sending a wrong message to make him think I wanted this? That meant I was failing to make him understand that I wanted this to stop. Or worst of all…WAS I sending that message and didn’t even know it? Was all of this MY FAULT???? I was so confused. Upset. Distraught. And I was a kid. Maybe I didn’t know best after all?

The ultimate worst one that got introduced a few years later was:

“This helps me with your mother.”

That one still freaks me out for so many reasons. And at the time, it was disturbing because I didn’t need or want to know about their sex life. And what did it mean that he needed help with her? Just too many disturbing messages.

House Rules

If the repeated reinforcement of his messages wasn’t enough, there were also the house rules. As I mentioned, the first was that if Dad said it, you were supposed to believe him. Or else.

A few of them were fine — such as helping our grandparents, being out there shoveling snow with the adults, and respecting my mother.

But most? Just like the “Don’t grow up to be a stupid woman” one, or “You’re the oldest, so you should know better!” rule, they spoke volumes about our house dynamics.

A few of the rules were:

• You must pay attention to Dad, his moods, and anticipate how to keep him from getting angry
• If he gets angry, you made him get upset. If you doubt it, he will tell you this.
• Family needs come first, before your own needs.
• If you put yourself first, you are selfish, and it means that you don’t care about anyone but yourself.
• Hurry up! For everything!
• We can’t have kids over to our house to play or for sleepovers.
• We can’t go to someone else’s house for sleepovers since we can’t invite them back here.
• NEVER TELL ANYONE OUTSIDE OUR IMMEDIATE FAMILY WHAT GOES ON IN OUR HOUSE!
• Our house is safe and it’s loving. It’s not safe out there.
• Never trust outsiders. They wouldn’t understand, and they won’t be loyal and love us like our own family.
• Don’t be so sensitive.
• If Dad was home, you’d better be doing “something,” not just sitting around.
• You can’t go anywhere on Saturdays because we have to clean.
• If there are any other family shopping or work projects, you must stay home and help.
• If you said you were going to be home by a certain time, you’d better be there then, even if you risked an accident to do so.

Rules in action

If Dad was fixing the car or doing a job around the house or yard, I had better be right there helping, even if it meant holding the lamp for his timing light or brake job and getting yelled at that I was doing it wrong.

What Dad wants, he gets. What he says, goes. Even the groceries were always his choice because he brought home the paycheck. So it was Oreos, not any other brand – and there must always be a homemade dessert every night …until his weight went up.

We could not have whipped cream from a can. It had to be freshly whipped heavy cream. (These days, I always get canned whipped cream, and no offense to them, but I refuse to eat Oreos.)

Don’t be “weak,” feel emotions, or cry. There was an old Slovak maxim the women would say, emphatically rolling their r’s as they said it: “I str-r-r-o-n-g like bull!” I never quite figured out if that was their way of saying that they, too, believed in being tough, just like the men did. Or they had to be tough because of what their men put them through. Probably both. But either way, all Slovak women were Str-r-r-r-o-n-g like bulls. And especially so in our household.

Don’t make close connections to people outside the family. You’ll be taking time away from our family. One year in school, the nuns connected each of us with a pen pal at another school. I was so excited to get a letter from her. She lived in Egg Harbor, New Jersey. That seemed like such an exotic place name. When I shared my joy about getting my first letter, he said, “So, how will you end this? You don’t want to get involved with others.” I never wrote back.

Respect your Mother. Of course, this goes without saying. But it also meant not seeing, or just accepting the double standard for him. This translates to: “Respect your Mother. I can insult her or hit her or do anything I want, but nobody else better treat her badly.” In thinking about this one, I suspect he viewed all of us as his “possessions.” So while he could treat us any way he wanted, no one else better hurt us because then that was an affront to him.

Everything had a very specific place in the house, and it had better be there. If things weren’t put away or put away messily, Dad would be sure to dump it all out on the floor and make you put it away again, this time, the “right way.” It was apparently like when he was in the Navy, and he failed an inspection. If it was wrong, they dumped it out and made you do it all over again until you got it right.

No lounging around the house if you were sick. I got sick one time, throwing up from a stomach bug. I’d no sooner walked out of the bathroom than he told me to go in the kitchen and eat, so I could hurry up and get better.

If there was an easier or saner way to do something, or a brutally hard way, we did the latter. When he was getting ready for our new house to be built on the country property my parents bought, there was an old, 2-story barn that had to be taken down. Instead of hiring someone to knock it down, he gave each of us a sledgehammer and made us bash it down, board by board. Later, when we had a 2-acre lawn to mow, we had to do it with just a regular lawn mower until he finally bought a used lawn tractor. And it went without saying that the huge cast iron stove he bought to put in the basement — he didn’t hire men to help him move it. That was our job.

Dad’s Navy background permeated everything, including his bearing and attitudes. He loved the Navy and loved being the tough guy with the short haircut. And he was even worse if you brought home a date. Don’t even consider long-haired men, or hippies, or Blacks, or non-Catholics, or…. The only boyfriend I had that he approved of was a guy who went into the Navy.

Weekends rules:

• There will almost always be a violent fight sometime over the weekend, or maybe even both days.
• Dad will then tear out of the driveway in the car, and we can calm down.
• When he comes back, MOST of the time, he will be VERY sorry and beg us to forgive him.
• We must forgive him…or he will get mad all over again.

The rules of vacations:

• The first day, he will be excited and happy. By the next morning, that will be gone.
• But there will always be fights. The first one will come, usually on the second day.
• He will give Mom 2-3 choices of things he has picked to do and ask her what she wants.
• She will shrug and say, “I don’t know.”
• I will sit in the back seat and pray she chooses something.
• He will ask again, and she will respond the same way.
• I count down from 3. He will then explode in rage that she doesn’t want to participate in choosing what to do. And I will be upset with her for not picking ANYTHING, just to keep the peace.

In thinking back, all of our vacations were things he wanted to do. I loved his choices, but I have to wonder what my mother felt. Did he ever ask her where she wanted to go, or what she wanted to do?

It’s possible she didn’t know what to suggest. She had not traveled much in her whole life. But it is also possible he just made plans and never asked her, except for offering her a couple of things to choose from that he’d already picked out. If so, she may have felt left out or fed up, and at that point figured what was the point of participating? I have no idea.

I only know that even in later years, the “happy vacation Dad” never lasted beyond the first day or so. It was like he could not sustain the “facade.” He would get more and more irritable until there would be the obligatory blow-up.

The only time I remember my mother putting him in his place was on a day trip to an amusement park. She was driving because he had gotten too many speeding tickets and lost his license for a month. In order to get to work, he had to carpool with a friend who also lived in our town and worked at the same factory. So for our outing, she had to drive.

Mom was not an adventurous driver and had only gotten her license after getting married because she and her parents had never owned a car. But she was skillful and safe.

Yet as she drove, he kept nagging her.

“Go faster! No, not now!, Slow down! Why aren’t you passing him?!”

I sat in the back, wishing he would just shut up and preparing for him to ruin the day again. But this one time, something in Mom snapped.

He made one more comment.

Mom floored the gas, then slammed on the brakes, whipped the wheel, and pulled the car into a ditch on the side of the road. Turning to my father, she yelled:

“LOOK! YOU’RE the one who lost their license! Not ME! So you sit there, and shut up!”

To this day, I still feel that sense of total awe, shock, terror, and exhilaration. I didn’t say a word — I knew better — but man, I wanted to stand up and cheer, “YAY MOM!!!!” For once, she told him off, and he actually shut up.

Several years later, we were driving back from bringing one of my siblings to college in another state. We had stayed overnight in Albany, New York, because we were so tired. This time, we were in my car.

As we crawled through morning rush-hour traffic, my father started in on me.

“Hurry up! I want to get home! I have a lot to do!”

I was also tired and not in the best of moods.

He snapped at me again.

I suddenly remembered Mom’s example from those years ago. So I floored the car right in the middle of the traffic, then slammed on the brakes and yelled at him, “This is MY car and I am driving! So I’ll drive it the way I want to!”

He didn’t say another word.

But these were rare moments of rebellion, chosen carefully and rarely. In both cases, he could have easily smacked us right there in the car, or worse. But on those two occasions, we’d both been pushed to the brink and didn’t care anymore.

However, we also knew the house rules…and his temper.

So on “his schedule,” vigilance was the word, and you followed the rules…though even that wasn’t always a guarantee….

This entry was posted on October 2, 2025 at 9:00 am and is filed under Memoir - sexual abuse trauma recovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.