Chapter 2 - Richard Raised Me the Same Way
My father believed childhood prepared you for:
the world.
And the world, according to Richard, was cruel.
Therefore childhood should be:
hard enough
that cruelty later felt familiar.
He never phrased it exactly like that.
He used:
discipline.
Resilience.
Standards.
When I was nine, he made me stand in the garage for two hours because I lied about breaking:
a window.
At eleven, I had to finish mowing the lawn after being stung by:
three wasps.
At fourteen, he grabbed me by the back of the neck and marched me upstairs because I called my mother:
unfair.
Did he beat me?
No.
That was how I always answered.
No belts.
No black eyes.
No broken bones.
So when someone asked whether Richard was:
abusive,
I rejected the word.
He was strict.
Old-school.
My mother, Linda, softened him.
“She’s had enough, Richard.”
“Let him cool off.”
“James apologized.”
She died from pancreatic cancer when I was thirty-one.
After that, my father became:
harder.
Or maybe there was simply nobody left inside the house translating him into something gentler.
Richard had worked thirty-two years as a supervisor at a commercial manufacturing plant.
He respected:
punctuality,
tools,
clean workspaces,
people who shook hands firmly.
He distrusted:
therapy,
excuses,
most doctors,
teenagers.
And yet he loved:
Eli.
At least I believed he did.
When Eli was little, Grandpa taught him:
fishing,
woodworking,
how to change a tire.
There are photographs of them smiling together.
Those moments were real.
That fact made the later pattern harder for me to understand.
But love does not cancel:
control.
May you like
Sometimes it gives control a better disguise.
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