=burn diary=

Daddy With A Gun

For as long as I can remember, I lived in fear that my father would one day kill us all in one of his terrifying and unpredictable fits of rage. That fear only became more real when he acquired a handgun. On several occasions, in a black depression, he threatened he was going to commit suicide. I was sure that he wouldn't be the type to die alone but that he would be the kind of father you read about who kills his whole family before "turning the gun on himself," as the saying goes. In this picture, I am offering my father an apple—or am I tempting him with it? I've come to recognize the seductive nature of my personality—it's a way to please, to offer someone pleasure—but it seems to me to originate in what I took as a child to be the life-and-death matter of pleasing Daddy, so he wouldn't kill me. When I look at this picture, I can't help but wonder…was I tempting Daddy with the forbidden fruit of incest? Was I inviting him to fuck me? Look at the way Daddy looks out of the painting at you, as if to say, "See? See what she's doing? Can you blame me?" It took me a long time—and several therapists—before I took seriously the question "Where was my mother in all this?" Daddy always took all the blame. He was always the bad guy, the melodramatic villain, playing his role to perfection  But shouldn't Mommy have been there to protect me? Where was she in all this? When I think about my childhood, I can hardly ever place my mother anywhere. It's not so much that she was inaccessible or remote; it's more like she wasn't there at all, even though I know she must have been. Well, you can catch a glimpse of her in this picture, peeking, or perhaps escaping, around the wall to the room where Daddy and I are enacting our little drama. Mommy wants no part of whatever is going on; she seems just as glad to let me "handle" the situation. After all, I imagine her thinking, what are children for? Okay, maybe that's unfair. But why did I have to be the sacrificial lamb? Didn't child sacrifice go out when people stopped worshipping Moloch? Apparently not.