Recently, when visiting my parents, they both brought up how in all their years of marriage they have had only one fight, and in the midst of some mild laughter, my father remarks that he didn’t even remember what the fight was about.
All throughout my childhood, from what I remember, I had only seen my parents in a fight once, and I sure as hell remembered what it was about. I even remembered writing down an entry about it that very day in my diary, and, curious as to whether my memory was valid, I decided to check in one of my old diaries.
I found the entry, which was dated Sunday, August 8, 1993. It happened essentially how I remembered it happening.
As usual, I had not done the chores my mother had assigned me. She blew up at me, explaining with viper eyes and a sharp tongue that she could not rely upon me for anything, that I was a self-centered brat and other such things. This was not an unusual thing with her. A fight like this was not at all unusual for us.
Back when I was reading up on astrology, drowning in it as I do all subjects I research, I had quickly come to find it interesting how my mother and I tied together astrologically. Her sun sign was Aries, and I was a Scorpio, meaning that we shared a ruling planet. Of all planets it was Mars, so named for the god of war. In addition, my moon sign was in Aries, her sun sign.
Indeed. Rams butting heads every step of the way.
Then I went outside, of course, heading towards the tractor so I could begin mowing the fucking yard. First, in the distance, I see my dad throw the weed-whacker he had been using onto the ground in body language that clearly conveyed fury. I didn’t immediately see any connection to the bullshit my mother has just spewed all over me back inside the house. My father practiced godlike restraint when it came to living beings, but when it came to inanimate objects and machines, patience was a short wick in a sea of sparks and the bang was bigger given all he has trained himself to hold back when it came to the living.
My father, interestingly enough, is a Libra, symbolized by those balancing scales of judgment. My Pluto is in Libra in the 12th house. Pluto is my other ruling planet.
My father is a highly empathic individual — to such an extent that it falls into fault. He becomes the pushover. His interest is and has always been to keep the peace, to make everyone happy, which is why he so often finds himself in the role of the mediator. Betwixt my mother and I he so often stood, playing the go-between. He wasn’t concerned as to who was right, He wanted to be fair to both of us, so his chief concern was balance, never the truth.
All he ever wanted was for us to get along. All my mother seemed to want was power and control. My mother never forced him to make a decision, she forced him into executing her decision. He loved her as much as she loved him, but he never used that love against her, and this was a routine practice against dad in her case.
When I was really young, as my mother has told me, he had been working on the stove when he had slammed his head again something and let out a hearty, “Shit!” In response to this, I proceeded to dance about singing, “Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Rather joyously, judging from my mother’s reenactments. It was as innocent as my mispronunciation of the word, “truck,” which was frequently heard by them given that I was quite attached to my toy trucks, but it serves to reveal that my father’s relationships with the inanimate have always been exceptionally contemptuous ones. I understand this well, as I clearly share this quality.
This anger seemed extreme, however, and I was sure to look away as soon as I saw him toss down the weed-whacker. As I began mowing, I then saw my mother and father yelling at one another in the distance. Faces blood-red, my mother pointing to me and my father waving his arms madly, screaming something inaudible over the sound of the mower. All of it struck me as surreal and horrifying, as I had never seen my father stand up to my mother, and my mother is never willing to stand down.
Though I would have much preferred to believe otherwise, there was no question in my mind that it was about me.
I always remembered it was about me. It just blows my mind that this all happened under the guise of me not doing my chores. And I say guise because if there were no reasons, my mother would invent them, so reality held no reins on my mothers deeply-rooted, frequently-stoked rage towards me. Any reason but the root one was a cover; they weren’t truly reasons, merely arbitrary conveniences or hastily-constructed concoctions.
Later, after I was done mowing, my youngest sister came up to me and asked if I knew what it was that our parents were fighting about, and I lied and told her I saw it all as well, but knew nothing regarding what it was about. On my way to hiding in my room, where I would write in my diary, my father approached me and said that he would write my chores down from now on. So mom had won him over, I thought to myself; again, he had folded. As frightened as his anger had made me, even from that distance, it had felt good to see him rise up against my mother full force, if only for a moment. There was nothing good about his anger at all when, face to face, I saw it rise from the dead in his eyes.
The closest he ever came to hitting me wasn’t even an arm fully raised from what I recall, but I saw it in his eyes, could feel its texture and movement in the atmosphere around his body. The inner demon was at the doorway, claws forming a fist around a door that had never been opened.
In retrospect I wondered, is that why my father had wanted ever-so-desperately to go to Vietnam, disappointed when he joined the Army and was never sent to fight? How much anger was pent-up in him, with all his parents had put him through alone? I had sensed that heavy, dark shadow behind him, but never had it come so close to noon; never had his soles swallowed so much of that shadow as I saw bursting in his eyes that day.
I know I was in another argument instigated by my mother. All fucking arguments in the house were, after all. One of them said something to me and I finally barked back with a sarcastic, biting comment and I saw it there. I was running for the stairs the moment I felt it in him, like the feeling I felt swelling in the heart of my friend’s father right before he gave his son a beating. I turned towards the stairs, darting to the top in record time. I didn’t want to be hit and I knew he didn’t want to hit me, but I nonetheless felt he would have had I not bolted, and the rift it would cause between him and I, the anger it would make me feel and the guilt I knew for certain it would make him feel was of a far larger consequence. If I ran, I escaped all that, I bought him time to reconsider, I brought distance between myself and that terrifying energy around him.
He had stopped chasing me roughly three-quarters of the way up the stairs. I had noticed, but that didn’t decrease my desire for further distance, so I kept booking it to the doorway of my room. He yelled at me to come back down there, with a hint of plea that indicated his rage had worked its way back down to manageable anger or frustration. Then he added that he would never hit me, and I knew it was sincere.
He never has.
Transmissions to Earth 