My Father's Daughter

A few things I learned from being my father’s daughter: The good, the bad, and the ugly…

My father has a terrifying command voice. From him, I learned to control my diaphragm to control my breath which I later learned is a fantastic way to control your perception of and reaction to pain as well.

I also learned from my father the art of storytelling, and the use of hyperbole and subtle embellishments. In this paper, however, I have taken great pains to avoid employing either of these techniques due to the serious nature of the subject matter.

From quite early on in life, I learned that one can control a person quite effectively by controlling their neck. When I was a kid, our house was full of love and turmoil. My two older brothers are biologically my half-brothers. Their father was murdered by gun shot when my mother was six months pregnant with my brother, Kev. My oldest brother, Will, was three.

As I got older and became more interested in psychology, I came to realize that they all have PTSD from this; all three to differing degrees; all three manifest in drastically different manners. All three cases intrigue me immensely.

Mind you, Kevin wasn’t born until three months after his father was called home. I theorize that his brain development was affected by the stress and trauma our mother endured from his father’s very sudden and violent home going.

My mother’s PTSD would be compounded over the years by having been held at gun point on three separate occasions while working at the bank and Thrifty’s Drugstores before I came along, not to mention the 38 plus years of psychological turmoil inflicted on her from being married to a narcissist.

I grew up with a great many misconceptions about gender, sexuality, manhood, womanhood, and control. Most of these misconceptions came directly from idolizing my narcissistic father and closely identifying with my traumatized siblings.

Here are a few of those misconceptions:

- Women are weak

- Men are strong

- Women are less intelligent than men

- Women need to be verbally punished for challenging the intelligence and authority of their

man

- My father is always right. ALWAYS

- Men always win

- Women always lose unless they agree with the man

- Being a woman is degrading, tiring, and boring

- I NEVER want to be a woman. Now, that’s not to say that I wanted to be man, but it’s the

only other option, so when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

- I can be a man by behaving as one i.e. imitating my father and brothers until the behaviors

become innate to me.

- The man is in control of everything

- No one controls the man

This brings me back to the understanding that you can control a person quite effectively when you control their neck. I only ever remember my father employing this method on my mother’s four biological children; that is myself and my three brothers. My mother, he quite effectively controlled with verbal bully tactics typical of the narcissist/empath relationship paradigm.

When I was a kid, my father worked a lot. We lived in the Antelope Valley, but he commuted to work in LA at the DWP power generating station called Scattergood. Most of my childhood, he was either at work or asleep. Family vacations were always laden with stress because he was around and awake.

I remember when we’d go to places like Disneyland or Magic Mountain or anyplace you walk around all day, he would always control me by placing his hand around the back of my neck. He would do the same to my brothers when he found it necessary.

Doing this, he would steer me like a car, but it made me feel more like a dog or a puppet. If I would protest, struggle, or try to wiggle away, to calm me down, he would squeeze my neck. This would calm me down. Not because it hurt, because it didn’t much, but because in doing this, he was pinching off my carotid arteries. They’re located on the sides of the neck and are responsible for carrying oxygenated blood to the brain. Pinching them, slows the blood flow to the brain and causes one to become docile, lightheaded and weak. The obstruction of these very important blood passages for too long will render the subject unconscious and could cause death.

My father would squeeze my neck until I got quiet and calm, then he’d just continue walking me like a puppet, his palm supporting my now heavy head. I would usually struggle at first, then the squeeze. I would start to see stars then feel chill and my mind would escape to elsewhere, more often than not.

Of us all, my brother, Will, got the worst of the neck control techniques. I can never forget the time my father picked him up by the neck and pinned him against the wall, legs kicking and banging against it.

Will and my father never got along. Recently, Will told me about the time he was hanging out, without permission, with his friends at a burger joint or something. My father storms in, picks him up by the neck, and carries him out the door like a damned chicken or something.

Will was old enough when his father died to remember him. He was old enough when my parents got married to feel like my father was a shitty replacement for his father, and he didn’t hesitate to voice that opinion, accurate or not.

My parents didn’t know how to deal with Will’s reactions to pretty much anything that I could see. He was bereaved, traumatized, and bullied and acted out in pretty much every conceivable way.

After he stole my father’s pistol and went out doing God knows what with his boys, my father chased him down, and I mean a literal foot chase through the entire neighborhood. My father eventually caught him, to my recollection, and choked the shit out of him, figuratively speaking. To my knowledge, Will did NOT literally evacuate his bowels. That’s simply a figure of speech.

After that incident, Will moved back to LA to live with Grandma Brooks, his father’s mother. I lost my best friend, my protector. Kev was my tormentor, Will, my protector, my ally, my idol in many ways. My father was never around to help me with sports and stuff, but Will loved to coach me. He trained me in all kinds of stuff. My heart broke when he moved an hour’s drive away. I couldn’t have been any older than nine or ten because he graduated high school in Culver City when I was 12, a couple or few years later.

I missed him a lot and started to identify as the black sheep by proxy. With him gone, I was the biggest problem child in the house. I was a rebel with a smartass mouth and an enormous attitude. Kev’s four main outlets for his issues were whispering psychotic shit in my ears, stealing random shit from around the house and keeping it in his closet, smoking an obscene amount of weed on a daily basis, and denying it all vehemently with a straight fucking face. Now a days, he might laugh at most of this. We’ve all grown and matured to differing degrees.

My mother, however, is still married to my father and locked tight inside the mental prison his narcissistic abuse trapped her in. She has memory issues, she lives in denial, and she doesn’t even realize she’s traumatized. It’s extremely difficult to live inside this house within their relationship dynamic because I’m not in his box. That box shattered some time ago. When he’s wrong, I’ll stare him directly in the eyes and tell him so. He’ll usually pitch a fit and leave or storm off.

To this day, I’ve not once heard the man admit that he’s wrong about a single fuckin thing. He sealed his fate of our relationship when he decided that my speaking the truth about him directly in his face left him no choice but to put his fuckin hands on me. In his eyes, he’s still not wrong. In my mother’s eyes, I share the blame for picking on him and getting in his face.

He didn’t grab my neck this time, maybe because of my surgery last year, but he hasn’t put his hands on my neck in years. My guess is he thought better of grabbing my neck for fear of paralyzing me or shifting the titanium disk that now separates my c6 and c7 vertebrae. He’s always been careful in that way not to cause permanent physical damage, only emotional, mental, and spiritual damage from him.

No, this time he wrapped both arms around my entire body, arms pinned at my sides, lifted me off my feet, and squeeze my trunk just enough for me to feel a pressure in my neck. Anger management is some effective shit when applied sincerely. So is active breathing in aiding one to remain calm and levelheaded.

In my head, I brough my forehead down with full force onto the bridge of his nose. He released his grip enough to free my arms and retrieve one of the three knives almost always kept on my person (two hanging around my neck and one in my right thigh pocket). I hit the same artery he taught me to locate, from experience of course from being led around like a dummy or dog. The rest’s a blood bath my mother screams hysterically through and surely blames me solely for.

In reality, I just told him I was gonna call the cops. He let me go and told me to call them. I tried, unsuccessfully, to push the refrigerator over to vent my mounting rage, but ended up just pushing it across the kitchen, spewing water all over from the subsequently disconnected water line.

I’ve learned so much from my father. In 2016, 2017, I can’t remember off hand, I was arrested after choking my then girlfriend, putting her in a headlock and dragging her across the room. I let her go when her struggle got that familiar calmness and weakness. I didn’t want her to pass out. That can cause lasting brain damage, serious charges and possibly death. I berated her to call the police until she eventually did. I couldn’t be trusted because my rage was mounting. Once I go red, that bitch is dead. When the police arrived, I told them exactly what happened. I was promptly arrested.

During booking, I was asked a series of questions from an intake form. The last one I answered, not the last on the form, was something about if I was having thoughts of hurting or killing anyone. My hyperbolic ass go tell the officer, “I should have killed someone.” I spent the next 22 hours, asshole naked, wrapped in a heavy tarp in a rubber coated cell watching 2-4 guards peak in the tiny window in the door every fuckin five minutes. I spoke to Jesus a lot that day. I cried a lot. I slept a lot. I studied the designs on the wall that those before me had peeled out of the rubberized paint.

One looked like a dog, probably a pit. It reminded me of my dog, Athena. It had a dramatically oversized tear falling from its eye. It was kind of looking at me, but its snout was facing this one that looked like a dude dancing in the rain, looking a bit like a lunatic. There was another one on the door under that tiny window. This was the most interesting. It looked like a baby in a highchair. There were all types of dangerous things strewn across the floor, pills and potions, gadgets and lotions. The baby was sometimes shoving food in its mouth off the tray and sometimes throwing shit away.

Did I mention these tableaus were in motion? I went right proper batshit during that 22 hour sit. I would rotate from sitting cross-legged upright, then doubled over at the waist, lying in the fetal position, and standing propped up in the far corner from the door so the guards could always see me when they peeked in. Otherwise, they’d bang on the door and wake me from my doze. I’d assume each position until I dozed off and woke up, change position (lather, rinse, repeat) so to speak.

My father’s never been arrested to my knowledge. What’d I learn from that? Shut your fuckin trap around the police. Did I mention Kev became a cop? No? Oh. Though he did, I digress.

When I was finally “cleared” by the supposed psychologist through that tiny window in the door, I was given a smock and some crocks to wear, pants too, and escorted to a general holding cell. I called my father. His cell was the only number I knew by heart. I got my sister’s number, actually my biological cousin. She’s the closest thing I have to a sister, so that’s what she is. She too is a cop. When I called her, I told her everything that happened and that I wanted help. She gave it.

I ended up pleading guilty to two misdemeanor counts of domestic violence that would be expunged from my record after satisfactory completion of my probation which I was permitted to serve in Louisiana where my parents live. I attended my anger management, paid my fines, and did my community service, all living under my parents’ roof. Trying vehemently to get better in the same environment in which I was created, with surprising success in many ways. Thank God, too, because fast forward to last month, and we were cleaning up water from the kitchen floor and walls as opposed to my father’s arterial blood. Fuck off, Satan, God won this one.

Don’t get me wrong, I learned amazingly positive thigs from my father as well. First and foremost, I learned how to be a critical thinker. I learned how to reverse engineer damn near anything. I learned to stay levelheaded in a crisis, except when my anger is triggered, then the lid’s off and there’s no telling what’s about to go down. He also taught me how to project my voice from the diaphragm.

I was able to combine these skills quite nicely one morning after breakfast in basic training. On post or base, there are three times during the day that everyone stops whatever they are doing, face the flag and stand at attention; during the rising and lowering of the colors (the American flag) we also present arms while the national anthem is played, and just before lights out we stand at attention to honor our fallen brothers and sisters in arms while taps plays over the PA.

On this particular morning, I was in formation at the front of my flight. As we finish eating, we go out and stand at ease in formation until everyone is finished and our T.I. (training instructor) the USAF’s version of a drill sergeant, returns and resumes control of the flight. The other flights are engaged in the same ritual. Us as a collective unit would be referred to as a squadron. Each flight is arranged in four columns known as elements. I was one of the element leaders present at the time for my flight. My element consisted of 7-11 other female airmen in training. There were zero T.I.’s present in the quad when the bugle sounded to signal that the national anthem was getting ready to sound and the colors were about to be raised.

This is the point where any T.I. present would call the squadron (over 2-3 hundred male and female airmen in training) to attention. No T.I. being present, this is when my ass snapped to attention, called, “Squadron, atten-hut!” The entire squadron snapped to. I ordered, “about face!” Everyone ceremonially turned 180 degrees to face the flag. I ordered, “present arms!” Everyone saluted. The music played. The colors were raised. The music concluded. I commanded, “Order arms!” Everyone dropped their solute, another about face at my command and at ease. I got a nice atta girl from my T.I. and that of our brother flight when they found out I commanded the squadron flawlessly.

About a week later, my T.I. accidently “promoted” me. He called me Sgt. Doucette. Bruh.. We were what the Army referred to as fuzzy patches at the time. These are troops with no rank patch velcroed to their chest. All they have is the fuzzy side of the Velcro exposed. In the Air Force, we just had bare sleeves. We were still in BDU’s back then. Shining boots with wet cotton balls and breath steam to make the kiwi shine. Later, when we got ahold of lighters, we learned to heat the boot tip just a bit before buffing to get that mirror finish, but again, I digress.

I was impressed by the impression I left by simply imitating what the T.I.s had done religiously every single morning, except that day. That day I did it, and I was proud to be my father’s daughter.