"Have you got any news?"

I have an uneasy relationship with my dad. He was never there for me when I was young, and he was abusive to both my mother and me. I mean he was violent, as well as verbally and emotionally abusive. I don't know why he stayed with us as long as he did, but when I was nineteen, he left the family. He had been so mean and so hostile that I was glad to see him go, but my mom, a typical battered wife, almost died when her marriage ended. She had lost herself to him, and when he was gone, she was nowhere to be found. She was a wonderful, brave woman, although I could not see this at the time, who held on to her religious faith until she could find herself again. Eventually she remarried and was very much in love with my step-father. They had twenty-one years together before she lost him to cancer.

The memory of the last beating I got from my dad is as clear as if it had been yesterday, yet it was over forty years ago. It was the summer I was eighteen, after I had graduated from high school, but before I had left for college. A group of four or five girls planned to go out that night, to do what I don't remember. A friend called and invited me while my Dad's mom and sister were visiting us. My dad, who was very strict, said of course I could go, but the minute my grandmother and aunt left, he hissed at me that I wasn't going anywhere that night. His gracious behavior had all been for show. I knew better than to say anything in response, so I took the news without reacting. My mom spoke up for me and criticized my dad for his hypocrisy. Dad told her to shut her goddamned mouth. At that point, I spoke. I said, "Why do you talk to my mother that way? She doesn't deserve it."

When I challenged Dad, he lunged for me, and I took off running for my room. He was right behind me, unbuckling his belt, slipping it out of the loops on his pants, getting it ready to use as a whip. He came at me, and I walked backwards away from him. Each step he took toward me, I took another step back. I picked up my guitar, and I planned to El Kabong him over the head with it rather than withstand another beating. He kept coming. I kept walking back until my legs hit the side of my bed, and I could retreat no further.

Me at 19

 "You won't hit me," he said. "You don't have the guts to hit me." And he began lashing me with his belt. He was right, and he was wrong. I didn't hit him, I couldn't, but not because I didn't have the guts. I couldn't hit him because he was my dad and I loved him and I wasn't raised to be a violent person. I fell back onto my bed, dropped my guitar, and submitted to the beating. Mom tried to intervene and he knocked her to the floor. She got up and went to his closet, getting another of his belts. She stood behind him and for every time that he hit me, she hit him. I still can't believe he didn't kill her for that. But he did kill something in me. I was different after that episode, easily upset, nervous, high strung - all characteristics that made life harder for me as I went away to college and tried to become a young woman.

My parents moved a lot, always in the same county. They kept thinking that a new house, a new neighborhood would make things better between them. One day Dad moved us against our will while I was at school and my mom was at work. He took us to a place he had promised we would never have to go, to a tobacco farm far out into the country away from all my friends and school activities. A chest of drawers filled with my belongings fell off the back of a pick-up truck. It was just my stuff, nothing important, right? so he didn't even stop to retrieve a thing. I've always wondered what the people in other cars thought when they came upon a chest of drawers in the middle of the road. I mean, that was a hazard, wasn't it? But my things wouldn't matter to Dad. I always had parts in our school plays, and he never came to see me act. I sang in the school chorus. He never came to hear us sing. I played in the marching band, and he never came to see one half-time show. I was a cheerleader, and he never came to see me cheer. I graduated, and he didn't come to see me get my diploma.

When I was seventeen, I wanted to take ballet lessons for the exercise and for my posture. But Dad did not "believe in" dancing, and he would not allow me to take the lessons. There was another big scene in our home, and then I went to my room. It was cold, it was winter time, and it was raining at the farm we lived on far from neighbors, farther from town. I put on a coat with a hood, got my transistor radio, and put a pair of scissors in my pocket for protection. I put records to play on my stereo so the music could be heard outside my room, and no one would suspect what I had done. And then I climbed out of my bedroom window and jumped to the ground and ran away from home. I walked alone in the dark, in the cold rain and covered three or four miles, across creeks, through areas where there were no houses. Suddenly a dog came at me barking furiously. His owner, Irene, was an elderly woman, my grandmother's half-sister. She came out to see what the dog was barking about, and she heard me crying. She look closer and saw me and then she recognized me. She took me to her next door neighbor's, to Mr. Paschal's, because she had no phone. He called my parents and told them where I was. I was four miles from home.

My mother came to get me at Mr. Paschal's house, but she brought with her at least two weeks of clothing and supplies for me. She took me to my grandmother's house, and let me stay there for several weeks. I wouldn't go home. Later, I learned that Mom had come into my room and had found the records playing for no one and had seen the curtains blowing in the wind and the rain coming in the window. She asked my dad to get the car so they could go looking for me on that deserted country road. She wanted him to drive so that she could look on both sides of the road, and she knew I would try to hide if a car came by. He refused. He said nothing. He just ignored her. He continued to watch TV. She got on her knees and begged him to help her look for me. He said nothing. He ignored her. He watched TV. He did not care. He was content to leave me out on my own on a country road ten miles from town, late at night in the rain in January. But just then the phone rang, and it was Mr. Paschal and Irene, who had caught me.

Dad took me on exactly one family vacation in my eighteen years at home. He spent each Thanksgiving and Christmas hunting rather than being with family. The truth is he just didn't love my mother or me, and he was cruel enough that about five years ago, he told my mother that he had never loved her. Before I left for college my father asked if I needed anything from him. I told him the best thing he could do for me was to love my mother. He said, "I'm sorry." That's all. And then I left.

I wanted love so badly and deeply believed it was out of reach, so that I spent my young adulthood focused on his many infidelities, his lies and other failings as a husband. I wasn't able even to begin dealing with his abuse of ME until I was much older and had marriage wreckage in my rear view mirror.

I don't remember the first brutal beating he gave me, but I've been told about it by my mother and by my aunt and uncle, with whom we lived, and others who witnessed it. I was around two years old. We had gone to the movies on a summer evening. I took my shoes off in the theatre. That's it. That's the crime. Dad made me get my shoes on and leave the theatre. Mom thought we'd be right back. She didn't know that Dad would make me walk the two miles home while he walked behind me with a "switch," a small branch stripped of its leaves used for "whipping" children. The story goes that he hit me repeatedly all the way home. When my mother got home, she cleaned all the wounds and put salve on them. I had welts all over my body. I think of all the people who drove by and saw him hitting me, and no one stopped. No one did or said a thing. I guess no one wanted to get involved.

Dad is 86 now and in an assisted living facility in my hometown, which is about 30 miles from where I live. I get over to see him when I can and whenever he needs me, and we sit in near silence with little to say to each other. Before he got this old, we could talk about his garden, his tomatoes and his cantaloupes, his dog, my step-mother and later, his girlfriend. Now he keeps to himself at the home, mostly staying in his room, not participating in activities, not making many friends. He always asks me, "Have you got any news?" and by this he means gossip about people he would know. I almost never do, and after a decent interval, I leave.

I call Dad at 6 o'clock every evening. The calls last about three minutes. He complains that he can't hear me (but he won't consider a hearing aid), and I ask him how he is and how his day was. Then he asks me, "Have you got any news?" I say "No, I don't." And he says, "Well, call me when you get some news." And that's it til the next night. I've asked him would he like me to skip a night or really wait until I have some news and he says an emphatic "NO!" He really wants to be called every day. It's the high spot of his day! He always tells me he loves me before we hang up. He never told me that when I was young.

When we hang up, I have the saddest, emptiest feeling. I read somewhere today that people get more happiness from their pets than from any of their human relationships. I don't know about that, but I do know that I go from the phone to Miss Kia, the Great Pyrenees, and bury my face in her abundant fur most nights at the end of those calls. And then Readmore, the sweetest cat in the world, comes and sits on me, as though he owns me, and I feel good to be owned.

Life isn't always easy. Some challenges are just too big. You don't fight them. You just try to be still standing after they hit you.

Readmore, the sweetest cat in the world