I have an ugly story.

My sister came to stay for a couple of weeks in early december with her two babies and her husband. After weeks of isolation it was so fun to have her around again, and the kids, at 1 and 3, are at the very best age. Her husband is a great guy, remarkably chill in the face of a lot of undercurrents. But after they left, the house felt sad and empty again, and my dad just leaned into his worst self, drinking more and earlier, with a simmering undercurrent of anger. One day when he was being really mean to me, I got angry and took his everpresent glass of scotch and threw it in his face.

Things went so sideways.

He's 84 now, but rage made him strong. The things he said to me. The rage on his face. The bruises all over my body from holding him again the wall as he tried to thrash the shit out of me. I'm 5'8" and strong. He couldn't hurt me but he tried. In the morning he remembered very little of what had happened but his arms were purple with bruises where i held him to stop him from hitting me.

His cognitive capacity and memory are shot. In the morning I tried to talk to him about it, see what he remembered, if he understood what had happened, and he said: "try it again and you'll be on the floor". Try what again, dad? He didn't know. It didn't matter. He felt justified in his actions because what he remembered was that i had disrespected him. After that, there didn't seem to be much more to say. I shouldn't have thrown that drink, I know that. But that doesn't make it okay for him to try to hurt me, i know that too. My brother, who happened to call that night, asked: "what did you think was going to happen". I slept with a chair against my door for a week.

I'm still here, we got through it, in a sense. He's too old and broken to think that there's a resolution coming. While it was all going down, on some level I was not that surprised. We all always knew that if we pushed my dad we'd get this rage, and all three of us kids pushed him to this place where he waled on us when we were kids, and then the fear of that kept us in line for years. Now that he's drinking more, that edge feels much closer. These things are true: My dad loves me, I love my dad, and also this is an ugly thing and it has always been here.

7:51 p.m. - 2021-02-18