the language of love

I feel like, growing up, I didn’t *learn* the language of love – I learned the language of DESTRUCTION.

Of search and destroy; of maim and batter; of belittle and demean. Of how to make the other guy feel like shit about himself in one easy lesson, with a glance or a backhander or an underhanded dig. (sports refs.)

Sarcasm; bullying. ‘Teasing’, so-called, that drew blood, and left a scarred and emotionally crippled victim in its wake, while the perpetrator laughed his way to the bank. Literally. People who THRIVED, who GREW and FED on your pain and suffering, your misery, your fear. You needed SO BADLY to have someone to trust...

It just occurred to me, that *I* was, for many years, in fact for most of my life, the ONLY ONE in that family who could be trusted to not do something dirty, or mean, or cruel, or vicious, or backstabbing.

And rather than fucking APPRECIATING me for my kindness, consideration, empathy and caring, they fucking MOCKED me. They saw it as a WEAKNESS, as something to be pitied and treated with CONTEMPT.

Wow. I can’t believe I never saw that before. I mean, I think I’ve *seen* it, but never quite from that particular angle.

***
my father spurned my love, scorned it, until he was in such a strait (on his deathbed, literally) that he finally reached out to me, knowing, somehow, that I was the only person in the family who could help him.

But by this time it was too late – the damage was done, I was so deeply, passionately ANGRY with him for what an ASSHOLE he’d been to me my whole life that I couldn’t give him a thing. It was all I could do to speak to him with a civil tongue, though I knew he was hurting, physically, suffering. He was so CRUEL. So VICIOUS. So incredibly, painfully, unkind. If he’d been a stupid man, maybe I could have forgiven him. But he knew perfectly well the damage he was doing - he was doing the emotional equivalent of pulling wings off flies.