I Love You

There were no I loves you in our house, at least not the way you might imagine.

No one ever held me close with tenderness and said those words...

I Love You

When I was younger I would say those words to my Mother on occasion, trying to make her love me back. I cannot say I actually felt love for her because it was drowned out by the feelings of fear and confusion but I knew I wanted to be loved, I wanted to feel love and to exchange the feeling of being loved and loving back with her. `I know, I know` she would answer irritably with a tone of `Here we go again`...Deep down she must of recognised I was trying to prompt her into offering me something that was completely alien to her.

As I grew older, if, at the end of a particularly harsh and vitriolic telling off, my Mother vaguely sensed she was coming across as a complete bitch, not that she cared about being a complete bitch, she just cared about me telling someone she was a complete bitch and Narc`s are notorious for trying to keep the charming facade intact, then she would at times add....by way of a warning...

"Now you know I love you"

It was said almost as a threat, with a cold hard expression and a `so there` nod of the head, no love was ever conveyed with these words.

It was tagged on to a telling off as an attempt to take away any right I may think I had to feel hard done by. My Mother had just told me she loved me, so therefore whatever she had said before had been driven by this declaration of love, that was in truth a mere damage limitation phrase to retain her holier than thou image.

She ranted and raved, admonished and scolded because she loved me.

So no telling tales {the truth} then.

As for my Father, well he was hardly likely to say I Love You, what if I repeated it to my Mother, what if after a dressing down, designed to make me feel worthless and a failure I had turned around and said in retaliation...`Well Dad loves Me !` {so I can`t be that bad} oh boy would he be for it. She would of been full of icy vengeance for both of us.

In my teens when my Mother was waging a particularly vicious and relentless campaign of hate towards me, in one of our `talks` where he would try to brain wash me to stop resisting my Mothers endless demands of compliance to her increasingly unreasonable behaviour, I told him I loved him. I did love him, in spite of it all, in spite of the beatings, in spite of his temper, in spite of his enabling spineless ways, I loved him. For however fleeting, there were occasional glimpses of real affection he seemed to have for me in an odd moment, here and there when we were out of my Mother`s scrutiny. I so desperately desperately needed him to tell me I wasn`t imagining it....So I told him I loved him in the vain hope he may say it back and confirm that I wasn`t all bad after all, if I was worthy of his love still. I waited for a reply......I waited....and waited......waited.....

I waited until the silence floated up and wrapped around me like a dense fog, isolating me both from him and the words I longed to hear. I slowly rose, walked to the door and left the room quietly, my face red with humiliation and rejection while the lack of reply hung heavy in the silence.... 

Years later when we were gathering ourselves after yet another drama, the details of which now long forgotten, the relief he felt to be on a `break` after all out war with my Mother was written all over him and the compassion and pity I felt for him in his old age burst out of me in the form of the words `I Love You`. After all I could now jump in the car and drive away from it all where as he was stuck there.

His face darkened as he wrestled with some inner dilemma and he looked as if he was caught between a rock and a hard place. After a pause of 3 or 4 seconds which felt like far longer....He exhaled deeply as he said, resignedly, "Arrr... n I love you as well" It was said in a defeatist way, as if he was at last unable to contain the words any longer and he surrendered them to me with a `here..have them...I give up` inflection.

I wondered if during the pause he was searching the attic rooms of his heart, sweeping away the dust and cobwebs of the poison for me she had spoon fed him all my life, brushing them aside to find the long forgotten place that held the love he had had for me when first he held me as his tiny baby daughter, innocent of any perceived crime as yet. 

He sat slumped in his chair, weary, as if finding a suitable reply for me had been yet another defeat in battle for him. 

Over a decade later, in a nursing home where he was living out what would be the final year of his life, I listened as he vented about her treatment of him. How she had discarded him when his health became worse than hers and she was in danger of becoming his carer in a reversal of roles, all his regrets about letting her have her way always..endless details of her cruelty towards him, observations of her character he only seemed to realise now despite me telling him the exact same thing for decades.....

I ceased my moment....

"I used to think you did`nt love me Dad.....when you always took her side"

He thought for a moment

"I did love you" he said "But I tried to keep the peace and I always hoped you would be strong enough to cope with it all"

Well you know what Dad, most of the time I wasn`t