The Message

"People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept." Libba Bray

I knew when I arrived home there was a message waiting for me.  Roy had given me a sanitized version of it and when I finally listened, I was disgusted.  I wasn't appalled or surprised because I have heard this tone many times and underneath the angry words the spite, hatred and vile lies are the feelings that my father has always had for me.  Two years ago we blocked his phone on our land line and on my cell phone after being served.  I don't know if he tried to call our home and heard that his calls are blocked or that he truly believed that we had come over there, without any keys, without knowing his security code, without being seen and hiding from his security cameras, we went over there and stole his car keys.  Uh, yea, sure.  We have nothing better to do.  Only thing I was in North Carolina and Roy is too busy and not concerned with my father  anymore because of the false accusations and the way we've been talked or rather lied about the past few years.  And at the very least the way I have been treated, really, for all my life by my father.  There was the message...when I was a child I remember a conversation with my father and we were probably talking once again about something I said or my attitude.  Granted, I was not an easy child to deal with but that came about because I was pretty much on my own emotionally from the age of five.  He told me you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.  Guess he felt this was not applicable to himself.  Even if I had been home there was nothing in that call that would have made me call him back.  The good things that come from the message, proof in his own words that he is not dealing with reality, we have his cell number now and that if I wanted to report his threats to the officer that investigated us for elder abuse, he would be a little more interested in the paranoia and the concerns with my father's dementia.  The call is considered a threat and action could be taken...if we report it.  Our lawyer also mentioned this would help if we decided to sue or take him to court for his slander. 

There is also that part of me that wonders why in the world does he think I or we would do any of these things?  Therein comes the hatred and intense dislike he has acted out toward me throughout my life.  I had such hope after my mother passed away that his heart would turn toward kindness because there was a little light in there but he put that light out when he took incidents and circumstances that had nothing to do with one another and weaved such a complicated and deceived thread.  But that mistrust has always been there.  He didn't want Cindy Pitts to tell me he funded scholarships for kids to go to camp and he didn't want a friend from church to tell me he was my father's CPA.  Why?  I will never understand his faulty reasoning and the lies he tells so many times to himself, they become the truth to him.  He would rather tell the same lie over and over again to whoever will listen than to do anything constructive.  Right after my mother passed away, he was in a tussle with a nursing home that had taken my mother in and in all probability added to the quickness of her passing.   He talked to Roy about it constantly and Roy told him he should write down the facts while they are fresh in his mind to be able to deal rationally with the nursing home.  He never wrote anything down and now I can see it.  He would rather repeat it till everyone is sick of the story over and over again and make it become the truth he wants it to be. 

I wish life had been differently for him.  I really wish he had been a wanted child.  Somewhere along the line in life I wish he had made a turn.  These wishes aren't so that my brother and I would have had a better childhood, no I truly wish this for him so that he could have enjoyed life.  But he is tuned to his default setting and hasn't ever made a hint of change that has been consistent. 

It will be three weeks this Friday that he left the message.  Funny, it was that Friday afternoon he found his keys that had fallen behind his nightstand.  Gee, not even an apology...not that I'm expecting one nor do I want one.  Deep down I think he knows that what he says isn't true and just maybe these are his futile attempts to get us back into slave hood.  Who knows?   I do know this, there is freedom from controlling and manipulative people.  Freedom comes in different ways on an individual basis but freedom comes.   

"People aren't born good or bad.  Maybe they're born with tendencies either way, but it's the way you live your life that matters."  Cassandra Clare