To my (biological, but certainly not practical) father - 108 pounds

To the one who put the heaviest weight upon my shoulders…

I will not be thanking you, so you can forget about that high-drama bullshit right now. You have added no benefit to my life, and your actions did not “make me stronger” or “make me who I am” or “make me [proud of or like myself].” You committed the worst sin a father could commit against his own daughter. After physically abusing me for years and years, you held me down, put your finger in your mouth and touched my labium. For months thereafter, you added weight upon weight to my already heavily-burdened shoulders.

After ‘asking’ if you could massage my back, you massaged my barely budding breasts and made me feel like I could not leave. You fondled my breasts when we took that camping trip while you were sleeping next to your wife and made me feel like I had to stay silent until I thought of asking if I could use the bathroom. I left the tent we were all sharing and just cried, in the woods, in the middle of the night. You climbed on top of me while I was sleeping and made me afraid of leaving my doors unlocked. You pushed your disgusting genitalia on top of mine and pulled on my hair as I cried. You told me to “shut up or [you would] make it hurt.” You made me shower with my baby brother while you watched and you told me to shave my pubic hair because it “look[ed] like a jungle down there.”

Prior to sexually abusing me you had already thrown so much weight on me.

You punched me in the nose for opening the door to another neighborhood girl who came by to see if I wanted to play outside because you told me previously not to answer the door for anyone. You then cancelled my plans to be picked up by my grandmother and go shopping and told me to “get in the shower with [my] clothes on” so that the blood would rinse out of my clothes. I stood there, fully clothed, shaking and crying as I scraped away my own blood with my fingernails. You pushed me over a coffee table once for “talking back” to my step-mother. You hit me so frequently that I cannot recall how many times you would punch me in the stomach until I fell back into the couch and then tell me to “get up” again so you could keep punching me. You would often add additional punches for “crying.”

You dragged me by my hair. You put me into headlocks. You whipped me with a belt. You once made me stand in a corner, facing it with my arms stretched straight out, and you hit me with a belt each time my arms moved. I was seven.

You did things that only someone who completely lost their shit would do. Like that time when you decided to abuse me the entire night after I came home from school because your wife said I peed on the couch and I kept telling you I did not do that. To this day, I still do not think I peed on the couch. If I did, it was surely an accident. And regardless, it never mattered how intentionally I had acted; you should not have abused me. You punched me repeatedly in the bathroom until I “confessed” to something I do not think I did. Then you punched me for “lying.” You filled up the sink with ice cold water and forced my head under so I could not breathe. You then made me take off all of my clothes and sit in it for hours while you repeated to me your reasoning for my punishment. You were disappointed each time I could not muster up the memory to repeat your verbally abusive remarks. After all, I was still crying and sitting in ice cold water with a sore tummy as you berated and tested me. You then gave up on that form of punishment and brought me to the kitchen where you had a can of worms and a measuring cup with a single turd in it. You gave me an option - you can eat the worms or the poop. Still crying, as I reached for a worm and hung it over my open mouth, you burst into laughter and told me to stop and put the worm down.

The first memory I have of being abused was when I was four and we lived in Florida.

I don’t remember what I did. I think I peed my bed. So you took off all my clothes and put me in the bathroom and told me to stand up, and that you would know if I sat down. Then you closed the door and turned off the lights and left. All I can recall from that memory is being cold in the dark and crying.

You told me “you have a big nose, kid” and “you’re just going to have to get used to it.” Before you said that, I never felt ashamed of my face. In fact, I felt proud to look like my father.

After each time you hit me, you would put your head into your hands and say, “I’m sorry Bec, I don’t know why I do it.” And I always forgave you. If you had never began sexually assaulting me, I probably never would have left. I might have just carried that weight around with me like it was nothing my entire life.

No, this is still not a ‘thank you’ moment. You are the worst person I have ever met. Not only did you physically, sexually, and verbally abuse me the entire time I remained in your custody (over a decade), but you lie to this day about it all. You made me lose my entire family. You made those other pieces of shit believe you over a child because that is where you grew from - shit. Didn’t anyone ever explain manure to you? Shit can be used to grow flowers, but you used it to spoil, kill, and poison. Because of you, I have always been afraid. I have had nightmares almost every night of my life. I thought I would never live to make it to high school. Let alone college, law school, or the rest of this beautiful life I am making for myself.

You can keep your pile of shit family - the persons who locked me in that back bedroom during the Thanksgiving dinner where I finally had a restraining order against you for sexually abusing me. They locked me in there to have dinner with you, and I will never forget that. I will also never grieve for them. Because I got me - and I am pretty fucking wonderful. And they got a child molester. I help kids. You harm them. So that’s the crowd you run with. And that is your choice and theirs.

I have been thinking about what happens when we die, and I think there is a good chance that no matter what it involves - you will have to live with yourself - your choices, your memories, and your impact on the world. You will live in eternity with a man who molests and abuses children and who lies to his family. I will live with a surviving warrior who has brought good to the world.

Nevertheless, the pain I feel to this day as I have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (thanks dad!) often feels like a weight I cannot carry. I never know when the pain will become too much, but I know I will do the best I can with whatever life I have left. I cannot calculate precisely the toll you took on me, but I feel as though lifting only those burdens you placed upon my shoulders would require me to literally be able to carry myself. And I weigh 108 pounds right now. So I assign to you the weight of 108 pounds of pain that I carry every day. The truth is that though I feel it, this pain does not belong to me. This is yours. And you need to pick it up and carry it forward, or else be doomed to eternity with it.

I do not know what happened to you during your youth, but you should know two things. 1) I am sorry for whatever innocent child used to be a part of you that died somewhere along the way because whatever you went through I never would have let you go through had you been my child. 2) I would never molest my child. That is a choice you made. And you can never take that back. Maybe that’s three or four things, but what the fuck do I care. I owe nothing to one so heavily indebted to me.

I hope you live a long and insufferable life with the misery you created.

I am not yours. You do not own,

Rebecca Schultz, J.D.