My dad bought me a beautiful MGB convertible mini for my 16th birthday. He wanted the California blonde movie poster daughter. But it was a 20 year old temperamental car & HE was a car salesman. So he knew about how they break down & what they require for maintenance. He knew I only made a few dollars an hour & needed a car to get to school & work.
Predictably, it broke down every month. The make, year, & model - this was a known outcome and yet, he blamed me.
Every time it broke down it was my fault. I drove correctly, put good gas in it, & gave it the maintenance that was suggested. Oil change, tune up etc.
But a highly tuned sports car that needs constant, expert care is NOT the car you get if you're going to be violent everytime it breaks down.
After a year of the abuse, he decided to sell my car without telling me. I was left without a car & I had a job & school to navigate.
After being angry that I now needed a ride to those places he decided he didn't want to drive me anywhere.
So he took the next trade in for under $200 that he could find.
There was no floorboard on the driver side.
The dashboard was cracked & fumes from the engine came inside. It was missing the gear that attached the muffler so it sometimes dragged on the ground, making sparks. The back bumper was attached to the body w a cord. It would not start 6 times out of 10 so I had to park on hills & bump start it.
It over heated & the only way to keep it cool was to run the heater on high & let the fan cool it, in summer. I often was stuck on the side of the road until it would be cold enough to start.
I covered the gaping hole in the floorboard with some fabric I salvaged from an old dress I couldn't wear anymore.
I used to make jokes about it.
Like the time a lizard got inside & ran around at my feet almost causing me to crash. Or the mouse I couldn't get to come away who would randomly run across the dash at 60 mph.
I developed intense stress around the unreliability of automobiles.
When I finally bought my own I needed it to be a manual shift because I was so afraid of not being able to start it.
Until then, though, I had Stella. This abomination held together by duct tape & a little girl's dress.
My father, insisted that repairs, insurance, & registration be paid by me w my minimum wage job.
My brother, saw this hardship, & from college, sent me a gas station credit card with which I could pay for gas & oil changes.
I was 17 years old.
Shortly after this my father lost his job & i ended paying for our mortgage & his top shelf vodka by getting a better paying job selling Lawrence Welk resort homes, by cold calling pensioners.
He made a bad choice, punished me for the outcome, left me to fix the mess, & then needed me to get a new job to pay for his vodka.
I still have nightmares about waiting on dark sides of roads, waiting for my dad to come pick me up, at night after a breakdown. Getting into his car, knowing that the next few days held abuse after abuse, ws one of the hardest things i've done, but I had no choice. WE have a choice. We CAN change our situation.
We're living under an abusive dad who punishes us for living in the clusterfck he left us, & then squeezes us until we have no more fight. Watching #fauxty5 is like reliving my childhood. The hate, abuse, the crimes - it's the same thing.
The same facial expressions, the same racism, the same greed, the same behavior. My father died in 2009 but since 2016 he's been abusing us from the top down. We all know that abusing children is wrong when parents do it but somehow it's ok since it's the government? #fauxty5
We need to stop thinking politics is not connected to the conditions of our lives & those that cause suffering. I may have been the one shivering in the cold, on the side of the road after a late shift at the restaurant. I was the one terrified everytime I got in my car. I was The one who drove every time w white knuckles, stress beating in my ears. I was the one who spent every day filled w fear about what would happen next.
None of it would have happened if HE hadn't decided to make off the cuff decisions to feed his ego, or last minute choices to
To take the worst available option to stop the annoyance of being needed. Everything is connected. It's not family, not faith, not creed. There's 1 fight. 1 source. 1 solution. Stop abuse. Help the vulnerable. GOP has become the party of abuse. The only thing they value is the marching order from their alpha abusers. It's abusers vs the rest of us. Not left vs right Not blue vs red Not men vs women It's abusers vs THE REST OF US
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