circle-of-chaos

[circle-of-chaos]

I live in a house with a verbally abusive father and I can’t escape fast enough.

As the title would suggest, I live in a house with a verbally abusive father.

He’s egotistical, micromanaging, and complains constantly about everyone else besides himself. He calls himself the king of the house and the alpha male; the kind of person who claims (every time we see someone he recognizes from high school) that he’s beat up everyone’s dad and dated everyone’s mother.

He emotionally abuses my mother for her decision to go to medical school and badgers her about how much she’s never home to cook dinner or clean the house now that she’s working at a university hospital as a PA. Lately he’s taken to making casually sexist jokes and expecting the other three of us in the house to find it funny; he always gets angry and yells at us when we don’t laugh at his jokes or reckless behavior, sexist or otherwise.

He’s politically obsessed with the hard right, going on all the time about conspiracies and fraud and ranting about democrats; and I know he’s angry that he’s not getting any kind of reaction out of the rest of us because we all have our own opinions and he wants all of us to have his opinion. Every dinner night with the extended family turns to politics and usually has the rest of us vacating the room because they all reciprocate with him.

Nobody I know would ever believe me if I told them about how he acts around the house. He’s always been the golden boy, the person that always has a smile and a conversation ready for someone if he meets them; but this is not who he is behind closed doors. We live in a tight knit Mormon community (yes I know they prefer the term “LDS” I don’t care) where everyone knows everyone because everyone grew up together and if I ever told anyone about what was going on in the house, not only would I get blown off because we’ve all refused to address this for so long, but it would eventually get back to him, and whatever god exists only knows what he’ll do if he finds out I told anyone what was happening.

I’m scared to go to the police because if it ever turned out that they couldn’t find any evidence to suggest he was an abusive person, the same kind of hell would be waiting for me because I can’t leave the house.

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Tonight he got set off because I claimed to have cleaned up after making a damn sandwich when he said that I hadn’t; yelled about me having a bad attitude and *threatened to fight me* next time I “acted out”.

He then started off on this shouting rant about how he was the only one who cleaned up anything around the house (he’s never cleaned a damn thing, I’m in charge of vacuuming and gathering the trash to take out, my sister is in charge of cleaning the kitchen and the bathrooms (something else I’m sure is a sick joke about women cleaning)); he went on to call the three of us freeloaders in the house that he pays for (He works in the water reclamation district (AKA. the Sewer district) in the city, my mother is a PA and makes way more money than he does).

My mother endures constant peppering about her bad habits and decision to work instead of remain at home; I’ve tried to talk to her several times about this, but she’s convinced herself that she needs to be the peacekeeper and the glue that holds the family together. This isn’t a family, this is two kids and a mother living with a bully that pushes us around and threatens violence when he doesn’t get his way.

I’ve been trying for ages to get a job again and get out of the house, but I’ve been applying everywhere I can for a full year and there’s no sign of anyone biting the lines I cast. Despite this big “employment boom” that’s supposedly happening post-covid where everyone’s hiring; but I also don’t want to leave my mother alone in the house with my father to push and bully her and blow every mistake she makes out of proportion.

I’m not a big person. I’m smaller and weaker than he is, and this isn’t the first time he’s threatened to fight me for one reason or another. I can’t win in a fight against that damn gorilla. All he knows is bullying and force to get his way, and I don’t know what I should do about it or how to defend myself. I don’t know how to convince my mother that she doesn’t need him to keep afloat and that keeping this family together doesn’t fall exclusively on her shoulders. I need help desperately.