Toxic
Toxic
Toxic
I tell: My dad had a dream about leaving Sweden and move to Canada. It was the great wilderness which inspired him. He also had his best friend there.
When I was eight years old we went to the Canadian Embassy in Stockholm. I remember us three children sitting very still and quiet in a sofa in a corner of the room, and mum and dad sat in armchairs in front of a desk being interviewed. In the end of the interview the woman raised and stepped to our corner of the room. She also wanted to interview us. I was only eight and I couldn´t speak English. We just sat there trying to be polite despite our lack of words. My brother do have a hearing damage, so he didn’t even hear. Mum couldn´t speak English either.
On the way home, dad felt that it didn´t go well. He stopped the car and he yelled at us. He was angry because we hadn´t said anything at the Embassy. I understood that we might have stopped dad´s plans and I remember that I felt ashamed. I thought that maybe we can try again if I learned some English. So I started to study. I had a box in my room, a green box, in which I collected words. I looked up words in a dictionary, wrote them down and I guessed how to pronounce them.
I sometimes wonder if dad was bitter for us holding him back. If he had applied for citizenship without us, he may have been accepted.
Please remember to NEVER blame a child for things he or she can´t help or influence. Please, please do remember.
I tell: In my family, dad´s words were law. He never said it out loud, but that is probably the case regarding narcissistic people. With his strong appearance, there was no question about it. We never questioned him. His perspective was the right one, and it also became our perspective. The thought of him being wrong probably never struck us. He often said bad things about other people, everything was black or white, a grayscale did not exist. That is, seeing situations from different perspectives. He decided what his opinion was. We never reasoned about anything, he was like our family´s dictator. We did not create any own thoughts or own knowledge about anyone or anything.
I tell: Dad was clearly an expert on keeping us in his grip. He constantly gave us a dose of “Feel sorry for me–preparation”. It was mainly about his back. He laid on the floor to stretch it out almost every evening, and he complained very much when he was about to get up. We all helped him.
My sister sometimes said: “Daddy will probably die young, he won´t get older than thirty with all that pain and all his hard work”. I was so young so I believed that she might be right. Of course it brought fear. Fear from the fact that dad could actually disappear any minute. It was he who kept us alive. It was he who was the important one, and now he was so worn out that he could die.
But one day as I was walking up the stairs, I saw between steps that he inside the livingroom stood up completely without a problem. A very first thought struck me that dad may be exaggerating sometimes, but I never said anything.
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