Overcoming the Sins of the Crybaby Father

I’m so sick of these guys who come rolling up, overflowing with entitlement, acting like they’re the stud of the ranch. You can perceive their attitude in the set of their jaw and the subtle tension in their shoulders.The way they move is a threat. The way they look at you suggests they’re willing to fight if you so much as hint that you’re going to stand up for your rights.These pitiful little crybabies are powder kegs of stunted emotional development. They demand that all their needs are met and they don’t care about anyone else.Worst of all, they’ve been coddled their whole lives. At every step of the way they’ve been able to look around and see their viewpoint validated. They see the model for their worldview reflected in television, film, books, and the political landscape.They are the worst of the worst. They’re fragile and cruel.On top of everything else. there’s an army of people out there who insist on apologizing for their atrocious behavior. There’s an army of people who are convinced that underneath that abusive exterior is some imaginary kernel of decency.That’s all nonsense.These men are empty vessels. They have nothing to offer. They’ll stomp angrily to their graves inflicting pain along the way and they’ll leave nothing of value behind them when they’re gone.All they do is destroy. Somehow, those of us who are decent and who do all the work are expected to carry the shame of these loathsome men.I’m done.My own father was a textbook example of the entitled, conservative, patriarch. He liked to bluster and act tough. He used his physicality and his sharp wit to beat us down. But inside, he was pathetic and fragile and always on the verge of tears.If he was so strong, why was it always my job to protect his illusion of identity?He liked to come at me when I was young and my body was still developing. I’ve always had large hips. Even when I was so thin I couldn’t keep my pants up with a belt, it looked like I had “love handles.”For most of my early life, I thought I was freakishly deformed. I came to peace with it, but my father pestered me about it endlessly. “You’ve got to get in shape, we’ve got to do something about your love handles.”As an adult, I know that all people are beautiful. We should grow up to celebrate each other. Human beings can do amazing things. A friend of mine lost her legs in a car accident. Today she’s running on prosthetics. She’s beautiful. She’s an inspiration.But the conservative ideology always wants conformity. When they see something, anything that’s not how they expect it to be, they pick at it until it bleeds.They do this every time.It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized I was just going through a development phase. My father’s attitude was wrong on two levels. He shouldn’t have acted as if the things that made me different were somehow wrong, and he should have known that children often have awkward phases as they grow.Thanks for your support: 30% off 💙 40% off 💙 50% off 💙 60% offInstead, he picked the low-hanging fruit and thought it would be funny to leverage my insecurities for emotional torture.Eventually, I started to fight back. My father has always had an issue with weight. So, I began to respond to attacks on my body with attacks on his. I’m not particularly proud of this since as I said, all people are beautiful. But when you’re a child and you are treated with cruelty, cruelty is what you learn.This is the sin of the crybaby father. As an adult, I learned the error of my ways. As a child, I simply tried to survive.I discovered an odd thing when I turned the tables of body shaming back on him. He began to sulk.The whole image of the tough guy who stormed into the room and who looked ready to physically assault everyone who challenged him, was suddenly reduced to a blubbering mass.Shame is the ultimate weapon of conservatives. They shame you with their attacks. When you turn their attacks back on them, they try to shame you for your cruelty.I’m so done with this.The entire population of the United States of America has a childhood trauma bond with conservatives. Most of us learn that it’s easier to apologize for the endless cruelty of conservatives rather than stand up to them.They have endless tricks. No matter what you do, they always wriggle out of accountability and determine that somehow you are to blame for everything.That’s not true. Conservatives are to blame. Their entire ideology is based on preserving patriarchal entitlement. They hide this by saying it’s tradition, but they’re lying. All they care about is ensuring that mediocre, crybaby men get to maintain the power they’ve grown accustomed to wielding.But here’s the thing: they don’t deserve it. They haven’t earned it. It’s time to wrest it from them.At some point along the way, I stopped responding to crocodile tears. When I grew into my body and began to attract the attention of the girls my age, my father became extremely jealous. The abuses stopped when I got big enough to stare him in the eyes. All of a sudden he became more careful. The “accidental” assaults came to an end. My hand stopped getting slammed into doors, he stopped his reckless gestures that left me with a bloody nose, I was no longer tossed face first into shallow water to strike the sand beneath.It’s strange how the physical attacks ended when I became strong enough to fight back. But even now he insists all that was unintentional.It was unintentional, but it stopped when hurting me became a threat to him. Convenient.I’m done believing that we all have some obligation to bend over backwards to protect the fragile ego of these crybaby losers. I’m sick and tired of listening to rude and obnoxious conservative men who think they’re entitled to a death grip on every lever of control.I’m also fed up with all the apologists who don’t realize they only defend these monstrous jerks because they haven’t processed their own childhood trauma.Entitled, conservative, defenders of the patriarchy lack merit. These men have no objective other than to protect themselves and inflict cruelty on everyone else. There’s no complexity to them. There’s no secret. Their threat that bad things will happen if we renounce them is a lie.How do I know?Because I renounced my father. I cast him out. I couldn’t bear the thought of him leveraging the confusion of an awkward developmental stage to permanently damage the psyche of my kids.I chose to look forward rather than back. I stopped the cycle of generational trauma by treating my children like people rather than threats to my power. I helped rather than sabotaged. I treated them with compassion. There were no “accidental” moments of violence. I uplifted my children because I know their psyche is more important than protecting the self-serving ego of a crybaby patriarch.It’s time that we held all entitled, conservative, crybaby men accountable. Stop letting them off the hook. They are the cause of all our traumas and it’s time we started saying it. There’s nothing good about their ideology. Every step along the way of the journey they take inflicts misery on the innocent. The entitled, patriarchal, conservative mindset must be scrubbed from our cultural identity. It must be sent to the scrapheap of history.They are the enablers of atrocities. They are the architects of all human suffering. Stop deferring to their authority. They’re weak. They’re crybabies. They’re losers. They can dish it out but they can’t take it.They’ve been exposed.The only question that remains is whether the rest of our society is going to continue to passively enable their abuses, or if they’re going to find the courage to become champions of the innocent.Thanks for your support: 30% off 💙 40% off 💙 50% off 💙 60% offI'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe