I Was the Mole in a Family of Mallets
How God rescued me from a life of getting whacked.
You’re probably familiar with the popular arcade game called Whac-A-Mole, where mechanical moles randomly pop out of their holes while you try whacking them with a mallet before they retreat. I grew up in a “reverse Whac-A-Mole” world, feeling like the only mole in a family of mallets.
All the men in my family had significant issues. When I was 12, my dad left our family for a married woman with three kids. While some divorced fathers become “Disneyland dads”—showering their kids with gifts and fun events to make up for their physical absence—mine didn’t. He withheld both financial and emotional support, and he rejected or mocked conventional displays of affection, even to the point of withholding birthday or Christmas gifts.
He was also verbally abusive. According to my mom, as he was exiting our family, he only came home to eat, sleep, and berate my brother and me. He especially relished picking on me, nicknaming me “Idiot Child” (as well as something worse that is crude and unprintable). In Matthew 7:9, Jesus asks, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” Well, I have someone I can nominate.
But my dad wasn’t the only disaster in our family. His father was a sullen man who apparently had a mean streak. I’m told that when my dad was about five years old, the two of them were having a conversation about electricity. My grandfather handed my dad a paper clip and told him to stick it into an electrical outlet to see what would happen. Such displays of malice may help explain why my dad ended up such a mess.
When my grandfather was in his 60s, he decided he had cancer, so one day he jumped in front of a speeding train ...