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He blamed my brother’s sexual orientation on an incident in the past, and nothing anyone said could get it through to our father that being gay wasn’t a choice.
Darren was born gay, the same way Joey was born straight and I was born empty.
He was who he was, and it broke my heart that he wasn’t accepted in his own home.
Living with a homophobic father was torture for my brother.
I hated Dad for that, more than I hated him for all the other terrible things he had done through the years.
My father’s intolerance and blatant discriminating behavior toward his own son was by far the vilest of his traits.
When Darren took a year off from hurling to concentrate on his leaving cert, our father had hit the roof. Months of heated arguments and physical altercations had resulted in a huge blowout where Darren packed his bags, walked out the door, and never came back.
Five years had passed since that night, and aside from the annual Christmas card in the post, none of us had seen or heard from him.
We didn’t even have a phone number or address for him.
He as good as vanished.
After that, all of the pressure our father had put on Darren was switched onto the younger boys—who were, in our father’s eyes, his normal sons.
When he wasn’t down at the pub or the bookie’s, our father was dragging the boys off to training and matches.
He focused all of his attention on them.
I was of no use to him, what with being a girl and all that.
I wasn’t good at sports and I didn’t excel at school or any club activity.
In my father’s eyes, I was just a mouth to feed until eighteen.
That wasn’t something I had come up with, either. Dad told me this on countless occasions.
After the fifth or sixth time, I grew immune to the words.
I’d long since grown tired of begging for love from a man who, in his own words, never wanted me.
The pressure he put on Joey concerned me though, and it was the reason I felt so much guilt every time he had to come to my aid.
He was in sixth year, his final year of secondary school, and had his own stuff going on, with GAA, his part-time job at the petrol station, the leaving cert, and his girlfriend, Aoife.
I knew that when I hurt, Joey hurt too. I didn’t want to be a burden around his neck, someone he was constantly having to look out for, but it had been that way since as far back as I could remember.
To be honest, I couldn’t stand to look at the disappointment in my brother’s eyes another minute in that school. Passing him in the hallways, knowing that when he looked at me, his expression caved.
To be fair, the teachers at BCS had tried to protect me from the lynch mob, and the guidance teacher at BCS, Mrs. Falvy, even organized fortnightly counseling sessions with a school psychologist throughout second year until funding was cut.
Mam had managed to scrape together the money for me to see a private counselor, but at eighty euros per session, and having to censor my thoughts at my mother’s request, I’d only seen her five times before lying to my mother and telling her that I felt better.
I didn’t feel better.
I never felt better.
I just couldn’t bear to watch my mother struggle.
I despised being a financial burden on her, so I sucked it up, slapped on a smile, and continued to walk into hell every day.
But the bullying never stopped.
