A good friend of mine–call him John*–was raised by his mother. His father was out of the picture. I don’t know why or how it happened. John didn’t like to talk about it…which to this day kind of makes me wonder just how bad it must have been while Dad was still actually around. Because there are other things John would talk about, such as his mother’s boyfriend, and that was bad enough.

“It was all about me,” John signed, chuckling ruefully. “That’s what stays with me to this day. How he turned it all around.”

His mother, in her early forties at the time, had just come through a bad divorce, and was taking her first tentative steps back into the dating game. Her self-esteem was in shambles. A guy whom she met at a college basketball game, of all places, at first treated her and her two children very well. He was nice to John—then about nine—and his sister Beth (seven). Within half a year he earned enough trust to take them on outings: ice cream, the movies, playgrounds, wherever the kids wanted to go. Six months after that, he earned enough trust to move into their home.

Now Mark was not a physically or sexually abusive man. When I asked John for permission to tell this story, he was quite adamant that I make this point. Not out of some lingering sense of love or respect that he still held for the man, but rather out of loathing for a kind of abuse so subtle, yet so devastating, he still has difficulty describing it to this day.

“It happened very slowly,” John told me. “He just wore them down. It all centered around our signing. Beth was already better at it than Mom was, even though neither of them were seeing too much of me at the time. I was only home from school every few weeks.”

While he can’t pinpoint how it began, John does remember a scene from breakfast. Mark would try a few awkward signs and then quit practicing or trying to memorize them. John’s mother Ellen encouraged him, but John recalls a feeling of surprise when Mark eventually just grunted, signaling his refusal with finality, and moodily finished his cereal. He then left the table, immediately becoming a bit too involved in the tasks of emptying his bowl into the sink and washing the dishes.

“His discomfort was clear,” John signed. “And I was confused. I didn’t know where it came from.”

But after a few hours Mark more or less recovered, and took the whole family to the park. He still didn’t try to sign, but he did laugh and joke with them all, and John could pick up enough of it to start feeling more at ease. By the time the bus came to take him back to school Sunday night, the incident was pretty much forgotten.

Two weeks later, however, when John came home again, the same thing happened.

“It got a bit worse each time,” he recalled. “Long silences at the dinner table, him going over to sit with Beth more than he’d sit with me when we all watched television… small stuff at first. And then one day he was talking with my mom. I remember how, until then, she had always tried to sign whenever I was around. It was sort of our unofficial family policy until he showed up.”

While they were talking in the kitchen, Ellen noticed John standing there, and did indeed begin signing. John doesn’t remember what the two of them were discussing… all he knows is that his mother would become much slower when she tried to talk and sign at the same time. Mark would grow instantly irritated with this. Impatiently he put his hand on John’s shoulder and ushered him out of the room.

“They were already starting to yell at each other before I was entirely through the door. I felt bad about it, like it was my fault.”

As the months passed, Mark’s behavior would alternate between predictable stability and the most manipulative kind of irritation John had ever seen. Even his mother stopped signing as much. Beth soon followed suit. ASL in his own home soon became sporadic enough to leave John in a perpetual state of longing and confusion.

“As soon as it got so bad I thought I was going to scream in order to just get someone to sign to me,” John signed, “Mom would suddenly sign or the two of us would go out by ourselves, and then it would normal again. Or Beth and I would be outside and then she’d sign—same thing. But Mark wouldn’t. Just absolutely would not. And that’s why he blew up one day. Mom put too much pressure on him.”

Pressure took the form of Ellen’s insistence that Mark make the proper sign for the number “six” while he was helping John finish a nagging division problem. Mark gave his usual irritated groan, but Ellen, more sensitive by now to John’s growing frustration, wouldn’t back off. So Mark suddenly slammed his hand on the table and shouted at her: “Would you just leave it alone!”

Ellen was dumbfounded. Beth was so startled she started to cry.

Exasperated, John stood up and screamed, “I’m sick of it always being about him! Okay? Just… ease up! You’re making me nuts!” Unable to handle the confrontation further, Mark left them sitting there and went for a long walk.

“That’s where it started getting bad,” John sighed, continuing his narrative. “I think he sensed that Mom was going to dump him soon, and he took that out on me. It’s always about you… It’s always about you… I think he must’ve repeated that a hundred times before Mom finally kicked him out.”

But she didn’t kick him out immediately, and that was the problem. It took another few months. In that interval Beth truly grew to hate her brother—a rift between them that did not heal for years. “She loved him a lot, more than I did,” he told me. “He was a lot closer to being her father than he ever was to being mine.”

His mother at times also buckled under the strain. One day, as John describes it, he walked into the living room to see her sitting in her chair, crying and smoking a cigarette. He stood frozen to the spot, his eyes tearing up as well. He had never seen her like this before.

She saw him there and snapped, “I just want something to work out, for once!” She wiped angrily at her eyes, trembling and looking around frantically for her ashtray. She couldn’t find it in time and had to stand up and shake her blanket out. John didn’t quite catch exactly what she had just said, and at the time, he didn’t ask. But she remembered, and when he asked her about it years later, she told him. She also told him that was one of the worst moments of her life up to that point, topping even her divorce from his father.

“You know,” John told me, “I wanted to snap the guy’s finger off. That’s how much I hated him back then—and sometimes still do. He accidentally poked me in the chest one day, did I tell you that? In the middle of his all about you rant. Just a light poke. But I wanted to snap it off and shove it right through his damned sternum.”

He sat back then, trembling visibly as he tried to bring himself back under control. We were in a mildly busy pub, but even in our booth in the far corner, people were now looking at us. Had John lost control of his voice, somehow? Were they just watching him sign? Or could they feel that anger, too?

John looked at me, noting my unease, and breathed in deeply. “That wasn’t about me,” he signed, reaching down and gently tapping the table between us with his forefinger. As if to emphasize just how hard it was. “It took me a long time to figure that out. More time than he’s worth. Because that’s who it was really all about. Just him.”

*All names in this story have been changed.