Thirty Days with My Father: Finding Peace from Wartime PTSD
Written and Narrated By: Christal Presley
Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
So very fragmented winds up being so very moving…
Okay so, like, this audiobook: Thirty Days with My Father, should come with a trigger warning. For anyone who walked around like a zombie during their childhood, afraid that those eggshells beneath their feet would crunch, make a sound, attract the attention of the Monster Who Lived Under The Same Roof? Seriously, I had a stomach ache as I listened to parts of this.
What starts as author Christal Presley’s attempt to finally release herself from the pain of her past, her sense that her future will never be filled with peace, turns into a long descent into the hell that was her childhood. A thirty-day project, calling her father each day and asking about him, asking about his experiences in the Vietnam War, has her jumping outta her skin and seeking a therapist, fearful of what-all memories will be dredged up, fearful of what self-destructive tendencies will be triggered. Keep a journal, the therapist tells her. And so Presley does.
Her father was just a kid when he was drafted and sent overseas. He didn’t understand what the war was all about, and when he came back, it was to be shunned by society. He met Christal’s mother, a small, quiet woman, and the two were married. There was only the one child, Christal, and Mom used to tell the little girl, Isn’t it good that I didn’t have any more children? Isn’t it good that it’s only you and me who have to live through this? As tho’ Christal was so resilient that it wouldn’t matter that her father’s silences, followed by his rages and declarations that he was going to kill himself, taking his rifle with him to the river… would NOT leave scars.
Christal, tho’ she didn’t go to war, suffered from intergenerational PTSD, and life bottomed out for her. This book is a back and forth of her memories, of her bouts of depression and self-destructive tendencies, with a phone call made to her father every day. Then there’s a jump to a journal entry as she tries to make sense of the tsunami of emotions and memories, the feelings that flood her after each attempt at connection. This is a woman who forgot all the good memories her mother keeps trying to cram down her throat because holding onto ANY memories was just way too painful. The only comfort she found, the only safe place to hide, was with her animal companions. Dad wasn’t safe, and Mom wasn’t a safe place to land: Every time Christal cried out for help, Mom told her to pray harder, Jesus, God would fix her.
And so her first few phone calls are made with vast amounts of fear and a hope that p’raps Dad won’t answer the phone. Christal is terrified. And she’s never sure when a conversation will trigger an episode, a trip to the river with a rifle, Dad saying he’s going to end all the suffering.
But her father has thought of it over the years, and through these phone calls, he realizes that Christal and Life are offering him a gift: The chance to be seen as the person he is, the man who was forever scarred by war, the man forever misunderstood. Little by little, the two, father and daughter, start some real sharing, and it danged near broke my heart how excited he was to be seen, to share, to say where he’d been. He encourages Christal to visit a VA Hospital, something she dreads due to visits made there when she was but a little girl, seeing the lack of limbs, the vacant stares. But when she finally does visit, she sees men just like her father, desperate to be seen, desperate to voice their stories, tho’ they’re so very frightened of sharing those stories with their own families. A chance encounter there brings her face to face with a Vietnam veteran who understands, who sees through Christal, how he himself may’ve passed on his own PTSD to his own children. He sees that he wishes for it to stop right there, that he will open up to his own family.
A further encounter is with another woman, a daughter of a veteran, who also has the same fears that Christal does, the fear to open up and engage with the world. The two form an exhilarating friendship, realizing that they are not alone in what’s been a scary and unsafe world. The children of veterans are their own family.
Yes, there’s quite a bit of jumping around in this book, but the evolving relationship between father and daughter, and even between mother and daughter, is moving beyond belief and so worth the listening time. The narration is just a taaaaad off as Christal narrates this herself, and she sounds soooo very young, not like the woman who’s a scarred child who’s suddenly getting up in years and discovering that she can’t live like this now that she’s creeping up on middle age. But thankfully, she does NOT do vocal gyrations to distinguish between characters, and she does NOT over-emote when her father is breaking down. So this wasn’t a disgrace to the ears, and the matter-of-fact telling served the content very well.
The PTSD doesn’t go away for her dad, and as the two grow closer, it still rears its ugly head with her father screaming into the phone, in unutterable agony, that he didn’t join in on some of the atrocities that his comrades were told to do, but he saw them. And he’ll forever remember them. And Christal must soothe him and tell him that all is over, and he’s a good man, a kind man.
It’s over. It’s over.
But it never is. But it DOES get better. Well, at least for the sufferer of second-hand trauma. A trip to Vietnam to find LZ Bayonet has Christal feeling closer to her father than ever before, has her feeling like she’s come home to a truth that was lived, a truth that shaped her life, a truth born long before she herself was. Prayers, held hands, sweat trickling down her face, and she now KNOWS her father.
Truly, a lovely book. Gut wrenching at times, a bit self-indulgent at a few points, but always earnest and direct. There is suffering, yes. But there’s communion when all is said and done. There’s a smattering of peace. And for one soldier who felt like he left his soul in another country, there’s a bit of homecoming, and a daughter to welcome him with open arms.
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