Watch David Lynch read his essay “Family Farm Survivor,” or read the text below.
Family Farm Survivor, by David Lynch
My dad told my older brother that it was time for him to get rid of me. This started the worst period of my life.
As the heir apparent to the farm, it was also my brother’s job to serve as my dad’s enforcer and carry out all the less pleasant aspects of the ‘family farming’ job as well–including clearing the way for his succession by removing any potential obstacles to that process (i.e. me).
This was nothing personal, of course. My usefulness on the farm had simply come to its natural end. My continued presence there was now starting to become an inconvenience to what my father saw as the natural order of things. This natural order meant that the chosen successor (my brother) needed to establish a clear and non-contestable claim on the farm by becoming the sole male occupant there apart from our father. The first step in that process was getting rid of any other males whose unwelcome presence might complicate the firm establishment of such a claim (me again).
To be clear, I had no problem with my brother taking over the farm from our dad. It was no secret that I had zero interest in the farm or in ever becoming a farmer myself. In addition, by that time, I was already 22 years of age, so wasn’t it high time for me to be moving on anyway?
In normal circumstances, yes: It would indeed have been time for me to be on my way. However, life growing up on the farm had been anything but normal for me. At best, it was hostile. At worst, it was abusive. Correctly predicting that my existence as the third boy born into the family (the third wheel) would one day prove to be a threat to his highest priority (an orderly farm transfer), my dad had treated me accordingly from Day 1 and demanded that everyone else do likewise.
At every turn I had been scapegoated, demonized and isolated. It was like there was the rest of the family–which was legitimate–and then there was me, an uninvited guest who had turned up late to the party and grudgingly been allowed to stay, although no one was very happy about it. In fact, oftentimes my presence alone seemed more than enough to disgust and enrage my father. It seems that my birth had been a point of deep bitterness and contention between my parents from the start. As a result my father resolved that whilst he might just barely tolerate my existence, he would never truly recognize or accept me as one of his own. For the unforgivable sin of my birth he would see to it that I always remained an outsider in my own family. Of course, he would never tell me this himself directly, but then again he didn’t need to when all such hateful messages could be just as effectively communicated to me indirectly via my siblings.
More directly, he would often simply ignore me or give me the silent treatment for long periods of time. I never had even one normal conversation with the man. He remained as opaque and unknowable to me as The Sphinx all my life. Nor was he interested in getting to know me any better. It seemed as though his mind was made up about me from Day 1 and there was nothing I could do to change it. He would often explode in a rage at me for little or no reason. Or bark constant demands for me to do ever-more jobs around the farm. Then explode again because his deliberately vague instructions had not been followed to a tee. This left me anxious and always walking on eggshells around him. I eventually became so fearful of setting him off that I started to mumble every time I would talk to him—which would set him off again. ‘Speak like a man!’ he would then roar at me.
Without consulting with me, my teachers or anyone else, my dad cut short my education at the earliest opportunity. He unilaterally decided for me that I should drop out of secondary school without any qualifications in my mid-teens to come home and work on the farm for him. No one raised any objections to that on my behalf. My own thoughts or opinions on it were neither sought nor required. In fact, they were irrelevant. While such a practice may have been common on farms in the 1950s, by the 1990s it was unheard of for anyone coming from a supposedly ‘good’ family not to at least finish their secondary schooling. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this action narrowed my options considerably for escaping what would ultimately become a very abusive situation.
As a direct result of all that constant contempt, discouragement, and rejection from those closest to me, by the time I had reached maturity I was far from being ready to go out and take on the world. Instead, I was at my lowest point–emotionally crippled, deeply confused, hurting badly inside, shamed to the core of my being and in desperate need of the one thing I was never allowed to have: familial love, understanding, and support. In classic carrot-and-stick Irish family farm tradition, I was always led to believe that all these things were constantly just around the corner for me–just as soon as I proved myself worthy of them. Of course none of this was ever stated explicitly–it was merely implied. Or maybe it’s just what I told myself in order to stay sane in the face of unrelenting rejection and disappointment. Somehow, though, the acceptance I craved always remained frustratingly just out of my reach. Unfortunately, things were not about to get any better.
Before, life on the farm had always been lonely and miserable for me. Now, it quickly became utterly unbearable as my brother began a relentless campaign of bullying, threats, smears, vicious ridicule and physical intimidation against me at our dad’s bidding. Although my dad was careful to ensure that my brother’s abuse never escalated to actual physical beatings, his treatment of me was still brutalizing and traumatizing. Again, I was in absolutely no shape emotionally at the time to deal with any of this.
My brother’s daily diatribes against me had a varied quality to them in that one day could be obscenely brash and bombastic: ‘Get the fuck out! Get a life! Get a job! We’re fucking sick of carrying you!’ The next day, however, he could be quite delicate and almost seemingly sympathetic: ‘Life isn’t fair. This is the way things are. We all have to go out and make our own way in the world sometime.’ On another day he would be dismissive and full of ridicule: ‘No one cares! Get over it! Stop moping around like a loser and get lost, you fucking retard! Hahaha!’ The intensity of his verbal assaults was always modulating up and down as a way to keep me off-balance and inflict the maximum amount of uncertainty and psychological distress.
My mother and older sister were also resident on the farm at the time, so they were aware of what was going on too. However, they both lived in fear of my dad just as much as we all did and so would not intervene on my behalf. I also had one more brother (the eldest), but he had wisely emigrated to Australia years earlier. Besides, ‘officially’ my dad had no idea that this abuse was even taking place. My brother would always wait until he was safely out of the room before starting another one of his tirades against me so that our father could always maintain plausible deniability. My dad liked to keep his hands clean so that he could never be accused of being too cruel and heartless, and thereby maintain his moral authority over us.
That was also why my dad couldn’t just kick me out or even get directly involved himself–it would make him look bad. Up to then, despite frequent and unfounded accusations to the contrary, I had remained a good, loyal and hard-working son for him, so if he tried to kick me out now without a good justification he would look horribly two-faced, cold-hearted and hypocritical. He needed a good pretext to get rid of me. That was why he was sending my brother to antagonize and provoke me beyond all endurance in the hope that I would react violently or make some other mistake and thereby give him a legitimate reason as to why I had to leave the family.
At this point, I should have simply cut my losses and walked away from the farm and my family for good. The writing was on the wall: My time was up. One way or the other, no matter what else happened from there on out, my family and my place in it were finished for me. I was no longer welcome there. It was no longer my home. It had already been decided by the only person in our family who mattered.
Unfortunately, my bond with my family, toxic though it was, was still primal in its strength and could not easily be broken. I could no more suddenly sever my connection to them than I could cut off one of my own limbs. That just left my brother to clumsily hack away at that connection as a butcher might swing at a stringy piece of meat with a blunt cleaver.
What followed were months of psychological and emotional violence that took a huge toll on my heart and mind. I felt like I was being slowly destroyed from the inside out. Everything I had ever thought was true or hoped for or believed in was all being taken away from me and I was being left with nothing. Worse than that, all my worst fears were coming true. I had lived in denial about how much my dad hated me all my life. Now that protective shield was being forcibly ripped away from me. A dam wall of deep agonizing pain was being breached inside of me. I was not ready to face this horror. I knew it would kill me as surely as a knife through the heart. There was no way I could survive it. I felt my self-control begin to slip away as my thoughts turned dark and murderous. I was terrified of what was going to come next.
In lieu of being able to walk away, now would have been a great time for me to reach out to somebody—anybody—outside the family and ask for help. I needed to admit that what was happening to me was more than I could possibly deal with alone. I needed to let someone know that I was suffering badly and desperately needed some support. But it all felt so pointless at the time. What good would it do? What the hell could they do about it? Say ‘There, there’ as they patted me on the shoulder patronizingly? Besides, who really cared anyway? People had their own problems to deal with. In any case, a deep sense of shame prevented me from telling others about it. Also, I was still mired in denial and confusion about what exactly was happening to me, so that made it hard to communicate it coherently to others. Once or twice in sheer desperation I even attempted to convey to my abuser himself how badly I was hurting, but he assured me that I was just fine and to stop being such a big fucking baby about it.
Even my sister got drafted into the war-effort against me as a spy and informant. She would keep tabs on my movements and rifle through the drawers in my room in an attempt to find dirt on me while I was out. Admittedly, it was nothing she hadn’t done before, but whereas previously it had all just been for fun, now there was a renewed impetus to it. My dad wanted me out of the house sooner rather than later and one way or another he was going to find a way to make it happen.
I often thought that if my family spent even half as much time talking to me as they did about me then we would have had a great relationship. The strange thing about it was that all this cloak and dagger psychological warfare was so unnecessary. We were not a poor family. On the contrary, we were a well-off family. Our grandfather’s claim to fame was having once been listed in Stubb’s Gazette as the largest landowner in the county. Even then, at 300 acres, we still had one of the largest farms in the locality. We had options. We had alternatives. Ways and means. My sister at home and my brother in Oz had both attended prestigious colleges entirely at our father’s expense and with his full support. All their futures were assured. So why was I the one being left with no way out? It didn’t have to end like this. We didn’t have to resort to this kind of vicious back-stabbing, cut-throat behaviour.
In a last-ditch effort I even tried to confide in my poor little mouse of a mother as we were driving in the car one day, but I was too late. My dad had already got there first, of course, and warned her off giving me any support whatsoever. She sheepishly volunteered that perhaps it would be best if I just did what they wanted and went on my way. I lost it then, roared at her in frustration, and my poor mother got a big fright because she thought I might crash the car. It was then that I hit rock-bottom.
At that point I acquired a gun.
It was a shotgun, to be exact. I did not want to hurt any member of my family with it. On the contrary, I wanted to protect them. From me. From the massive rage, violence and agonizing sense of betrayal that was boiling up inside of me. As the pressure on me inexorably built up I knew it was just a matter of time before all those things exploded out of me. Either I or another member of my family would get seriously hurt or killed as a result of it. I desperately wanted to prevent that from happening at all costs, but it was like we were stuck on a runaway train that we were powerless to stop.
But if I couldn’t stop it, maybe I could swerve it? Maybe I could make it so that when that violence finally did spill out of me my family were no longer the intended targets of it? I could displace the violence and instead use it to set myself free from the painful trap that I was in. I could use the gun to get what I thought I needed to become independent from my family: I could rob a bank with it. Then the pain would be over. Then I could show my family that I didn’t need them anymore. That I could be strong without them. Instead of the nothing that they had reduced me to. Then I could finally leave them on my own terms without feeling so wronged and betrayed by them.
To be clear, I have never in my life been a violent or aggressive person. In fact, I am the exact opposite of that because I always went out of my way to not be like my dad. I never got into fights. I never got into arguments. I never even raised my voice. On the contrary, I carefully avoided any kind of confrontation or conflict all my life. I always wanted to be as accommodating, understanding and respectful of other people as possible. This was partly down to nature (I took after my mother—another reason for my dad to hate me) and partly due to an upbringing that caused me to struggle with intense feelings of shame and worthlessness. As a result, any kind of fight or rancour within the family was always unbearably painful and upsetting to me because it destroyed the idealized (and completely false) image that I had of us in my head at that time.
Exactly how I planned on making the transformation from a quiet farm boy who wouldn’t say boo to a goose to a hardened criminal was not at all clear at that point. Perhaps I assumed it would all just come naturally to me on the day. Nor did I have any experience or proficiency with firearms, so that too would be a steep learning curve. And of course, I was somehow going to pull all this off completely alone, in perfect secrecy and without any outside assistance from anyone else.
Although I still appeared to be functioning normally from the outside, internally I think my rational mind was long gone by that stage. I had lost all touch with reality and was now living out some kind of strange and deadly fantasy. My thought process was not very clear at the time, but somehow in my mind having that gun enabled me to lessen the unbearable psychological pressure I was under. To reduce the sense of intense victimization I was feeling to the point where I could continue to survive and believe that my family was not really falling apart at the seams. To feel like I could take action and have some agency over my own life instead of just being endlessly acted upon and broken down into ever-smaller pieces all the time.
Of course my ‘plan’ to become an outlaw was the poorly-imagined fantasy of a damaged and lost child who had watched too many Hollywood movies. It was pathetic and doomed to tragedy and failure. I was a shy and backward farm boy without the knowledge, temperament or ability to even attempt the insane and desperate act I was contemplating. I was about to make the biggest mistake of my life and in so doing, ruin not only my own life, but my entire family’s lives too. Maybe not directly as I feared, but the consequences of my actions on their lives would still be devastating to them.
I didn’t want to do it. But I had to do it. If I didn’t do it then everything would be destroyed. I had to do it. Didn’t I?
And then it was all over.
Normally when your own family spies on your every move it’s generally considered intrusive and unhealthy. However, in this one instance it proved to be a literal lifesaver for me. As instructed, my sister followed me one day and saw me with the weapon. She went straight to our father to tell him about it. At first they thought it must be some kind of joke. Then he searched the outhouse nearest where I was seen with it, discovered the gun, immediately realized the deadly seriousness of it and figured out it was no joke. He confronted me. I reluctantly told him of my ‘plan’ for the gun. For once in his life, he was left shocked.
The gun disappeared.
The relentless hate campaign against me came to an end after that. Everything went quiet again. Life went on after a fashion, but things were never really the same for our family. We were finished. There was no more denying it now. I left first. Then my sister. In the end, my father got exactly what he wanted.
I no longer have any contact with any member of my family. My father died a few years later. I was already estranged from him for a long time by then. All the trouble and trauma we went through back then was all for nothing in the end as, by the time he died, he still hadn’t gotten around to the task of making a clear will that named a definitive successor. That led to a protracted inheritance battle between my brother and my other two siblings that dragged on for years. I couldn’t have cared less by that point. It was never about the farm for me. I left Ireland for good in 2007 and haven’t been back since.
I live somewhere a lot warmer now. However, every time I think about how close my family came to the brink of disaster back in those days a chill still runs through me.
I try to keep up with the news from rural Ireland. Nonetheless, there are too many stories about our family farms ending up in violence and tragedy just like ours almost did (four such examples in less than one calendar year from 2020 to 2021). Each incident not only destroys a family, but tears the heart and soul out of an entire community. And those are just the most serious incidents that make the papers. How many hundreds more incidents that are less serious happen every year that no one ever hears about?
I was wrong to pick up a gun back then. Violence or the threat of it is never the answer to any problem. But if I hadn’t picked it up, if I hadn’t somehow caused an interruption in the path of that runaway train, where would I be now? I wish I could have been strong enough to just walk away from that horribly painful and messy situation before then, but I wasn’t.
The Irish farming industry always presents a very wholesome, family-friendly image of itself to the world. It’s useful for marketing, if nothing else. However, it is important to recognise that some families have had a very different experience. People always seem to think that it’s wonderful that so much of our farmers’ sense of identity is bound up in the land. However, it can also be dangerous to those who, through no fault of their own, come to be perceived as a threat to that all-important sense of identity. I think my experience on the farm is far more common than people like to admit. It may not play out in the exact same way for others, but the underlying themes, narratives and lethally toxic culture remains the same. Sometimes the good of the farm becomes more important than what is good for those who are on it. Every generation there are farm kids who suffer in one way or another to safeguard a legacy. For their sake, we can’t ignore their stories or pretend that they don’t exist.
Although I still carry a lot of scars from my upbringing on the farm, in many ways I am lucky to actually live a pretty good life these days, although that’s more down to luck and choosing the right partner than anything else. We are raising two beautiful kids who get on well with each other and rarely fight. We also have no scapegoating, favouritism or divide-and-conquer-type mind games going on in our family. It feels good to break the cycle of abuse. I still feel angry about the past sometimes, but I know now that it is pointless wishing ill on those who wronged me. The only true healing or redemption for me now rests solely in doing right by my kids and refusing to repeat the same mistakes that my dad made with us.
Find out more about David on our Contributors’ Page.
The Facebook group Farm Abuse Support Ireland can be found here.
To read more work from Irish farmers, browse a free online version of Voices from the Land.
(Photo: kilgarron/flickr.com/CC-BY SA 2.0)
- Family Farm Survivor, by David Lynch - July 7, 2022