If It Helps Father
The world cannot break me anymore.
This one is for the little girl who ran home from school, breathless with wanting to learn the piano, who began waking an hour before dawn to practice alone.
For her tiny fingers floating above the keys.
For her soul, growing tired from trying not to make a sound when she cried.
I don’t play anymore.
But I remember the sound.
I wanted you to hear it too.
If it helps father, every man who has ever entered my life has bluntly echoed you. You never chose me, none of them ever did too.
I shake my head side to side each day, resisting my thoughts, trying to make myself believe that I’m enough.
If it helps father, there will always be room for growth, since the word “good” was always accompanied by a “but” when it fell from your lips and landed on my heart.
We were having breakfast three days after the university entrance exam results were announced. I lied about my ranking, telling you it was higher than it was. Yet when you heard what my cousin scored you asked,
“Why did you get lower? Are you stupid?”
If it helps father, I had to suspend my master’s. My peers graduated. I did not. I ignored your calls for months until my mother said,
“Your father is not angry with you.”
If it helps father, I know your temper. Your eyes grow larger and your voice strikes like thunder.
Just like the time when I asked you if we could finish practicing the guitar, and somehow it led to an argument. I don’t really remember how. I wish I didn’t remember the words that came after too,
“I’ll break this guitar on your head,” a sentence that never became an action, but lived in the air between us, reminding me what failure felt like.
I ran into my room and buried my face in the pillow. Hours later you appeared at my door, calling my name, yet I didn’t look. Then you said,
“I have something for you.”
You got me the camera that I begged you for.
If it helps father, your money fell short from stitching the hole in my heart.
All I needed was a call from you when I was forced to sit whenever I took a shower.
I couldn’t leave the house.
I kept the curtains closed.
The room stayed dim even at noon.
We rarely spoke on the phone. You told me we could go to Cuba. That stem cell therapy might work. Your hope felt heavy in the room.
I don’t have wounds. I became the wound.
You looked me in the eye, your body loose on the couch, your jaw tight,
“You are wasting your life.”
Have you noticed I don’t call you anymore?
I don’t feel the same excitement when I read my words that I was once proud of either.
My essence grew tired from shoving the memory of being in the shower under the white fluorescent light while the recurring whispers grew louder,
“Who’d ever come to your clinic?”
My sight replaced its vision with the darkness you saw in my future while I was crushed underneath the oath of making you proud.
“Which friends? The online ones?”
“I’m not happy with the way you turned out.”
If it helps father, I tried not to turn out like my sisters. I saw them at the dinner table, eyes fixed on their plates, mouths pressed thin, as you called them your biggest disappointments.
Yet the fear lives in me; what if I disappoint you too?
I’m just a child who doesn’t know what she is doing, never granted the right to say the things my sisters kept accusing you of.
If it helps father, I never wanted to, but I understand them better now.
We were doing a role play on anxiety in my CBT training. Everyone was trying to force a memory to create a scenario.
I didn’t have to. I spoke about our conversations. My eyes filled. I looked at the ceiling until they cleared.
“What is so anxiety-provoking about not having a job?”
“I’d prove my father right.”
She looked at me. The silence had a pulse.
She said you were a dick. My tears didn’t ask for permission this time.
If it helps father, I said you were not.
I said you had a kind heart.
You did everything in your power to lay this world underneath my feet. I spent my life learning how to perfectly hold onto it.
The haunting wounds that you never meant to give became the lullabies that put me to sleep, growing into a woman who carried both your love and your ghost.
You were the biggest supporter of my growth, the one who held my hand through all the darkness and storm.
You were my first and biggest love; steady, complicated, unforgettable.
You were my first heartbreak, my lifelong mirror.
And I can’t help but blame myself all the time, thinking I wasn’t worthy of you.
I’m sorry I was your daughter.
You deserved a son.
If it helps father, the world cannot break me anymore.
I love you.
Author’s note:
I wrote this piece in tears. I almost kept it to myself, but I chose to show up because I believe we can find healing in each other’s stories.
This is for everyone who has been crushed under the love and devotion of parents who never knew how much it broke you.
I won’t ask you to go paid. I leave that to you. But know that it was one of the hardest things to press publish.
Thank you for your bravery.
Thank you for the endurance, the kindness, the incredible beauty of your soul.
From rocky, imperfect soil that held you, crushed your roots as you grew…thank you for your blossoming into an inconceivable beauty, measure, and meaning.
Something kind, caring, helpful…far more dazzling than the sun.
ps-the other spelling of that final word applies as well.
😉
ps to ps-thank you for your lovely presence here. ☺️🙏✨
My mother took me away from my father when I was four - she told me we were going on a holiday. I never saw him again. She befriended a paedophile and made me share his bedroom. When I was eight they told me my dad had been found dead in his bath, with an empty whiskey bottle in his hand. He's been there two weeks before his body was discovered. He died of sclerosis, they told me. It was not until I was 40, when my mother died that's I found out it was a lie. I found his sad letters. He had been told I wanted nothing to do with him. He died three years later. In his bath. The cause of death was 'water in the lungs'. I swear that paedophile who became my stepfather murdered him, so he could marry my mother. It took me years to find out who that man was. He was a bigamist. His first wife and her child were killed in a road accident a year after he married my mother. The story he told about them dying in a road accident in 1960 was another lie. Maybe he killed them too. The man my family protected until his death. He broke me. And many other little boys. I couldn't stop him. I tried to get my family to help me. They called me a 'dirty little liar', though I now know they knew what he was. Without their help I could not stop him. He abused boys even after he turned 90. He is finally gone. But his memory remains. I cannot wipe it away. I'm 70 now, shunned by my family. As if they could never forgive me for being a child victim. They are comfortable in their fake Christianity. I am still here. Alone.