It's not actually him, though: it's the man standing ahead of me in the grocery checkout line, fidgeting and impatient and radiating discontent; or it's the man ambling to his vehicle, the way my father ambles, drawing out each stride, each entitled yard, stretching limbs as though released from a cage; or it's the man making earnest, almost desperate conversation with whoever, leaping forward with interruptions, throwing his head back to laugh, eyes unchanged, because this is the world and this is how people do in the world, and the world is watching. Ever the external pastor-figure: chin up, eyes straight ahead, looking forward, moving forward, ever away, ever someday: toward someone else's eternal home.
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I can hardly face the ways in which we're alike; I suspect he feels similarly. We are alike. I have never been my mother's; I was his, until he left me toward the ecclesiastical ecstasy of someday. We were never familiar, though; we nodded coolly at each other over art and music, discussed the penciled shape of a face or the messy imprecision of watercolor or the vast vocabulary of pottery, completely confusing to a six-year-old (he is an amazing artist, and it was his trade before he pursued ministry). We regarded each other's edges as he strove to connect me intellectually to his understanding of artistic interpretation, where he found solace, and I strove to meet him where he was, wherever he was; to draw him to where I was, which, surely, I could do, if I could do it better.
His hands changed with his vocation - from ruddy, paint-stained, bruised and scraped, dirty fingernails, to smoother, no longer torn, webbed with hardened scars, and in perpetual futile motion; endless drumming against steering wheels and tables and doorframes, knuckles flexing white against his palms, fast-moving, hard-grabbing.
I'd always told myself that he was the safer of my parents. My mother's rages and violence were totally unpredictable, extreme, emotional and manipulative, and satisfied in our destruction. If I had to weigh the cost, I always figured my mother's relationship to me had cost me more.
But anymore, I don't think that's true. I'm starting to realize, as an adult, how very deeply my father hates women. Starting to understand the very real damage that banks inside the daughter of a man who hates women. Starting to understand how that hatred shapes her.
For my entire life, I knew my femaleness was a problem for him, something which drew and repelled him, against which he had to take deep breaths. I was always afraid of it, always felt shameful, dirty, in his presence. Always. Always felt sorry, as though I were a blight on already-broken things which he might otherwise make function, as though he could be happier or more present if I weren't present to remind him of the demons which banished him toward someday instead of now.
Always listened at church - red nail polish! makeup! wanton! wearing pants? failure! purity rings: wear your sex life on your sleeve (my snarky interpretation)! modesty! temptresses! nice to see you in a skirt for a change! why can't I touch you? god wants me to pray for you! better get used to! have every right to! It's not the result of any great insight, or anything to do with me; it's nothing I'm bragging about, because it was one of the central most painful truths of my childhood and young adulthood: I was the only one in my family who did not know how to pretend it wasn't all bullshit. And he knew it. Because we are alike.
It sounds arrogant, condescending, to me, to say things like but he's a good person, he is, insisting to the wind, as though I am a person who could sit and list another person's sins and bask in the heightened glow of my own righteousness by the end of it. I won't do that. He's a seething, broken, angry, controlling person in whose presence I have always - every single day of my life - felt threatened and endangered, pacing childhood bedrooms knowing to myself he could snap and kill us all - as real as fearing my stalker, as wondering if I would die at the hands of the man who raped me.
But I know that the question of whether he is a good person is a stupid one. What is a good person, anyway? I know that there's always been good in him. I know that a broken person is terrified of the indescribable grace which abounds in the presence of children. There's enough good in him that he was, early on, enchanted with his baby daughter, his own hopes for redemption so interwoven with her presence, sustained by his expectations that her nonwoman female presence ought to nurture his good intentions. Until she failed him, somehow. I don't know how. Sometimes, I think I know how. I don't want to know.
Now, I am just tired. I've stopped calling him. When I do, I end up sitting rigidly across tables from him, hardened and wise-talking and swallowing sawdust food which lodges in my chest, absolutely exhausted, thinking you are a person I truly don't know what to do with. I don't know what you want from me. I am still afraid of you. I will always be afraid of you. We still regard each other's edges. He still holds himself distant, as do I. I know, intellectually, that he can't hurt me, not really. I fear for when he's gone, when I still see him at the bank, or the grocery store - wiry, graying, dirty-blond hair, a tall, slim frame in drab colors, an ambling stride, blunt, work-darkened fingers drumming against a steering wheel. I don't know how I'll be with the time of my chosen separation, when the separation becomes final.
And, as an adult, I sometimes wonder what it must have been like, maybe from an outsider's perspective: all of us under the same roof, my brother and I old enough, and all of us thinking and feeling as individuals in a unit; sometimes I wonder, at all the different relationships we had to each other, all the ways we saw ourselves in each other, and how we could hardly face the ways in which we were all alike.
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