I went to daily Mass, I baptized my daughters, I baked bread and made jam, grew our own vegetables and homeschooled, made quilts and volunteered at school and church. I married, then remarried, trying to get it right, seeking approbation for my choices. For years, I fought a battle between approval for my silence, or disapproval when I spoke my truth. “Well, anyway,” she’d say, and the subject turned. My mother took over, approving when I behaved, talking over me when I didn’t. And of course I didn’t know about my parents’ money struggles raising five kids, the stress of unhappy people who had married too soon, freighted with the baggage of their own bitter parents.
And wipe that smile off your face.” I didn’t know that all families weren’t like this. So it went, for years, the call for silence, the muting of the voice. “Don’t let me catch you saying that again.” When precocious neighbor Beth called me a turd-face in our living room, I retorted, “I am not a turd-face!” My father, apoplectic, yelled at Beth and turned her out of the house, then pulled me into the bathroom and rubbed a bar of soap on my tongue. That told me almost everything I needed to know: That I was stupid and not to ask questions. “If you don’t know by now whether or not I love you, then the hell with you!” He snapped the paper back up to read.
“Do you love me?” Only 7 years old, I had just asked the cat, who purred, and now I felt brave enough to voice the words to my father, behind his newspaper and his pipe.
0 kommentar(er)
