They loved me because I was a miracle, the product of their coitus, the synthesis of her egg and his sperm and as such I was amazing. They loved me also because at first, I grew up to be a nice little blond, vanilla, sugar and spices – and the other children didn’t like me because I was shy, dull and eager to please the adults and for those same reasons they loved me. They loved me as their daughter, but beneath that status laid a monster in the making, a someone they hadn’t meant to create. And that someone that started showing more and more as years passed, they did all they could to make it feel how unwanted it was (by ignoring it or screaming at it or beating it) and I could see the hate that glowered in my father’s eyes when he was about to strike me but the monster in the making wouldn’t, couldn’t go back to inexistence. It awoke such terror and despair and such rage breathing wasn’t easy anymore so I shouted back at him I didn’t say “stop it, stop screaming” like I really wanted to “this hurts stop it, make it better” I just fought back I tried to find words that would hurt him as much as his words and acts hurt me and would inevitably, painfully loose to him and my family and the family’s friends kept asking me: why? why would you do that? why won’t you keep quiet and let the storm passes? And I didn’t know what to answer. I was just a little person and nobody taught me self-esteem, so I didn’t know how to justify myself but the truth is that to my ears their questions translated to “why don’t you let it all die, all that’s raging in you, why don’t you kill it? if you hate your father’s behavior so much don’t provoke him and just kill it, kill it before he does?” God knows I try. Without even knowing what I was doing I tried with all my might but when I sometimes reached that empty, blank place, where everything was quiet and my emotions so deeply asleep it felt like death, the truth is it didn’t feel better at all. Successing at making a huge vacant space out of myself wasn’t a relief at all. And my parents were still dissatisfied with me. They loathe my passivity but it was and would always be my primary defense mechanism.
Now we’re on good terms again and sometimes we become somewhat close with my father and I can’t stop feeling a little giddy at that healthy closeness I had yearned for for so long. But then he acts in ways that remind me how it felt back then and I realize this is not a safe place to be, that dangerous connivance that can rot so quickly. I’ll never really hug them again; I’ll never completely forgive them. I used to be so utterly lonely and that lonely “I” was disassembled and crushed and that’s how I grew up for years, lonely, lost, in pieces, kicking in the void and with no notion of self-esteem, a never-ending Hell and all the raging that was born at that time won’t ever completely leave.
I’m so fucking angry and that anger stitched me up over the year, gave me coherence, and something within me is still slightly infectious; it keeps discreetly bleeding somewhere, that volcano isn’t sleeping and tonight I’m so close to eruption, lava on my tong, running through my lips, seeping, cities about to burn in a hushed-up, a beautiful silence.
They should have known better. They should have fucking known better than to fuck-up like they did with a teenager’s head, a person in the making.
“Why don’t you want to have children?”
Here’s why.
