I wrote this in 2018, as part of a student-led campus “inclusivity initiative” that invited the community to participate in storytelling sessions. I later found out I was the only staff person to do so. This was intended to be read aloud, so the cadences feel different from my usual writing style, but the intervening five years probably make a difference too. Like, share or comment if this speaks to you.
I don’t think of myself as a storyteller. In part, it’s because I don’t want to create fictions. I want to tell the truth. Storytelling always seems to require leaving out details, glossing some things over, emphasizing certain events to make them seem important and exciting, not leaving things open to interpretation. I don’t like stories to be constructed like a half hour tv show, with laughs in predetermined places. I want them to be real. I want to walk in the world. A story is like a map. Telling is not the same as showing. Showing is not the same as being there. In other words, this is not an anecdote.
That said:
When I was a small child (probably 2 or 3) I was angry or throwing a tantrum or behaving in a way my father felt was inappropriate and he said to me “you’re so cute it doesn’t matter if you’re angry” or possibly “you’re too little and cute to be angry.” I think now he might have meant he loved me anyway, despite my brattiness. But at the time I took it to mean that my feelings didn’t matter, and I resolved from then on to be ANGRY and BIG and NOT CUTE AT ALL so that no one could ever dismiss my rage again.
The anger was a spark that became a steady flame. It lives in me still. Like our planet, I am a ball of fire at my core.
I never thought I might explode. I always felt I was in control, that this anger was a secret source of strength. It kept me going in the dark, in the years before I knew or understood myself.
I was extremely stressed as a teen. There wasn’t anyone to talk to. I spent a lot of time meditating, trying to calm down. It was in the days before meditation apps, so I made up my own version. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t do breathing exercises without going rigid, gasping for breath and falling out of my chair.
Maybe I shouldn’t have thought of it as anger. Maybe it was vexation or pique. Maybe it was pride or determination, confidence or self-respect. Maybe it was strength of will or strength of character. Maybe it was sheer bloody-mindedness. All I knew was that I was not going to be disregarded again. I was the girl with the secret inner flame who wasn’t aiming to please.
It’s not that I became fierce, or sassy, or openly defiant. Instead of blossoming up and out, I withdrew in and down. I became like a root in the dark, stretched out, seeking, absorbing everything but keeping it to myself. I spoke very little. I read a lot. Horse stories, comic books, Nancy Drew, Lord of the Rings. The entire science fiction and fantasy section of the local public library. Mysteries. Romance. I sucked in all I could of the rich nutrients of memories, dreams and stories, the grand unified field theory of human emotions.
Few other girls I knew shared my anger. When we talked about our feelings, it turned out that nobody felt, or at least would admit to sharing, my sense of outrage. They were all good girls, I thought. Maybe it was they had been taken seriously all along and didn’t need to to be allowed serenity. After a while I realized that it just hadn’t occurred to them to buoy themselves on a pontoon of resentment.
I didn’t grow up in a diverse community. In my small town, the big difference was among the types of Christians, especially different Protestants. I didn’t meet anyone outside of that circle until I went to college. I didn’t meet other people who felt they didn’t belong, or were willing to admit they didn’t belong until then.
Later, at high school reunions, I finally heard the tales of the girls who took off with their parents’ cars and credit cards and had to be tracked down by the police, who gave birth at 16, who flunked out and were sent to disciplinary boarding schools, who dropped out and became waitresses and teen mothers living in apartments in the bad neighborhoods of the nearby small city, who became junkies and died of AIDS. I wasn’t the only rebellious one. But somehow I manage not to be destroyed by it, not to turn it against myself. I was a good girl, if immobilized. I wasn’t about to go out of bounds. I cherished my anger and kept it close.
In high school I had a mentor. I’m still grateful to her. I think she’s still alive. After she finished with me, and incidentally a few other people who were and are far more distinguished than I, she took a sabbatical from teaching high school and went to grad school. She never went back to our high school. I haven’t been in touch with her since, in some part because I don’t know what I would say to her. I don’t think I’ve lived up to her expectations.If she’s still alive, she’s my mother’s age, that is to say, pretty old. I should get in touch, if only to apologize for doing it wrong, for having failed to live up to my promise.
When I got to my then only-recently coeducational world-famous ivy-league college, the mentors available to me were men. And my non-cute, BIG ANGRY persona, concealed within my disguise as a root vegetable, was not the best way to make that kind of connection. They weren’t interested in me as I was, or so I thought. They weren’t interested in my intellectual desire that did not accord with the status quo.
Part of the problem with my attitude was that it wasn’t getting me anywhere. Nobody likes an angry girl. Anger’s not such a good look. I wasn’t leaning in. If anything, I was leaning away. All the stories I read about women getting ahead in the world involved finding someone (a man, pretty much always) who would mentor them, or marry them, or the equivalent, and that was the transaction. You traded what you had and you got, at least, some of what he had. It probably wasn’t that black and white. It was, probably, often more romantic or emotional. But from my root in the dark point of view it seemed cut and dried and it also seemed pretty clear that I was never going to manage it.
It’s not that I’m blaming my father. It’s not that he was a bad dad. It’s just that I feel I was set up. Or I set myself up. Our relationship was shot through with the bad faith engendered by toxic gender stereotypes. I couldn’t trust him, he didn’t trust me, and I couldn’t trust myself or anybody else. It was the era of second wave feminism and I really believed those problems had been solved. I thought I was the problem. I thought 10 years was long enough for an institution to get past 300 years of not admitting young women. My stretched-out roots quivered and drew in. I lost my voice.
My father was a nice guy. He was a gentle man who disliked confrontation. He thought anger was bad for you, that it caused ulcers, heart attacks and possibly cancer. My childhood illnesses and chronic health issues were thus ascribed to inadequate emotional control. I was in my 30s before my asthma and migraines were properly diagnosed and treated. Up until then, I believed I felt bad because I was having bad feelings. The story then was “what’s wrong with you?” Or as my mother used to say, angrily, “WHY ARE YOU SO ANGRY?” Geez Mom, I don’t know.
I’m pretty sure my father loved me deeply, but he also had an unsettling way of never being forthcoming with praise. When I was in my 20s, he flat out told me that he had always thought I was crazy for wanting to be a writer or artist. Just before he died he said, with palpable sincerity, that I was a good kid, but until then I was certain my status fell in the Unsatisfactory category.
He died in 2002, of mesothelioma, a virulent cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. We don’t know where or when he was exposed, although we can make reasonable guesses. He was presented with a few treatment plans and chose the most aggressive one, which involved a pneumonectomy and removal of much of his pericardium, the lining of his chest cavity, which was replaced with, all things, gore-tex. He had a choice of Manhattan or Boston for the surgery and chose Boston. My mother rent
The procedure was a success, though he had some complications and lost his ability to speak for several months. Our family didn’t know what to do without him. My youngest sister managed to step in and coach him on to complete the exercises given by the speech-language pathologist. But he never really got better. Then he died. And there’s not much more I can think to say.
A personal update:
I saw the orthopedist again on Monday and he wrote me a note to stay out of work until 12/27. He also did not OK me to drive. I’m actually fine with both of these statements, but what am I going to do with myself now? I’m done binging Venetian police procedurals. I can sleep a lot, but I can’t sleep all the time. I could prepare for more job-hunting by redoing my resume etc., which I will, I expect, at some point. Just not at this moment. I’m tired, everything hurts, I just re-read and lightly edited the above brief essay about me and my late father, I’ll talk to you again some other time.
Awesome. Thanks.
I'm not sure what to say. My college advisor as a freshman was a female poli sci Prof who happened to be a Republican and she was an oddity because the rest of the poli sci faculty were conservative Democrats. I got recognized as being an intelligent woman who was a classic nerd. I never felt angry as a teen/young adult because I overcame it by humor and being smarter than the men I dealt with. I understand your perspective completely, I just wasn't there at the same time. I didn't get angry until after I was out of law school and dealing with women with kids earning partnership points stuff. Then afterwards I got angry about Veterans issues, Veteran spouse support, and then seeing women screwed over and over again by age discrimination.