My Father
My father decided. My father determined that the perceived threat to his son trumped the transpired harm against his daughter. He decided that his daughter’s pursuit of justice against a man who violated her was invalidated by potential harm that could come to his son. My father’s calculus was plain - potential harm became more meaningful than real harm when the subject was his son and the object his daughter.
My father, when faced with the cruelty of his actions, sought accordance from his daughter’s husband and his eldest son to validate his cruelty. “You know how she is,” “I’m just trying to protect my family.” Utterances of a patriarch calling the elder men to counsel. Because together men can decide that a man’s actions are grounded, rational, and true in the face of a woman’s hysteria.
My father prioritized his ego over his daughter. Preserving his conception of who he is and how others should behave in his presence mattered more to him than preservation of his relationship with his daughter. His inviolable rules of engagement which he never deigned to clarify, he nevertheless treated as law. And the law of my father superseded the laws of any other man, let alone woman.
My father chose his grandson, the beautiful boy who resembles his mother both in look and trait. My father treasures his grandson not privately but boastfully as if to make plainer to the boy’s mother that her personhood would have been accepted had she simply been born with the right parts. The ones that aren’t as susceptible to violence from men.
What my father does not understand is that the physical violation of his daughter’s body was nowhere near as traumatizing and dehumanizing as the consistent and ever present emotional destruction he has wrought in his daughter’s life. It is one thing for a depraved man who does depraved things to do yet another depraved thing to a stranger. But for a father to perpetually undermine his daughter’s entire sense of self worth, to call her back from a life that she had built up for herself only to break her back down. Well that is another hurt altogether.
I cannot continue to live in the hurt of being my father’s daughter.