Content warning: this is an essay about bullying. Some violence is described, but not graphically.
I walked past your old place on Drinkwater the other day. I stopped for a moment and looked up at the doorway where you and I used to stand watching thunderstorms, huddled together under the sheltering archway. We counted alligators between the lightning and the thunder. We counted Mississippis. Standing there with you, with your arm around me, I knew I was safe.
That was one of our first doorways. Our last doorway was different. Behind that last doorway, you were a target: you had forgotten what safe was like. You insisted that you weren’t a victim, so I told you to stop acting like one. But you couldn’t.
It’s hard to picture you as a victim, really. When I try to hold “father” and “victim” together in the same thought, I hear the glee in your voice the countless times you told me about that time you beat up a gay man — not the term you used — just because he’d come on to you. I see you relishing the reaction of the man you stood over in an empty theatre yelling, “You’re in my spot!” Your unstoppable laughter after a ‘Gotcha!’ still echoes in my brain. You enjoyed making other people feel small.
I don’t see you as a victim. I see you and victims. Your victims. I see myself.
And yet. Other people have described you to me as a good or a wonderful man. There were so many times when it was safe to be your daughter, when I was proud to tell people who you were.
Who else, after so many years of thunderstorms, would have come out from behind yet another door with me in the middle of the night, in a snow storm, to play in the wind? I remember waking you up, excited because I’d never experienced thunder and lightning and snow all at the same time, and asking you to watch it with me. You grumbled, but got up when I said, “Well, what kind of Daddy did I train you to be, anyway?”
We went out into the snowstorm, filled black garbage bags with wind, then let them go to watch them sail down the street, magnificent improvised air ships. When a man in a pickup truck pulled up beside me to ask if I was okay, I answered, breathless, “Yes! My Dad’s just over there.” You were there in the storm with me, and I was safe.
You were supposed to be invincible.
Until the door you lived behind was broken down, and you were the one made small by someone else’s actions. They beat you, they robbed you, they made you believe they were going to burn your house down. They made you run, leaving everything you knew behind.
In your new home, behind your last door, you propped a step stool under your doorknob to keep intruders out. I had never known you to be scared before, but here you were. You never wanted to feel unsafe again.
Trauma changed you, just like my safe/unsafe life with you changed me. You became timid unless you knew for sure you had the upper hand. I became the person who can’t take a joke, who either trusts too easily or not at all. What a pair we make.
You used to tell me that a person can’t understand a way of life until they put on the clothes or the uniform associated with that way of life. But once you put on the clothes, you get it.
Do you get it now?
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