My father was an angry man. That is the truth. Most of the time. Not every second of the day. It was in the way he moved through the house. It was in the way he spoke. The way he walked into a room. In the way his eyes found mine. In the way doors were closed, in the way footsteps sounded on the stairs. In the way everyone learned to scan a room before speaking. In the way I spoke or reacted when spoken to. In the way I hurriedly came when called to a room. The way he yelled out his commands at me. How they were commands and not requests. I was on guard of his anger, his moments of sheer explosion all the time. I tried my best to soothe him. To keep the peace. To play the dutiful youngest daughter who tried her best to do everything right. To make him happy. To hug him when he seemed down, to try and make him laugh. I was never successful. I learned to read his emotions like one would read the weather pattern by looking up at the sky.
You did not realize you were adapting when you were a child. You think it is normal. You think this is what families feel like. You think your tight chest is personality, and your hyperawareness is maturity. Your silence turns into respect. I did not grow up thinking I was abused. I grew up thinking I was sensitive. I grew up thinking I overreacted. I grew up thinking if I could just be better, calmer, quieter; things would settle. I remember many nights just lying awake in my room thinking of ways I could bring peace to my house, thinking and rethinking of ways, repeatedly. I often blamed myself for the problems in the house. For my father’s anger. I tried, but I never found a solution, because I was never the problem. But I did not realize it back then. Back then I was just a kid trying to survive and adjust to adult problems in a big world I did not understand.
When you live inside hostility long enough you start to implement it into your daily life. You start to measure your own tone. Your own footsteps. You measure your needs against the needs of those around you. You learn to read a room with instinct before you learn how to read a book with words. You learn, exceedingly early, how to anticipate moods to just stay safe. You learn how to disappear in plain sight so people call you to their side and you can gain some affection. And if you become particularly good at all that, people call you mature. They do not see the consistent bracing inside. They do not see the constant scanning that your eyes do when you enter a room. They do not see the child trying to regulate an adult’s emotional weather pattern like they would trying on clothes for the day. An adult will see a child that is strong and responsible and think that they are fine, that they do not have needs or concerns, so nothing is ever addressed. They are left on their own to fend in a world too big for them to handle.
This book is not about dramatic moments alone, but about the quiet ones as well. The ones that looked normal from the outside but were far from it on the inside. The ones that taught my body lessons my mind could not yet name. This book is about permission. Permission to hurt. Permission to call something grooming. Permission to call something abuse. Permission to stop minimizing what shaped you and I, because the hardest part is believing it mattered. Believing that fear without visible bruises still counts. Believing that confusion never equals consent.
I spent years minimizing what happened to me. Explaining away my father’s actions so that I could survive it. Making it smaller so I was functional and could believe in a father who would not do any harm to a child whom he claimed to love. Functional but not thriving. On the inside, I was braced. Constantly living in fear of what had been done to me. Waiting for something I could not name. This book is about the unbracing. It is the slow permission to look at what I once dismissed, the revelation of truth. It is the act of saying: It hurt. It mattered. And I am allowed to say so.