I forget that my father makes up part of me just as much as my own mother does. My first instinct when it comes to thinking about my father is to look for the ways that my body blames him. My mind goes directly to all the times he's put me through traumatic experiences. My voice strains anytime I have to speak with him on the phone like its a rehearsed script. The way Jeffers explores the impact her father has had on her ecologies made me question why my first instinct is to reject my fathers presence on my skin. My complexion closer to his then my mothers. My stubborn attitude a reflection of his own (both in the good way and the bad). I think Jeffers frames this struggle with wanting to let your father in after he has hurt you in "The Blues I don't Want to Remember". She speaks of this in between space where she is trying to heal from her trauma but she also isn't quite sure if she is ready to "just let daddy in". Because just like we feel lour mother pains and our mothers mothers pains and the mothers before them we also carry our fathers pain as well. I think as daughters we try to push away that part of ourselves because we are taught to disassociate ourselves from out fathers, especially when it comes to familial trauma. However, we also feel that in between space that Jeffers touches on, because our fathers are very much apart of our ecologies both spiritually and physically. another revelation that I had when reading these pieces about her father was that because of this disassociation that we feel we forgot how to navigate the world with the part of ourselves that relate to our fathers. We struggle to build relationships with other men because of the wounds we have not healed that have been passed down to us from our fathers. So how can we heal that? How do we begin to love our fathers again and no blame them for the pain we feel? How do we forgive them? I think Jeffers provides us with at least one answer to these questions. To look at our fathers as the little boys they once were. Think about the ways they have hurt. Think about the innocence and vulnerability that comes with that adolescence. Because that still exists in them somewhere, before they were a father they were men and before they were men then were little boys. I tried to envision my father like this and i felt my body go tender in the places they once hardened at his name. I forgave him. And even though I was able to conquer this, like Jeffers does in her pieces, I also remember that just because I was able to forgive does not mean I am ready to open the door yet and that is okay. Navigating our father-daughter relationships is not an over night process and that's okay.
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ReplyDeleteThe first line of your post grabbed me and would not let me go. Such a beautifully articulated question you put forth. It gave me chills as my own father/child dance with my father, now passed from the earth three years ago this month, remains unresolved, with its strange and painful music. You touch upon the delicate, awkward question Jeffers poems about her father echo, "What does it mean to be my father's child?" The line, "thinking about my father is to look for the ways that my body blames him." The ways I am like him in spite of not having been raised with him in the home past the age of eight. The trauma left on our family in the wake of his untreated mental illness; and his father, who believed he could beat it out of his him, believing my father just needed discipline. I too love the poem "The Little Boy Who Will Be My Father," and have reached out to that little boy who would be my father with deep compassion, and who was once as innocent as I was in childhood.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your honesty and introspection.
Mel