Growing up, I had a pretty stable childhood. My parents had been married for around thirty years, both had jobs good enough to provide summer family vacations, weekend trips to the mall and generous Christmas and birthday gifts for my older brother and I. However, I learned from an early age that a household was a dictatorship rather than a democracy.
My father was the boss, no ifs, ands or butts, and he expected his minions to fall in line without question or fault. Second in command was my brother, leaving my mother and then me at the bottom. Sexism and misogyny was like bread and butter for my mother growing up. My mother was raised by a southern woman who supported her sons going to school and seeing the world while she trained two out of her three daughters (My aunt who has fair skin never had to do chores) to wait on her hand and foot. “When I was your age, Grandmommy was really mean,” I remember my mom telling me one day. “She made me go down to the cold basement and shovel coal into the furnace while i was having the worst cramps,” my mom said and then quickly changed the subject.
It’s funny how history can almost repeat itself. Instead of shoveling coal, my father made me shovel snow from our icy driveway while my brother got to sit in his room and read. Normally, I wouldn’t hesitate to help my parents with any chores around the house but that day, I was feeling nauseous and had cramps that left me huddled over in pain. Without knocking, my father walked in my room and said it was a mess. I responded and said I’d clean it later. Of course, that answer was not good enough for him and he proceeded to yell at me. He called me lazy for laying in bed all day. I ignored him and tried focusing my attention back on the television show. Every few minutes he’d come back in my room and continue to call me lazy and say I needed to help out around the house. When I asked why my brother couldn’t shovel the snow, my father said sarcastically “Don’t worry about what he’s doing, you need to get up and do it.” Finally, I could not take it any longer and slowly put on some socks and threw on a sweatshirt. When I walked past the kitchen, my mother asked where I was going (like she couldn’t hear my dad bothering me about shoveling the driveway). I told her dad said I had to shovel the sidewalk. My mother turned to my father and said I couldn’t do that, since the cold temperature would only make my cramps worse. My father retorted “she’ll be fine and needs to get up.” My mother’s response: silence.
I wish I could say that was the only instance where I was subjected to verbal abuse and my feelings were disregarded. Until the day I left their home to go to college, I grew up being called names, criticized and being treated like my body, thoughts and feelings weren’t my own.
As a college student, I still rely on them for financial support but for emotional support I now turn to my close friends and my therapist, who has become my closest confidant. She allowed me to see how toxic my parents were with my father’s abuse and my mother’s passiveness and encouraged me to make the best decisions for myself, not them.
Today, my parents still try to control me. One way they do is by calling me multiple times a week and getting mad when I don’t pick up the phone. It’s my life, and in order to stay sane I have to minimize my contact with them and allow their words to flow off my back like water. I’m a student, writer, aspiring fashionista and adventure seeker, who knows her worth is more than what they deem me as. I know there is a whole word out there waiting for me. I don’t have to stay rooted near my parents. I am more than their property.