Liar Take All
“Change your face,” he said. “Change it! Change your face,” he said. I had to rearrange such logic instead, such logic that allows this presumptuous command, a father so proud to take this damaging stand. Sitting on the pier, I was immersed in my view of lake waters. Sitting on the pier, I would have been happy not to think of a father's mistreatment of his daughter. But there they came, on bikes, a father and two sisters. The younger one came onto the pier as the father stayed back and hurled his twister, arguing with his daughter about what I don't know. The rules were clear: he set them and she was caught in the undertow. She balked, he stalked. “Don't start with me, don't start, don't start, don't start, don't start.” She was trapped. I could see. Her expression was not being received and her attempts at it rebuffed. “That's enough,” he barked, “That's enough!” She registered a look of dark, withheld anger. Her lips locked in obedience of her commander. She headed down to the end of the pier and huddled at the northeast corner. I watched her close from the opposite end, wanting so to comfort her. I witnessed her defeat, entrapment and isolation as an empathetic, silent, by-stander. She wrapped her arms around her knees, hung her head down and sat inside herself for an oh so brief reprieve from her father's fascistic grip. Postured in his role, so rigid, so emotionally myopic, so mentally, so traditionally thick. The younger sister strolled off the pier back to where her father stood and then the instructions: “Get your sister!” Of course, she listened. She obeyed him good. As the sister edged her way off the pier, he said, “Smile.” The capper, the incestuous jeer as if to say: move your feelings out of there while I displace them with my own. Controlling your behavior and censoring your genuine feelings as I do shouldn't make you so glum. I'm your father, he postured, as though this biological fact gave him license to keep her emotions under his thumb. The girl rode off first and her father again commanded she wait for them to start. “I'm going slow,” she said, in half-compliance. He said, “Put your brakes on NOW!” She rode further and her younger sister followed. As he fastened his helmet, I approached his spot knowing I could not let this one pass. I could not. “Excuse me, sir, I am concerned for your daughter. It seems you weren't listening to her.” “I listened to her,” he insisted, caught unsuspecting of my response, unsolicited. “She smiled,” he retorted further. “But she didn't really feel it.” “She's my daughter,” he said and rode off to catch up with `his girls.' I called out to him. “Your daughter is going to be in big trouble if her father doesn't let her be who she is—a teenager with absolutely no recourse but to hold fast to her lifeline's terrible sway.
I sure hope emotions become as indisputably substantial as one biological statistic some day.
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Emotion Literacy Advocates™This page was last updated February 12, 1997