For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts

by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez

  You drive like you have something to prove. Your vehicles have become extensions of your manhood, and you drive like someone is always watching, always judging. Like every vehicular decision is going to reflect on your masculinity. No matter what is happening, your car needs to represent you. You drive like the world owes you something, like you are always late, like you do not understand how traffic works, like the rules were not meant for you.

  Appearances are a total package for you, and status is of utmost importance. You speak confidently about everything that you know and things you do not know. When someone proves to have more knowledge than you, you lose interest. If someone you know attempts to take up more space than you, that is grounds for terminating that relationship and ridiculing them publicly. If that person happens to be your daughter, then so be it.

  You are proud. Your reputation is more important to you than your actions. You will present a face in public that is different from who you are in private. You will blame everyone else around you for things you did, to save face, even if that means blaming mi mami for things she never did, for thoughts she never had.

  How you look, to the few men you admire, is currency to you. You hate yourself so much that you pretend to love yourself, and eventually you sabotage yourself.

  And still, my heart has always wanted to embrace you, even if you did not embrace me.

  Not only did I not understand men, I feared them.

  —bell hooks

  I had an aversion to anyone who embodied toxic masculinity, or who could potentially embody toxic masculinity, for a long time. In fact, up until my first marriage, I would say I created barriers that I thought would protect me when dating or making friends. Because the monster under my bed resembled the monster sleeping next to mi mami. I had to learn to preserve myself outside of mi papi and brother’s reach, because for entirely too long I left myself vulnerable to these men. The harm they inflicted in me is still felt.

  I was a daddy’s girl. I look identical to my papi, and my nickname growing up was “cara de papa,” because I had a cute little round face much like a potato, and because I looked like mi papá.

  It took me years to mourn the loss of my daddy’s girl status. As a society we revere daddy’s girls. Daddy’s girls are the cherished girls of society, in the opposite way that mama’s boys are ridiculed. Those extreme reactions are both products of toxic masculinity. Within heteronormativity, to align yourself with your male parental figure as a girl is a gift, and to align yourself with the female parental figure as a boy is a weakness. I knew that the status of daddy’s girl was something to boast about.

  Being a daddy’s girl was my reward for being the best kind of girl. I defended him—I felt like I needed to, even against mi mami. Mi papi casually gave me that burden. Mi papi would confide in me, and he would talk about mi mami negatively, constantly. I began to believe that mi mami was a bitch, growing up. Mi papi would tell me about all the things that mi mami would not let him do, which sounded like a lot of the things that I was not allowed to do, like hang out with my friends and stay out late.

  Mi papi got to align himself with his children because he was not home often, and mi mami was the parent to all of us, it seemed.

  Mi papi was El Proveedor, and mi mami did everything else.

  It was easy to pick her as the enemy. It was easy to see her as the focal “problem” for all of us. But it was also easy to isolate her and turn her children against her. And for years she and I rarely spoke, because he had painted her as a dictator. I resented her for doing that to him.

  I bought into what he said about her, and I wanted his approval more than anything else. In fact, mi mami and I did not become close until I myself got married. I started to imagine having my own kids and how I would react if my husband talked badly about me to them. Suddenly it became so clear how unfair he was to her. Things started to fall into place in terms of how their relationship worked, and how isolation was the tool that was used against both of us, because he not only isolated her but managed to isolate me from her. When I needed her, much later, I had to find my way back. And when I did, I began to ask mi mami some tough questions.

  I remember telling mi mami about how mi papi talked about her to me, and I asked her why she never talked negatively about him to at least counter what he said to us. She said something that sticks with me, even to this day: “El es tu papi y el es un buen papi,” defending him still. Mi mami protected him, like I protected him.

  Yet still, I held a special place in my heart just for mi papi. Mi papi is funny, and I am not just saying that in the way that everyone is sort of funny. I mean he is hilarious. If you hang out with him long enough, you will find yourself cackling on the floor with laughter. I have seen mis tias pee on themselves from laughing so hard with him, and I have gone to bed to the sound of laughter many nights because mi papi had friends over. As a kid, I thought laughter just followed him around.

  For mi papi’s birthday this past year, mi mami sent me a video of him. In the video you can only see mi papi, my niece, and my brother. There are cupcakes in front of him with candles on them. They let my three-year-old niece blow out one of the candles, and she is filled with joy about this. And then it is his turn. In this video, I could see mi papi dramatically preparing to blow the candles out, opening his mouth wide and loudly filling his lungs with air. Then, as he exhales, he pretends to forget where the cake is and “accidentally” turns away from the cake and blows in the wrong direction. Then he pretends to be shocked that he missed, which my baby niece loves. I could hear her squealing and laughing. This is peak mi papi.

  He did this head fake four or five times, sending my niece into fits of giggles. Her laughter filled that entire video. Watching it, I cried, because that is the papi I knew as a kid. He was funny and favored me above anyone else. I felt immense love for this funny and warm man in my life; I still do when I reflect on some of my childhood memories with him. For that reason, it took me years to accept what happened, to accept that something had changed. I could never really reconcile that change until I finally understood it through reading bell hooks’s retelling of her own stories with her family and her dad.

  Mi papi was a phenomenal father to me during my girlhood, but he got lost when I became a teenage girl and then a woman. As I got older, he tapped out entirely. I was no longer his chosen one.

  I write about mi papi from a place of pain and with a deep longing to heal myself. The last time I let mi papi treat me like I was subhuman was in February 2016. When he lashed out at me, I almost cried. I almost showed him weakness. I almost acted like a girl, like mi mami. I was almost right back to where I started, despite all the work I had done to undo what he had done to me my entire life.

  On that day, that fateful February, I know that my papi attacked me with explosive remarks because he had felt that his status had been threatened, that he had been insulted and excluded. He had felt inadequate, and his pride was hurt.

  I know that my papi attacked me because he felt disrespected. He thought I was stealing attention and respect that were rightfully and exclusively his. He thought I was taking up too much space, which was any space—more space than women are allowed to take. My confidence made him feel less than, and he could not allow himself to feel less than a woman, when he knew not to place any significant value in women.

  February 2016, we were in Guatemala. I had insisted on going with him on a trip he was taking to both Nicaragua and Guatemala because I missed my motherland. I missed my cousins, the food, the climate, the scenery—and I needed to just get away. Traveling back home to heal is a luxury that many of us aspire toward. But some of us have to make concessions to take this type of healing journey. My concession was to travel with this man I no longer had a relationship with, and I tricked myself into thinking that the trip could heal that relationship.

  I also ensured that I took care of myself in the ways I knew how at that time, so I escaped often with cousins and friends, and I dr
ank. I connected with old friends, and when I was with mi papi I made myself as small and as invisible as I could be. I did not want to be the reason we got into a verbal altercation. I wanted to be easy, uncomplicated, just like mi papi liked.

  I had moved in with my parents after graduating with my master’s degree, because mi mami had insisted and I had no other choice financially. I had been accepted into another master’s program with a wonderful fellowship that covered the majority of my expenses, yet I felt like I needed to get away from academia for my health. My graduate program had been hard for me, I had gotten divorced halfway through it, and I recognized within myself an exhaustion I had never experienced before. So I was living with them, because I had no other choice and I convinced myself that I had the skills I needed to survive living under the same roof as my papi again.

  Yet, on this trip, I ran out of money and made myself vulnerable to him. Mi papi has used money as a means to control others my entire life. Money is how his grip on mi mami remains as strong today as it was years ago when they first were married. Allowing him to take care of me meant allowing him to have dominion over me. I knew this to be true, but after a week of being away from home I had run out of my own money and turned to him.

  A thing to note about my dad is that his favorite pastime is being the center of attention. He thrives off of being the funniest person in a room. Growing up with a dad like that was fun, until it was not. One of the worst things that both my parents did was hit me and make me believe that they hit me because they loved me. I was hit because they said that they wanted the best for me. They framed spanking as their God-ordained right, and they explained it as a loving act to keep us “good.” As a result, as an adult I struggled to separate physical pain from love. And while the beatings hurt, mi papi’s words are what I hear over and over in my head whenever I do something outside a very narrow definition of “good.”

  So, here we were in the last leg of our trip, and something happened that I will never forget. While in Guatemala, Andrés, my dad’s good church buddy, kept talking excitedly the entire trip about theological gatherings he would host in his home. He talked about his guests and said that they would talk theology and philosophy. Women were invited, which was surprising for me to hear, considering how this church did not ordain women or allow women to do much in terms of leadership roles. On one occasion, I got to meet some of those intellectuals, who were all men. These men had gotten wind of the fact that I had just graduated from divinity school, and so they were intrigued by me. A girl, born in Nicaragua, now living in the United States and obtaining a graduate degree from an American university, and a theological institution nonetheless. That was what Andrés dreamed for his daughters: an American college education. And I was sitting there, in front of him, living his dream for his own children.

  At church they had learned that God created man to rule the world and everything in it and that it was the work of women to help men perform these tasks, to obey, and to always assume a subordinate role in relation to a powerful man.

  —bell hooks

  One morning, Andrés gathered a few of his buddies to join us for breakfast. I remember him bragging about me based on what he knew from social media, and the other men proceeded to ask me questions. I tiptoed around responding to them, giving short answers, because I know my place in these spaces and I had no reason to believe that these interactions would be safe. We got into the topic of the election in the United States, because Trump was just running. One businessman in the group talked favorably about Trump, and I pushed back in the most demure and muted way I knew how. Having studied theology and ethics, I feel generally comfortable marrying those topics, but I did not feel comfortable with these men. Every time they asked questions, I responded, but I did not invite follow-up questions and generally avoided diving into the conversations. Instead, I listened to them talk about a slew of issues. In some ways, they seemed to be pushing against the very gendered theologies I knew my dad still believed. Again, no other woman was present at this discussion but myself. The men were respectfully engaging me; therefore, they seemed to feel entitled to have those conversations with me. They had no awareness of how traumatic the years of misogynistic church teachings might have been for me. They didn’t perceive that my clipped responses and wary stances came from a place of distrust and pain. They were just intellectuals doing what intellectuals do, and that is ignore context, emotions, and pain and continue talking just to hear themselves talk. Talking in circles about everything and nothing, all at once—that is masculine intellectualism. I am afraid to say I disappointed them, but I will not put myself into situations that trigger my own trauma for anyone’s entertainment, and so I did not engage and did not cooperate.

  During all this, mi papi was exceptionally quiet. Generally, mi papi is far from quiet, and that also kept me tense. I know this man; I grew up understanding him and I know when he is displeased. He went about minding his business while we were there, and then on the final day Andrés drove us to the airport. Andrés pried further into my studies. I have known him my entire life, so while I was curt with his intellectual buddies, I felt like I could talk to him. He has two daughters, and he treats his wife like an equal. So, I started to speak and was candid about my theological views and where I stood. I mentioned that our church had done a lot of harm by not equipping the pastors (all male) with better theology around women, and then my dad cut me off.

  My dad began to scream at me with this reserve of pent-up anger that I knew was not entirely meant for me. He said he did not need an education to understand God’s will. He said the theology he knew was the only theology that is God-ordained. He said that anything else is a lie from feminists—spitting out the word “feminismo” like it was a curse. And he said that I was wrong to question our church theology because that was not my role.

  I clammed up.

  All the trauma around that man, my father, came rushing back. I thought I owed him the respect that would be due anyone who had paid for my meals while we were traveling. Andrés, his friend, looked at me and then looked at him and just stayed quiet. This man who I had thought respected women as equals, he stayed silent.

  But then I remembered: my childhood church in Miami had a sexist and vile pastor. Edgar is in a very high senior position in our church governing board; he is in charge of all the church plants on a national level. Both Andrés and Edgar had attended the same church in Guatemala until Edgar immigrated to the United States. And every churchgoer, at one point or another, has seen Edgar belittle his wife and call her things I would never call another person. All the congregants talked about it; nobody ever did anything to stop it. How these church men treated women told me everything I needed to know. To them, the way men treated their wives was unimportant and a private matter. If a pastor had been chosen by God, no one, especially not any woman, could question him. These men were respected and admired, even when they terrorized the women in their family. I remember hearing my parents talk about how Edgar treated his wife, both expressing disdain for this man. My dad and Edgar had a personal feud, rooted in power and proximity to it, but I always had the feeling that mi papi was willing to work toward a resolution, despite how horrendous this man was to his wife.

  That is where people often fall flat: they would rather stay silent and look the other way than dare correct a husband’s treatment of his wife or a father’s treatment of his daughter. It is a club. And a club rule is protecting one another and maintaining men’s power over women.

  After he screamed at me, my father and I stopped talking. The rest of the car ride to the airport was a silent one. We hugged Andrés and said our goodbyes, but we did not speak to one another. We checked in, boarded the plane, sat next to each other, and did not speak. We did not speak when we landed. We did not speak when getting our luggage. And then, while waiting at the airport in Miami, mi papi made a joke about my having gotten a stomach bug and losing so much weight while traveling. And I laughed while avoiding
his eyes. I made myself as small and as invisible as I could. I did not want to be the reason we got into a verbal altercation. I wanted to be easy, uncomplicated, just like mi papi liked.

  That is what mi papi does. He explodes at the women in his life for falling out of line. After whatever explosion, which he thinks was deserved, he pretends he has done nothing wrong and puts the responsibility on me to release whatever resentment or hurt I may be harboring. And if I do not let it go, then I am the problem and the hateful one. That is the game, the only game he knows how to play. The rules are clear, and I should have known better.

  But I did not want to know better, so I stopped trying to mend my relationship with my dad. I seldom tell him that I love him, because I fear him. When I am with him, I shrink away and long to make myself invisible. So in order to deal with my fears, I do not engage him. I have created the strictest boundaries, where I do not even pick up his phone calls. I do not allow myself to visit my parents without being fully prepared: I make sure I have a car and money for a hotel in case I need to escape, and I bring a friend or partner to protect me when things get heated. I cannot depend on my parents to take care of me, so I take care of myself.

  I have learned that trauma is intergenerational and complex. Mi papi was raised under high pressure due to his gender. He had to grow up fast. Mi abuelito died by suicide when mi papi was sixteen years old. Mi papi was one of seven siblings. Right before mi abuelito died, he spoke to mi papi’s two eldest brothers and told them that he was going away and that it was going to be their responsibility to take care of the family. Mi abuelo attempted to pass the torch to these adolescent boys, and was found dead the following day. Soon after his funeral, both those brothers left town. They ran away from the immense pressures they had been left with because of their gender.