The Milk of Human Kindness

by Lori L. Lake

  By virtue of genetics, I was not a girly girl. I was tall, lean and favored boyish clothes like Levis and large hand-me-down cotton oxford shirts from my older cousins. During that time, I wasn’t even sure I liked girls. The girls I knew in the neighborhood and in school seemed to spend much of their time obsessively worrying about their appearance, or being cruel to one another. I avoided them. Without understanding why, I felt more and more uncomfortable. I only knew I didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. There seemed to be no one else even remotely like me on the planet.

  Awkward and aloof, I had few friends.

  At the dinner table, and in the living room watching the one television set in the house, my father waged a campaign of criticism, venting his own unhappiness by finding fault with me. His blunt comments and my sullen silences became our only dialogues. Within six months I had retreated completely from any social interaction with my family, going upstairs to read, or out on long, rambling walks with the dog in order to separate myself from the painful encounters with my father.

  About this time, my mother insisted I help her each night after dinner, drying the dishes while she washed. I wanted to play the radio, to listen to the latest soul or rock tunes while we worked, but she wanted to talk, and so talk we did. During those nightly half hours together, alone in the kitchen, I told her all my youthful dreams and heartaches and uncertainties. We usually started out talking about incidental things and by the time I finished, I had revealed the secrets of my heart. In the midst of my adolescent angst, against my will, and sometimes without my knowledge, I revealed who I was and what was important to me. She maintained her purpose in making me help her each night was to teach me how to do kitchen chores and to create in me a work ethic. She all-knowingly informed me I would need both when I married, one day. However, she taught me far more than that during those sessions together over the soap suds and dish rack. She taught me that I was important to her, that my feelings and plans mattered.

  She also made it a point to tell me that my father loved me. As with any truth sent through a messenger, I was never actually reassured on that fact. To be frank, looking back on it now that I am the age my father was then, I think my father knew I was a lesbian. I also think the knowledge disgusted him. I believe he abhorred me, and I believe from the moment of his realization of my true, if latent, nature, he was rejecting me in an almost primal reaction. No one in those days wanted kinship with something as horrific as a queer. Certainly not my father, who became more openly prejudiced and narrow-minded as he grew older. He didn’t like anything that did not reflect his own social dynamic. He defined the world by his own points of reference, and anything outside his understanding, he despised.

  In my mother’s kitchen, I came to understand that my mother would always love me, no matter what. However, she would not put her marriage or her relationship with my father in jeopardy. I became the sacrifice my mother made to my father’s anger.

  When I was fourteen, my father began beating me. Sometimes once or twice a month. Sometimes every day. It happened most often when my mother wasn’t around; for years, I feared coming into the house and realizing I was there alone with him. There were times when he found what he considered to be a good reason to hit me, and he roared about it, working himself into a frenzy before he cornered me. Just as often there was no good reason. Those times the beating began with a long, icy stare; I have never seen anything as awful as the hate I saw in my father’s eyes. The silent beatings were the worst—as if the event was stripped of any excuse or trappings of cause and effect, and he hated me for knowing he could not be anything but the man I saw at that moment.

  By the time I was fifteen, I had given up trying to placate his wrath with good behavior or compliance. Instead, I tried to keep a low profile, trying to stay as far away from him as I could. I hid in my room, reading an unending parade of library books or writing in the journals I filled with line after line of left-handed scrawl. I stayed out after school each afternoon, playing sports, volunteering for projects, or just walking for hours. By then, I was also becoming adept at recognizing the signs. My father gave unconscious cues that told me he was in a rage about something that had happened at work, or about the Phillies or the Eagles losing a game he had bet on, or some event I knew nothing about that had left him feeling powerless. There would be something in the set of his mouth, in the glaring brilliance of his eyes. When I saw it, I learned to go absolutely stock still, to blend into the paint on the wall, to try to do everything possible in order to prevent him from noticing me. I was living a shadow life, trying to disappear from our family, in a quietly desperate effort to avoid the increasingly frequent explosions of violence.

  Only once did I stop him. I was standing by the kitchen counter one night, pouring a glass of milk and in the process emptying the half gallon carton, when he came into the kitchen. As I had developed a habit of never turning my back on a door, I saw him as his pace quickened, and he moved in on me. He shouted, “Selfish pig! That’s the last of it!” as he swung at me. I was a month shy of eighteen, and I had had enough. I blocked the blow with an elbow, flung open the refrigerator door and grabbed the half gallon I had brought home earlier that night at my mother’s request. When I showed the full, unopened carton to him, he actually got visibly angrier, confirming my belief that my supposed selfishness was just another pretext. He advanced on me, and I set the carton aside and for the first time did my own yelling. “What is wrong with you?” I demanded. Astounded, he stopped. And then in a voice that seemed to pour out of my lungs, full of power and fury, I stated, “It ends now. The next time you hit me, I’m hitting back.” My fists were balled up at my sides, trembling. The blood was pounding in my head like a drum and oh so badly I wanted him to start the first fair fight between us. Both enraged, we stood there, a few feet apart for so long it seemed like a breach had occurred in the cosmic continuum of time. Minutes slid by. I think neither of us knew what to do; the usual order of things had changed abruptly. In a quieter and far less intimidating aside, he finally muttered that I was “getting a smart mouth,” and then left the room.

  He never tried to hit me again.

  I didn’t realize until I was in college that most families did not live like this. When I did finally comprehend, during my training to become a teacher, that what I had endured was child abuse, I was too ashamed to speak of it to anyone. Instead, too poor to afford therapy, too proud to admit I was emotionally scarred by what had happened, I read dozens of self-help and psychology books. In the next ten years, I worked hard not to become a duplicate of my father. I struggled to set aside my fears, and then gradually my anger. I slowly discovered I could become who I wanted to be, I could love whom I wished, and I could create my own life.

  Somewhere along the way, in a deliberate act of self-preservation, I put my venomous father, whom I had once loved with all my heart, out of my realm of human acquaintance. I had succeeded in forgiving him, but for me he was still such a harmful personality that there was little use in trying to interact with him as I had once had–as father and daughter. He was forever embittered, forever the man he evolved into when I was fourteen. When he died suddenly one autumn twenty years ago, I did not cry. I felt relieved.

  My mother was a far more difficult relationship to understand. During all those episodes, when my father sometimes hit me so hard that he knocked me to the ground, Mom did not once intervene. I might be huddled in a ball at his feet, sobbing in stark terror as he kicked me, and she stood in the background, wringing her hands, looking upset, and not saying a word. My mother never made an attempt to intercept him when he grabbed me and hauled me away. My mother never stopped his hand as he casually delivered a slap across my face at the dinner table. Worse, she never let on that the way my father treated me was wrong or cruel, or even that it angered her. And when I was finally old enough and enlightened enough to comprehend the enormity of her betrayal, I’ll admit, it left me feeling utterly devastated.

  There wa
s a period of time in my early twenties, when I walked away from my family and I did not look back. For years I stayed away, at Thanksgiving, at Christmas, and all the special birthdays in between. My mother called every once in a while to talk about family things, but I never spoke with her long. I always found a reason to end the call. I never called my parents. This wasn’t because I was still angry with my father. True, I had given up on ever having anything resembling a father-daughter relationship with him. One can do that, you know. Hurt someone who loves you long enough and hard enough and they will simply not be able to love you anymore. No, the reason I stayed away from my parents for years and years was because I could not forgive my mother for her part in what happened to me in our home. I couldn’t forgive her for her passive choice to let my father run our family, even when it meant I dwelt in hell.

  Once I figured out what she had done, it took me nearly fifteen years to get over it.

  But I eventually did forgive her. Though it sounds like a weak defense, I finally accepted that she was doing what she thought best according to the family dynamics of the time. She was as much a product of her generation’s preconceived notions as I am. However, by the time I fully forgave, I was on the other side of the continent, completely involved in a caring, vital relationship with the woman I love. Finding love does that; it gives you the strength and good will to reach out and reconnect, even with people who have hurt you.

  Still the difficulties of travel logistics and work demands prevented me from getting home much. My mother had ended up returning to the countryside of southern Delaware, living alone in a ranch-style home about twenty miles west of Rehoboth Beach. I managed to spend one week a year with her, sometimes more, but not often. We spoke every Sunday on the phone, though, and wrote letters and cards. In the odd way that distance promotes honesty and effort, we became very close. When we spoke, it was as if I was once more in the kitchen with her, methodically drying the dishes that she had washed, and showing her my heart.

  Another fifteen years slid by in the slipstream of time.

  And then one October afternoon this past autumn, she passed away in her sleep after a short illness. She told me a month before the end that she was more than ready to go. Surprisingly, ever the optimist, she confessed she did not believe in an afterlife, but that it didn’t matter. Except for the sudden loss of my father twenty years before, she thought she had had a good life.

  I told her I believed God gave us more than one chance to get things right. I thought we’d both be back, and if I was lucky, we’d meet again. She laughed a little at that. I told her I thought my father would be there to greet her when she crossed. She only shook her head then, her gaze turned inward with such a look of defeat that it silenced me. As I sat there with her in the warm sunshine, I realized I truly wished she would find after death the one person she cherished above all others. And that’s when it struck me that I loved her entirely, beyond any bruise my own soul might still bear from those times. I loved her enough to forget that the man who owned her heart had purposefully hurt me. I guess it’s true. Love forgives all things.

  Not so long ago, I stood with my brothers and their grown children on the Indian River Inlet Bridge, releasing my mother’s ashes into the wind. Caught in a swirling updraft, white-gray dust danced gracefully up and away, then drifted down and surrendered to the churning water rushing below us as the tide went out to sea. As she wished, my mother has merged with the land and sea off Rehoboth. And now I sit here trying to write of our relationship with truth and mercy. It is perhaps the most difficult thing I have ever done.

  When I was a girl growing up in the Fifties and early Sixties, the world was a much more strictly defined place than it is now. People were categorized in groups and lived their lives within the boxes those groups defined. Men, women, boys, girls, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and an infinite collection of other clearly defined sub-categories. So many of us spent our days trying to hide who we were, for good reason. Many Americans spent large quantities of time being afraid of or despising the groups in the other boxes. There are some people who wouldn’t mind if our country again embraced the way things were then. I guess some people need a group to exclude, a societally condoned exercise in discrimination to make them feel better. It’s strangely like the way my father needed someone who he could hit. Cultivating hate seems to be as much a part of human nature as expressing love is.

  But America today is not the same place where I grew up. The boxes are breaking down, and the groups are merging. The prejudice that was commonplace forty years ago is still around, but it is not quite so acceptable anymore. In a thousand acts of defiance and persistence, I—and a million others like me who will not be treated as less than their brothers or sisters—have helped to cause change.

  My father wouldn’t like the place America is becoming. But I know my mother was all right with it. She told me once that she loved my partner Susie and thought of her as her daughter-in-law. But then my mother was a loving woman, and my father was a prideful man. If America is ever going to grow into the land I think it eventually could be, it will be due to people who love. The hard part is this: love is a verb.

  America has changed a great deal since the 1920s, when the coastal towns of Delaware were small fishing villages. The roads weren’t yet paved, and boats were the main means of transport from one town to another. In those days, people had so few changes of clothes that most bedrooms had no need of closets, and when an airplane engine was heard chugging overhead, it was such an event that everyone ran out of the house to try to see it. While living in a tiny rented house in a little one street town, my mother discovered a free library; she wandered inside and opened a book. As the fear and desperation of the Great Depression swirled around her, she returned again and again to the nourishing peace where thousands of glorious tales and millions of beautiful ideas were contained in the pages of books. Row upon row of books. Enough for a lifetime of contemplation. The library became her church.

  Henrietta was a dreamer. And she raised me to be a dreamer, too.

  World without end, Amen.

  ***

  ABOUT CATE SWANNELL

  Born in Birmingham, England, Cate Swannell has lived in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia for so long that she considers herself Australian. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Queensland and majored in English Literature and Semiotics, with a dash of journalism and psychology for good measure. Since then Cate has enjoyed a career in journalism including stints as a copy editor and web page designer.

  Cate has had the chance to visit the United States on numerous occasions for book and writing opportunities. She enjoys spending time with friends, watching Australian rules football, and eating Tim Tams. Preferably all at once. She is currently editing her third novel, A Long Time Coming, which she hopes will see the light of day in late 2011 or early 2012.

  Damaged Goods

  Fiction by Cate Swannell

  “OKAY, IT'S OFFICIAL. I now want my mother.”

  I looked over at the older woman sitting next to me and I knew, just knew, that I was being pathetic. Delaney’s blue eyes didn’t say it, but the bleating little voice inside kept telling me so. Quit being such a baby. It’s just a cut finger.

  “Do you want me to call her?” she asked.

  I looked back at my left hand, which I was holding gingerly with my right. I could feel the blood pooling inside the light wrapping the doctor had left me. It was pulsing out of my body at a rapid rate, and the sensation left me scared and nauseous.

  You don’t want your mother, the calm part of my brain said. What you want is for the woman next to you to quit looking at you like you’re a freak, and put her arms around you and tell you it’s going to be all right. What you want is to rest your head on her shoulder and know that someone else is in control.

  I swallowed hard and tried not to puke on the floor of the emergency room.
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  “No,” I answered, my tongue feeling about 17 sizes too big for my mouth. “By the time she gets down here it’ll all be over anyway. Better to wait till we find out what the damage is, I guess.”

  “Okay.” She stayed where she was, sitting next to me, but apparently not inclined to touch me. Not that I could blame her. I was a mess.

  Living alone for a long time had left me inclined to strange solitary habits … like sleeping late, wandering about my house naked and letting the housework slide from time to time. So when I sliced my finger wide open one Saturday, severing an artery, a bunch of nerves and, for all I knew, the tendon as well, I was bare-assed and in that fascinating place – a locked, messy house with nothing but a cell phone and a list of acquaintances to call.

  I’d managed to do what I’d needed to do, in between fainting twice. I’d crawled into clothes, contacted Delaney, and gotten myself out of the house. But by the time she pulled up in her car, I was covered in blood, sweating like a racehorse and still barefoot. She was lucky I was wearing underwear – shoes were not an option.