Consider the source

How do you explain a life?

My daughter will be nineteen in a few weeks and I am constantly amazed at the beautiful being that she has always been. I am in awe of her and the maturity with which she faces the world and the beauty and compassion she sees and shows everywhere.

When people ask her how many siblings she has, how does she explain that she is the oldest of six but that three of them have different last names, two of them have a different mother and three have a different dad? Sounds very ghetto, but she has had the same set of parents up until recently when I divorced my second husband.

Her father and her step-mother have been together since before he and I were divorced and my second ex-husband and I had been together for sixteen years.

She calls her step-mother “mom” and I know who she’s talking about by the tone of her voice when she talks about her.  I get along well with her.  She’s a tough cookie and from very early on in her relationship with my daughter’s dad she had the guts and backbone to stand up to him, something I was never able to do.

I have nasty memories of the eleven years we were together.  It was a physically and emotionally abusive relationship and the memory of his strength and anger haven’t faded even after seventeen years.

Now that our daughter is off in college and I’m divorced a second time, he seems to believe he needs to atone for the sins of our relationship.  And I can’t let myself believe that he isn’t looking for some way to get the better of me.  Not in a sexual sense, but in an emotionally dominating way.

My daughter knows how I feel about him.  It’s never been a secret to her that the scar across my forehead was put there by him, that my eating disorder was his favorite weapon against me and that I can’t trust a word of what he says.

And yet, he has said that he wants to put the past behind us and he wants to make up for what we went through before.  He says our daughter turned out the way she did only because of how I’ve brought her up and what an influence I’ve been in her life.  But does that mean that I forgive and forget the evil I see in his face when I remember our relationship?  Do I betray my daughter’s trust in me and become his “friend” and therefore, no longer make her uncomfortable when we’re both in the same room together?

When she would come back home from staying with him and his family, she would share with shock and disgust the things he was teaching her other siblings.  “Mom! He said that if a white person and a black person have children they will be albinos!”  “Mom! They believe that gay people are vile and they are all going to burn in hell!”  “He said that people who have tattoos and nose piercings are all scumbags who won’t amount to anything but drug abuse and end up in jail.”

Needless to say she keeps her small tattoo well hidden and it took her a long time to keep her nose piercing in place when she would visit him.

The things she heard from him haven’t changed her own personal beliefs nor have they made her dislike him. But he still wants to tell her what she needs to do, how she needs to do it and what she isn’t doing right. 

I’ve let her make her own decisions, trust her own judgment, believe in her own gods and she has been independent to come and go as she pleases since before she was a senior in high school.   And she has always known that I have her back. No matter what.

She can’t depend on him that way.  She shows an incredible amount of compassion and understanding and patience with him but continues to do things the way she feels she needs to, no matter what he says to her, but she is always weighed down by knowing that she has to keep things hidden from him.

Why would I want to become “friends” with someone I know will always try to be a dominant force in my life?  Haven’t I had enough of that before?  Wasn’t it bad enough when we were “in love”, what would make it any better now when I see him as still being narrow-minded and untrustworthy?

In honor of my daughter’s strength and maturity, the only thing I can do to make her life easier, is to be civil and polite with him in her presence.

For my own emotional safety, I cannot ever trust that he truly wants to make peace for our past sins and really cares about my well being. I trusted him once before and my life was a living hell.  

I have been honored with the presence of this amazing child in my life. And her soul explains it all.