Flaw Salad

I’m writing raw, which I never do. It’s a rule. Keep it together in front of other people. Don’t let them see too much of you. Stay hidden behind layers of artifice, a performance of personality for all the world to be fooled by. You taught me that. You taught me other people were worthy of disdain.

I suppose you disdain me.

For days, I checked in the morning, in the afternoon, at night. My text remained undelivered. All shadow of doubt fell away. You blocked me, your first child, the one you raised like a son until you found someone more boy-shaped in my brother, the first person since your mother to love you unconditionally, if you can call what she gave you love. Fuck you, Dad.

Fuck you for casting me aside, for calling me worthless with your silent dissent. I am not worth knowing because I am not the—what? the daughter you cherished? Fuck, Dad, you didn’t even like me when you thought all these tits and legs and labia were woman bits, not the utilitarian features of the not-girl-not-boy hybrid you crafted with your own intentional actions. The Hot Wheels and Tonka Trucks and fire station visits and construction equipment fetishization and yard work and woodwork and car work and Menards runs—fuck me, I still get jazzed in a lumber yard—and even the city job you got me to be the only “girl” working among all 170-some men in that city garage, where you fought with your friend to make him hire me even though I was a “girl” and I did that job and loved that job and you loved me doing that job, where I wore men’s clothes every day and spent time with men in a men-only environment and learned to eat my lunch sprawled across three seats at the cafeteria because that’s how men sit and that’s how I felt that whole summer—and what? Me being nonbinary is a fucking shock?

Jesus christ, Dad, you are the shittiest parent. You wear it on your sleeve when you call yourself Dick, not Rick nor Richard nor Rich. No, it’s Dick for you because that’s what you want people to expect.

You know, you raised me to be an asshole. Every night you complained about your coworkers at dinner. I knew their names, like characters in a play. Canaan said this and Bryan did that, and my little child mind listened and learned how most people in the world are idiots and deserved to be mocked, and if you want anything done right you have to do it yourself. I watched you turn on charm to people, smiling and laughing with them, making them think you were their friend, and then turn around and spit venom behind their backs. You teased us constantly, and I learned that was how to give and receive love. When men were cruel to me, I found that attention titillating and familiar. I went back for more and more and more, a fragmented self drifting through their twenties with a body I could not recognize and an ego so fragile it was always breaking and bleeding all over the city and the internet and my professional network. Predators smelled that blood.

“Wasn’t it your college trauma that made you who you are?” asked my hopeful mother, looking to slough some blame off her shoulders and onto mine for getting into that trouble in the first place, and maybe a little blame for all those frat boys, the ones who helped shape the toxic fuckup I turned out to be. But I was already busted, Dad, and you did that. Those college boys didn’t make me. They found me. And so did my abusive ex-husband. And so did all the men after, the whiskey-scented beards I scarcely remember, the parade of taking these men did, and the giving I did of myself, which I had learned not to value. 

Well, guess what, motherfucker. I found my way out despite you. I learned how to be open and generous and kind and to value other humans, even though you tried your hardest to turn me into the mean and small person you are. 

I never stopped feeling like your buddy. That’s the bitch of it all. You loved me, really loved me, for at least 10, maybe even 11 years. I don’t know exactly when you stopped, but adolescence did the trick. Was it when I brought home my first bra, the one you called my “over the shoulder pebble holder”? You fucking creep.

Remember in college when I thought I had a stalker and then he suddenly went away? I thought I was crazy. I thought I was hysterical for having run from this man who seemed so threatening to me. I wrote a whole frantic livejournal post from the library computer after emerging from the stacks maybe an hour after I had run there, from this man, terrified for my life, where I hid until I felt safe enough to tell my internet friends and then my mother about him. My “stalker.” And then I never saw him again. I caused a huge scene for nothing. Embarrassing. Mortifying. I was truly just an attention-seeking wolf-crier. 

Remember that? Did you know I carried shame for that incident for 10 years? Did you know that it taught me to disregard my threat detector because obviously it was far too panicky?

Do you remember also what you casually told me, a decade later, about what you did back then? How you called your buddy at the sheriff’s office—such a Dick thing to do, befriending a cop two states away—and had him tail me? Remember how he followed me until he found the guy I had described and how he pinned that boy to a wall with his vehicle and threatened his life if he ever came near me again? Remember how you never told me any of that?

Fuck you, Dick. You piece of shit. You pathetic, controlling, narcissist. Fuck your firefighter shield and your affable demeanor that tells the world, “Hey, I’m just a guy.” You are not just a guy. You are a black hole of empathy, siphoning others’ and never giving any out—never, ever feeling full. You take and take and take. 

And you cannot even give me—fuck, I can’t even type the word “acceptance” because to even think it is possible to expect of you is embarrassing. How foolish I have been to hold out hope for you. There is none in the empty cavity where a conscience should be. You are guided by nothing but your cheap, mean, festering emotions.

You are a sad man.

You made me, though, and the fuck of it—I do know other words but FUCK is all I want to say right now because fuck you, fuck this, fuck your gossamer ego—the fuck of it is that you are still Dad. I only get one of those. You’re it. You’re the guy. The big, flawless apple of my child eye. I can still feel the giddiness of going to see Jurassic Park with you in theater, my first movie at night, a special date with Dad. I felt so chosen and delighted, and that is still my favorite movie to this fucking day because of you, you piece of shit. 

I didn’t choose to be your kid. I didn’t consent to any of this. You chose to make me. You chose this relationship. You molded me into the gender-expansive person I became. You signed up for the lifetime responsibility of being Dad to someone, no matter how they turned out. It was your job to make sure they turned out healthy and capable, and, my guy, you didn’t quite finish it.

Not that anyone can expect you to raise a child beyond your maturity level, which I estimate to be approximately 14 years of age.

What hurts most, what really fucking stings, is that I only just learned how you turned my young brother against me. That little baby whose diapers I changed, who started to turn out a little like me because at 7 years old, I happily signed up to help raise this new sibling, whom I loved. And you whispered aspersions in his little teenage ears, and you made him dislike me. Do you know how much it broke my heart? Did you know that when you chose him over me, when you abandoned me, because I started having unwelcome hormones and developing a body I did not understand nor especially like, that you took from me not just Buddy Dad but also someone who felt like my child? Because you parentified me, you see. That’s the therapy term. 

I’ve done a lot of therapy. It’s expensive. $180 per session. $250 for the couples therapist I desperately need because I have zero framework for healthy love and have to learn it as a 41-year-old person because no one fucking taught me at home, when I was a child, when people who are not raised by assholes usually learn that love is a nice, safe thing and not a minefield of short tempers and cruel “jokes” and competition for power, a smiling veneer over a simmering swamp of resentments and disdain. I have to pay people to teach me how to love. That was your job, Dick.

And you’re moving to Florida, where you feel more comfortable, where I am not even safe.

You belong in Florida.

I’m running out of rage, and I’m running out of words. And I’m going to publish this because parents who treat their genderqueer kids the way you have treated me deserve to be publicly lashed, because maybe this rage will feel cathartic to someone, but mainly because it feels cathartic to me. 

It is raw, and it is messy, and I am raw, and I am messy. I am scarred, and I am unfinished, but I am not broken. You did not break me. You cannot. I’m stronger than you. 

And you hate me for it.

Well, I finally hate you, too. Congratulations. You got your wish.

See you at your funeral, maybe.