I Like To Say, 'I Grew up Rough'

I like to say I grew up rough.

When I say ‘I grew up rough’, I mean that my dad and his friends fashioned paddles out of two by fours and traded them with each other like trophies and their favorite one had thirty-six holes and it whistled through the air and snapped like a frozen lake that’s being walked on and isn’t quite strong enough to support weight, and that half-second breath before the ice splits, is the red lattice pattern that ring-worms itself through skin.

We were pulled out of class for questioning because my mom ran a daycare and one of the girls was pushed by her mom’s boyfriend but we never said a word.

We didn’t tell them that our dad had us stand on one foot with our noses an inch from the wall and our hands tucked neatly behind our backs.

We didn’t tell them that being grounded meant no television, no telephone, no friends, no going outside, no family time, no communication with anyone other than yourself.

We didn’t tell them about the paddles or the wooden spoons my dad waved from the stove.

I didn’t tell them that I was grounded to a chair for a summer; sentenced to stare at a wall of shelves filled with towels and linens and bedsheets.

I didn’t tell them that I passed out from fever during a revival tent, and they beat me when we got home because I moved from the spot they told me to stand in.

I like to say I grew up rough.

I like to say I don’t have a dad.

I like to say that we were a gang.

We were a gang and we have seen it all.

I like to say that every bad thing that you can imagine has happened to us.

We have all been raped and abused and alienated and discriminated against and oppressed and concentrated in the camps of our minds and the barbed wires were the hands of our fathers and our fathers liked to laugh and trade paddles and talk secrets of their trades and their trade was nothing more than rubbing dirt into our already fractured hearts and our backs cracked with sweat and blood and I have cut blades of grass with a pair of scissors because I was afraid that my dad would beat me when he got home if the weed whacking wasn’t perfect along the edges of the house and I never understood why my brothers started drinking and doing drugs but maybe I actually understood all along and I am only just now looking through the fences and seeing what they were actually teaching me inside those bunkers and I know that I am strong and I know that I will not give up and I know that weakness is something they beat out of me but when I look back on those dirty bunks and see the mud-stained carpets,

I am not angry.

I am not angry,

anymore.

I remember sitting at a party and telling a boy that I just met that this was my year to figure out what I believed and I ended up tearing at my sleeves and screaming into the eaves of my mind and I remember staring at the sky and praying to forget everything I ever knew and I prayed that I could be someone new but my mother always surfaces and I don’t know what to do because she was brainwashed too.

I am not angry anymore.

I was stupid, and I was young and the things that I held on the tip of my tongue were meant to inflict pain and I think about the rage pent up inside of that teenage child and I wonder how I survived.

I wonder, how I was able to grow.

They say that gardens need tender love and that gardens need care and that gardens need breath and that gardens need a green thumb and that should whisper to your plants so they can breathe your breath, but who manicured me when I ran away when I was eighteen? Who followed me across the state and who watched me stand still and sift through my empty mind? Who told me what to do? And what do I do?

My mind was barren and wasteful and filled with spite and fog and mist and the ground is hard and coarse and they’ve plowed it into rows but the frost has fallen and the ground is hard as stone, and I am standing in the mist and I can see the trees on every side and my mind is a square-shaped field and someone forgot to tell me that summer is alive and it is almost always fall in my mind and I stand there with my head toward the sky but my eyes see the blackness behind and

I just breathe.

This white tank top falls against my chest with each breath and my jeans are mud-spattered and my hands are torn and gaping and open and loose at my sides and my mind is spinning, spinning, spinning, but every breath calls for me to stand still, although I am already standing still, and so I breathe.

I breathe and I wait and I am still waiting.

Here.

My professor said ‘you are iron that was forged in the fires and you are strong enough to have survived it’ and I think of the Bible. I think of the verse where iron sharpens iron.

If anger and peace come up against each other, do they break and crumble?

If anger and peace are always at war, what other weapons are we given?

If I am not angry anymore, am I at peace?

And what is peace if not a fleeting feeling that we give ourselves to comfort the pain we’ve endured?

Where does the pain go when we send it off?

Pain lays dormant, yet rears up inside and catches you under the ribs when you least expect it. I have felt pain in the middle of a laugh. I have felt pain in the small of my back, in the roots of my mind, in the corners of my smiles and I keep it hidden inside because it isn’t your fault that I have cracks and fissures within my heart and mind, it isn’t your fault that your jokes and teasing send me into a well that I had to claw my way out of.

I am not angry.

They say that if we tell ourselves the same thing over and over, we will start to believe it.

But I don’t believe that.

I am not angry because I have learned that forgiveness grows within the cracks of my foundations. I have learned that love grows with hate but only one can survive and love has choked out my hate and my hateful heart cannot bear the weight of the thorns that tore at my ribcage so I weeded my garden and threw them onto the sidewalk to dry in the sun and my mother must have come by with her trash bag and gardening gloves and stowed the rotten roots away with her own and I think she put the bags to the curb and watched them wither away in the sunset and I think the trash man picked up the trash last Monday because the curb is empty and clear and I am five years old and my mom is in the driveway holding my hand and we are watching the sun kiss the waves and the trees goodnight.