Thank You For Having a Heart

“Thank you for having a heart,” she says, finding it and piercing through it. Not in a way that’s painful. I had grown accustomed to that feeling. This was different. It was a burning similar to the delayed sensation you feel when you slice yourself with a particularly sharp blade.

My heart became inflamed, like it was trying to protect itself from feeling too much love. Like a thirsty man who finds an oasis in the desert and has to stop himself from choking on the water by drinking too fast.

She looks at me with her innocent brown eyes. I am just now noticing that the softness has returned to them, reminiscent of the eyes I looked into when singing to her as a baby while rocking her to sleep.

She interrupts another one of her rants, something she believes strongly because of arguments she reads on the internet. I’m realizing that she puts too much stock in the things she hears influencers say in YouTube videos.

She has been so protected by me these past few years that she has not yet experienced the reality that most people have opinions, but often choose survival over openly expressing them or taking a strong stance that would cause more friction than necessary to get what they need from the world before retreating back to the solace of their home base.

It was in that special, shining moment of hearing her express that seemingly simple sentence that it occurred to me: I had successfully achieved a level of sanctuary and peace that allowed us both to grow.

Three years ago, we fled the persecution of her narcissistic mother. A woman who would lash out with the most hateful speech if it soothed her own psyche. She wreaked havoc on her daughter’s self-worth by openly criticizing her from infancy anytime she sensed an inclination that exposed her own inconsistency and insecurity.

I knew my wife did it to me too, her husband who fought hard to provide for his family a life I thought others dreamed of. One my parents never could keep it together long enough to provide for me. Yet somehow, the battle to survive the outside world seemed easier than the one constantly waiting for me at home.

One day, three years ago, my daughter opened up to me about her depression, the cutting, and all the damaging things her mother was saying to her. Things that made the feelings in her heart so painful that she needed to feel anything else that might distract her from her emotional anguish.

I knew the pain well. It was why I used to drink. I could feel the toll it was taking on my body. Small, strange ailments presenting themselves throughout me. I was hurting myself in my own way, but it felt like it prevented my pain from spilling out onto anyone else.

It was in our conversations that I saw the suffering was shared. The realization that my wife’s abuse was affecting not just me. It was hubris on my part to think I was capable of shielding my children from it.

Escape was our only option. So I ran, and my daughter followed. Well, she was exiled by her mother because she opened up about the insecurity she felt being perpetuated by her. But that inconvenient truth would not be allowed to exist at all. She was clearly a rebel. A bad apple that dropped too close to my bad rootstock. She had to go.

The plan was always to have her with me in a place I would create out of peace, respect, and security. But her mother made sure the exodus away from her would be controlled and framed not as a choice that would help our daughter become strong and independent from her influence, but as an act of selfish rebellion.

So while packing her up and dropping her off, you said the words:

“No mother loves her daughter more than when she is willing to give her up.”

What the fuck? I’m sorry? Who says that?

Thanks for driving in the knife that would take the next three years to gently remove from our daughter’s subconscious.

But I did it. I scraped a life together for us from the scraps you didn’t snatch for yourself, like a wounded animal striking out while cornered. Squatting in a home someone else built, refusing to be dislodged from your comfort.

But we were the ones wounded.

So I bled, and I fought to make the home I always envisioned. A fortification against the ugliness that exists in a world full of people who soothe their generational trauma by inflicting it on others.

Hurt people hurt people. But why can’t we have a place that’s ours, where we try to face the trauma and heal it rather than use it to wound others? Where our shields are lowered and our nervous systems can rest. Where we are met with unconditional love and acceptance.

It was with that simple sentence from my daughter, rich with so much meaning, that I realized I had successfully built that place for us.

A place where she could rant about what matters, at least to her, in the theoretical mind of a newly minted woman who has been allowed to exist in artistic, childlike expression. Someone who has been allowed a viewpoint and the grace to know her mind will continuously evolve and mature.

It meant she was watching and listening to the lessons I wanted to embody for her:

The world is tough. People are hurting. They will hurt you because of it. But whenever possible, meet their pain with love and a gentle heart. Their anger is not a reflection of your beautiful heart and soul. Your reaction to them, and your treatment of them, is.

It was in that simple expression, seemingly inconsequential perhaps, that she filled my being with all the love we had lacked.

“Thank you for having a heart.”

She didn’t just learn the lesson.

She appreciated it.

🥹