disappeared
by Elouise
disappeared seeds
sown in haste germinate –
my heart skips a beat
It’s the late 1950s. I’m a young teenager, sitting at the supper table with my parents and my three sisters. I’m teary, feeling crampy and a bit nauseous. Not eager to eat anything.
My father tells me to stop crying and eat my dinner. I can’t stop crying, and my stomach ache isn’t going away.
My father tells me to stop this nonsense immediately, or he’ll give me something to really cry about. I burst into loud tears and run upstairs to my bedroom, sobbing my heart out.
My childhood, youth and adulthood are littered with occasions that replicate or echo these dynamics. My biggest problem, so it seems, is that I’m over-emotional and haven’t yet learned to control myself.
I learned to ‘disappear’ myself by choking on my emotions, swallowing them, eating them alive, or trying to paste a happy face over my true face.
When I wrote about the pain of retirement, I said I feel ‘disappeared.’ I didn’t hear it then as a loaded word. But now I do. A cue of sorts. The kind that suggests the opposite of what it seems to say. Following is my un-disappeared, crystal clear comment about myself.
No, I do not feel sorry for myself. No, I’m not stuck in a gear I need to shift out of. No, I’m not simply repeating myself over and over and over again.
My words are my words. My feelings are my feelings. I’m as entitled to them as anyone else is to his or hers. I dare not sit on them, deny them, modulate them to suit your ears, or beg forgiveness for not living up to what you believe should be the standard for my life.
I’ve never understood why some men (also some women) have, throughout my life, felt free to give advice about how I should NOT be. Or about what I should be ‘over’ by now.
My father buried and tried to smother in his body and soul the very things he demanded I bury in my body and soul. Not because they would harm me, but because they made him uncomfortable, or didn’t fit his view of the woman he wanted me to become. Or the man he thought he was.
I’m grateful for my feelings. I admit to feeling uneasy sometimes about letting them show. Yet overall, I’m grateful to be a highly sensitive woman of a certain age. Unleashed, untamable, not prone to shame or responsive to scolding.
© Elouise Renich Fraser, 11 December 2017
Image found at ucg.org
Telling the Truth 
Your words touch me deeply as the father of three women and now as a grandfather. There were undoubtedly times I shifted into “fix it” mode as a man (sometimes in a misguided attempt to assuage my wife’s sympathetic pain). Having no real father figure to lean on in my own life to emulate my “automatic pilot” was not always reliable. I don’t know who mentored your dad along the way but I am deeply sorry for the affect he has had on you. Your writing has inspired me to initiate healing conversations with my children. Trust me, you have not disappeared. And I am grateful for your continued influence. Blessings on you!
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Thank you, Dan! I’m so happy for your comment. My father, unfortunately, was ‘mentored’ by his own rage-aholic father who beat all but one of his sons (7 of them), and abused at least some, if not all his 4 daughters. I don’t know how he treated his two wives (the first, my father’s mother, died of TB). They were farmers in the Northwest and Midwest, somewhat isolated no matter where they lived. A dairy farm in Kansas finally became the solution to their financial situation. It also, like all other ventures before it, required immense hard labor by all hands, and evoked my grandfather’s unpredictable rage and physical abuse when things didn’t go exactly as he thought they should.
I also can’t say enough about how much my own conversations have meant to me and to our adult children (and their spouses) over the last several decades. It was difficult and scary, but immensely rewarding. Thank you for your comments about not having ‘disappeared!’ I’m most grateful.
Elouise
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Yes Elouise. Your post sends me back to my time as a father and my need to tell my daughter to ‘grow up’ and to stop being a ‘sook’. Luckily I stopped after a while – I hope I did. But in the end I think I may have become a little too easy. It is a horrible line to walk when the one leading is also learning the path.
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Yes. It is. I think adult conversations with my adult children were some of the best gifts I ever received. Sadly, my father seemed incapable of empathy or compassion.
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Very Sad.
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