bit-bar
: Disagreement by design!
I have been reading ‘The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love’ by Bell Hooks, and in it she quotes John Bradshaw explaining how boys learn self-betrayal when they are taught that their true self is inappropriate and wrong:
“The feeling that I have done something wrong, that I really don’t know what it is, that there’s something terribly wrong with my very being, leads to a sense of utter hopelessness.
This hopelessness is the deepest cut of the mystified state. It means there is no possibility for me as I am; there is no way I can matter or be worthy of someone’s love as long as I remain myself.
I must find a way to be someone else—someone who is lovable. Someone who is not me.”
When I was a young boy, I received a comically oversized celebratory T-shirt at the conclusion of a soccer season. At some point, I took to wearing it as my pajamas, with no need for any pants as the shirt was down to my knees.
This enraged my father. He demanded that I cease the behavior. But I, born with a stiff neck, refused what seemed to me an absurd request. I have only recently come to a point where I can interpret what followed. I couldn’t understand why he was so upset. I couldn’t understand why it mattered to him so much. I couldn’t understand why my tearful pleading fell on deaf ears, why the man who claimed to love me was so blind to the pain he was causing, pain I was desperately trying to make visible.
There was an established paradigm for how we were punished for misbehavior of varying degrees. This was different. When I wouldn’t obey his directives, he resorted to calling me ‘Michelle’, a feminization of my given name, ‘Michael’. It didn’t hurt to be misgendered (at that age I didn’t even know what that was). It hurt because I knew that whatever my father was so worried about, whatever he thought about me that could drive him to such abuse, simply wasn’t true. If I could just make him see past whatever he was thinking, get him to see me, his son just as I’d always been, and the pain I was in, his love for me would win and I would get my father back.
I was wrong.
There was nothing I could have said to him that would stop the abuse, because in that moment my father wanted to hurt me. The tears and the begging didn’t help not because he couldn’t see but because the pain was a weapon, wielded deliberately.
It is the agony of Isaac, with no divine hand to stay the blade. “Why, father?!”
In the end, I won the battle of wills. I clung so tightly, so desperately, to my sense that this was wrong, that I didn’t deserve this treatment; refusing to be dominated, I made my agony so visible that my mother couldn’t bear it. She gave my father some sort of ultimatum, not because I was deserving of protection, but because she herself couldn’t stand to watch anymore. And my father ended his campaign.
And still, I lost; the well was poisoned. I don’t remember if I continued in wearing the night shirt, but I don’t think that it matters. What matters is that I had learned that there were things I could do that would make me unworthy of love in my father’s eyes; that I was only ever one wrong move away from being the target of a grown man’s rage; that there were parts of my personhood that could drive those I loved to want to hurt me.