A History

She never was secure in her father’s love, ever looking for his approval, even into her adulthood. Any earnings she made went to them – 90% of her wages for years. Meanwhile, she counted slices of bread and shared a one bedroom apartment with five other young pre-professional women working hard for their break into the corporate scene. The idea was that the parents were using the money to invest in her future. (It was always more about investing for the future – for a better life… in the future.)

She eventually found a man who wanted to marry her, devote his life to her. He crosses the ocean to be with her, ringing in his ears the voices of disapproval of his own family. She went for it: got married. It’s what people do.

But her father didn’t seem to welcome this new person in his daughter’s life. This new person curbed the daughter’s attention for her father. The father had his own wife, but he never fully surrendered himself to it, always hanging on the outside of his own potential life. His wife, the mother, was loving and devoted – although at times, she wasn’t sure why – but he kept her at arm’s length: the power of this love was just too much to handle, too much to reciprocate. A daughter’s devotion, on the other hand, can be modulated, manipulated.

The father expressed his disfavour for the daughter’s husband: he was of ‘low-birth’; his business wasn’t white-collar; he didn’t provide his daughter the lifestyle she was entitled to. And perhaps, on some level, he recognized in this man the same limitless devotion he saw in his own wife. It’s something to distrust and fear. It’s something one cannot rely on. Money. Material goods. They are secure. You can rely on them. They’re what will get you through life.

The daughter wasn’t strong enough to withstand her father’s blows to her life. She starts to turn on her husband, the one who left everything just to love her. She became a ruthless critic herself. Nothing he did could ever be good enough. He becomes despondent: is this where my faith led me? Is this how faith disappoints in the end? Faith, he learns, is a lie; it’s not rewarded. He turns angry. He fights back in his not-so-passive ways. The marriage, after only a few years, is obliterated. The possibility for repair is completely unforeseeable.

They have kids. It’s what people. Having beautiful children will provide the façade of peace and satisfaction. But the wife and husband are still at war. Now they have ammunition between them. Or territory to claim. I’m not sure which.

In one, ultimate blow, she seizes the territory as her own. He has very little hope of regaining it now. He had been demonized. He had failed them. So according to the wife’s rhetoric, she had every justification for taking the children away from him. ‘I saved them. Therefore, they will have to love me more.’ They were going to live with her father and mother. Her father approves of this. Finally, he can correct the bad habits formed in them by their low-class father. He will get to teach them all the things that life is about, like obedience, discipline, and academics. ‘The children’s father is about all play and no work. I will show them that virtue is in a life of all work and no play,’ the grandfather tells himself.

Almost 30 years later, the grandparents have passed on. (The grandfather had a lonely, emotion-less funeral; the grandmother had a very populated, laudatory one.) There is very little trace of the woman’s family. The bonds are tenuous. Except for the woman, each of them is in a new family of their own. She lived for her parents, her father’s approval. But now they are gone and she is left with very little else, much less a sense of herself.