Hermanita, You Have Our Father’s Rage
“My father had the kind of anger all fathers do.
Loud and terrible. It lingers for your whole life.”
– Katie Maria’s “It lingers for your whole life”
“I am angry because of my father.
I can hold a grudge like it’s a hand.”
– Halsey’s I Would Leave Me If I Could: A Collection of Poetry
A father’s anger is no comparison to the anger of a seventeen-year-old girl. My hermanita has our father’s rage: terrifying and full of fire, its flames swallow me whole and leave me heaving on all fours. The anger within her rips from out of her throat, her wavering screams tear into my chest like teeth ripping through skin, and my hands don’t know whether to go to my ears (to block out our father’s screams), eyes (to block the sight of our father coming closer), or
mouth (to block the hurtful sobs our father’s words caused). Instead my hands tremble, fingers
fidgeting unsure whether to grab her by her arms to hold her down or let her carry on, quietly
watching her burn everything in her path until her own tears coming out of her big brown eyes
put out the fire consuming her – the one thing she inherited from our father.
To clarify, my hermanita is not an angry child. She does not carry the heavy weight our father once bore on his shoulders, a weight which manifested his rage. He is mostly quiet now,
the crackle of a candle next to his second daughter who is the embodiment of the threat a simmering match brings to forest grounds. She used to be a small quiet child with her hair tied
up nicely in a neat ponytail, her bangs right above her eyes. Her clothes were colorful with
lovely designs which were carefully picked out by our mother. My hermanita would scream out
of delight doing her best to outrun the ocean waves or when I would come home from school
because I’m her big sister and she missed me. But children grow up, and the mere ghost of the child she once was only makes appearances in moments of weakness.
“I’m trying, okay! Can’t you see that I’m trying? Why can’t you see?”
Why can’t you see me? The last word is always left unsaid, hanging in the air. It must be
difficult being the second daughter, the middle child. I will never know what it feels like, but I
bear witness to the effects it has on my hermanita. She has always been in the middle: the middle
child, the middle birthday in August (she is the 21st, my mother is the 12th, and my youngest
sister is the 25th), the middle in between conflicts with her friends, the one who got bullied in
middle school, the only one who cried between my little sister and I when our parents brought up
divorce. It seems the only place she is not in the middle is in the backseat of the car; there, we
team up against the youngest one for the window seats. Being the middle child is considered a
curse amongst most people, constantly being overlooked by the youngest child, overshadowed
by the oldest, and overworked by themselves to prove their existence, that they are here too. I
guess that’s why my hermanita’s hair is now untamed and dyed different shades, her bangs covering her eyes; her clothes are dark and take inspiration from Japanese street style picked out carefully by herself; her large brown eyes are always done with black eyeliner and false lashes, and if you look closely enough you can see how fatigue and anger replaced her once starry-eyed glimmer. Where did it go, the wonder in her eyes? Who took it away? Was it age? The cruelty of her tormentors? Was it me? Was it our parents? Who? What? When? Where? Where is it? Where did it go? Why her? Why, why, why, why, why?
“I’m sorry, Dad! I’ll try, okay? I’ll try! I’m sorry, please don’t – please – ! Mom, tell him no! Mom! Mom, please!”
I remember so vividly hearing the loud cracking noise my father’s slap caused as it made
contact with my cheek before I felt it. It wasn’t meant for me. He had already yelled at me for my grades, but something set him off on my hermanita and he was charging for her toward the
kitchen despite her pleas, ready to hit her for her own terrible grades. To this day I don’t recall
how I got there in time for his hand to make contact with my cheek. I think I got in between
them, pushing my father away from her, which sent him into a rage of fury that he directed toward me. I don’t know, I don’t care, I just didn’t want him to hit her. Did he not know? Did my mother not know? Or did they choose to look the other way? This incident happened when my hermanita was in middle school; she was eleven and being bullied mercilessly. Of course her grades were going to be a reflection of her mental state, but our parents then were victims to their own torments, their own issues they lacked fixing – or better yet, believed they could fix by molding us into what they could have been.
As my hermanita was being tormented by bullies from the ages of eleven to fourteen , she was still expected to be better than me in everything after I had failed my parents consistently (through academics and life choices). She was expected to become everything I couldn’t and set an example for our littlest sister to follow. Our parents were not going to allow my hermanita to slip through the cracks and brush off school for play, or let her go out unless she had done absolutely everything she was told to do. If my hermanita would show any sign of struggle , it was brushed off, even blaming her for her own troubles because how could she have any? She was a child and had nothing to stress over – nothing my parents saw.
Our mom would say, “You should be asleep! Why didn’t you start your homework earlier?”
“I did. I’ve been doing homework since I got home,” my hermanita would reply,
surrounded by workload for five classes each of which required two hours of studying. School was over at 3pm; it took her thirty minutes to get home, thirty minutes to eat, and, from 4:30pm until she couldn’t keep her eyes open, she was doing homework. She went to an IB middle school, but I think “hell” is a more appropriate word.
“What do you mean you don’t want to go to school?” Our father scoffed, “Don’t be lazy.
All you do is sit down and take notes.”
“I just don’t feel so good,” she replied quietly, hiding the tears forming around her eyes.
She was being tormented by a boy in her class for the eczema around her mouth and arms and
for potentially being gay (she’s bisexual, just like I am, and knew the trouble that loomed in the
horizon if our parents found out).
“Why did you tell your counselor you want to kill yourself? Don’t be ridiculous. You
have no reason to be sad. We have given you everything. You know there are kids with worse lives than yours out there, right? Some kids are starving and you’re depressed? Por favor.”
My hermanita would cry consistently, locking herself in our shared bedroom and scream
into her pillows because our parents, the people who were supposed to console and help her, were telling her to get over it despite not knowing how difficult it is to be a young girl in a cruel world that demands she hand over her childhood with no promise it would reciprocate anything in return. Why did the world have to come after her? Rip away her childhood because she was
quiet, shy – lonely? She never deserved to know what it feels like to want to quit, to want to not
keep going because she could see no other option . Holding the weight I should’ve been carrying was a burden I wish she didn’t have to carry on her skinny shoulders, a burden I never should’ve let slip through my hands. What does one do with all that pressure, that suffering? Where does it go? What does it become?
I presume the swelling of her anger was inevitable. Something had shifted within my
hermanita almost overnight.
“Can you shut up?”
The silence that followed was suffocating. My eyes went wide with shock hearing those words come out of my hermanita’s mouth directed at our father. I stood up so fast, nearly
toppling the chair over to defend her , knowing what was coming next.
“Just shut up, shut up, shut up!” My sister screamed. Her hands were in her hair, and she was shaking her head with such rage that none of us could react properly. My father couldn’t
even do anything. The surprise left him perplexed. He looked more worried by this outburst than angry; she just told him to shut up.
After that, her fury became more prominent; one wrong move and she’d be screaming,
destroying whatever was in her way. She became so protective of her own peace that she became
chaos. I couldn’t touch her desk when cleaning the room because if one little thing was
misplaced she would tear apart her desk, making a mess everywhere. None of us could tell her
anything or she would get physical. I remember the night I tried holding her down, crying on top
of her as I watched her writhe beneath me. The night we almost broke the television in the living
room because I was holding her and she kept throwing herself backwards to make me fall. The
night when I was going to see my friends, I got a call from my mother crying that my
hermanita almost got into a physical altercation with our father, throwing punches at him, and
that she didn’t know what to do.
My hermanita inherited our father’s rage. The more she transformed into a forest fire, the
quieter my father got. The anger that had once consumed him was now clinging to his daughter–its claws digging into her shoulders, its sharp teeth grazing her neck–and I know he’s the only one who can see that, and I know how deeply it saddens him. My hermanita has no other motivation, no other drive besides the rage accumulated over the years, the desire to be seen and heard how she wants and when she wants. As an artist close and dear to her heart once said, “And I’ve been a forest fire, I am a forest fire, and I am the fire, and I am the forest, and I am a witness watching it.”