Hitting

I am hiding under a shade shack by the beach. Being a parent of a small child, time off is an illusion. Yet, there are precious pockets of time when solitude swings by my door and sits with me for a while. 

Last night, happened again. I did not see it coming. I felt the harsh hit between my nose and left eye. A clumsy hit. My glasses felt to the floor. The bigger he gets, the harder the hits become. The patter is the same. Overtired, getting ready to bath or going to bed. The target is the same. My beautiful, wild little kid has a preference to hit me. I don’t want anyone else to experience a sudden slap on the face. At the same time, it has become a lonely thing to experience and make sense of.  

Sometimes, my reaction is anger. I hand him over as soon as I can. I put him down on the bed or I stretch my arms as far as I can from my body while still holding him. Sometimes, I feel sadness. A deep sorrow. I tried every day to be the best parent I can and this is what I get? What am I doing wrong? Does not he love me? At the end of each day, I feel as I gave it all to this child, I left it all on the field. If this is not enough, I get overcome by a sense of incompetence: if this not enough, If I am not enough, how do I go about this? This is all I have! 

This is my master in love. Not because is easy, not because it is self indulgent. It is the grueling process to do the emotional and intellectual work to change myself in the process to raise this kid. I am parenting as much as I am seeking to parent myself. 

I have been trying to find the right way to articulate these feeling and reactions. It has taken me some months to get here. Perhaps it is the sound of the water and the ease of mind that has helped me to gain some clarity. Perhaps it is the long days and nights that I have been thinking about my own parents and my experience with being hit that have landed me here. It is hard to tell. Sometimes, it is the things that seem futile and empty that serve as the proper catalyst to  get where you need to be. 

When you experience violence, you remember all the details. They stick to you like wet sand. It does not need to be recurrent to be traumatic. Intimidation and fear are things many of us learned at home as bell hooks said. Violence as a mean to instill fear and establish authority works.  Especially when you are little and the person using violence  is your father. Men are particularly prone to act in violent ways and get away with it. Mostly, justified under layers of cultural acceptance and complicity. 

So when my child hit me, it brought back into my presence the injustice and unfairness I felt when I was little and was hit without  justification. There is no justification to hit a child. I was unable to articulate my feelings about it. It has been many decades since these experiences happened yet I still feel the power of my anguish and fear. How can someone who loves me so much could be capable of this? 

Violence is a chronic incapacity to articulate emotions in ways that create and sustain change. I understand it and because of this, I never justify it. I hate it. I grew up in a violent country, surrounded by violence from early in the morning to late at night. Violence slowly robes you of what makes you human.  

In this process to understand the emotions coming from my child and from my father, I see in both a plea for help. Help to articulate the feelings inside. To name them. I understand the violence. I don’t justify it. Sometimes, the generational trauma gets justified as if it was unavoidable. “This was the way I was raised”. “My father would beat us for no reason”. It takes real courage to choose what you were not given. How do you give yourself the space to choose empathy and solidarity for the struggle of a child to become eloquent in their feelings? How do you give yourself the chance to heal by choosing never to inflict the pain of physical punishment to others? 

As I learn with my child how to articulate better our emotions I gain a deeper understanding of the work I have chosen to do in me. There is nothing I can do to change my past and I hope to find the healing power I want in my life. I can also empathize with my father, with his own journey. At the same time, violence and love are a choice. Choose wisely.

Becoming a feminist parent help me to have tools to walk this path yet I am still unclear where it leads. I truly believe the beauty is in the process. 

Sending love and solidarity to all of you.