Perfect Daughter - Content Warning Childhood Trauma
You wanted to control me
And you did
Very successfully
Now I am choking
Unable to breathe
Through the reality and agony
Of dreams I can’t believe in
Of loves I can’t pursue
Of hope I cannot fathom
Even walking out the door
Rips a hole in my chest
Demands so much of me
That all I can manage after
Is to lay down
I don’t want to die
It’s not that
I just don’t know how to live
I don’t know how to breathe
I don’t know how to hope
I don’t know how to believe
I don’t know how to feel
I don’t know how to love
I don’t know what I am imagining
And what is actually real
I’m not certain
But I suppose you got what you wanted
A perfect daughter
With no thoughts of her own
No hope for the future
Few good memories of her past
Gagging
Because crying is too loud
Its dangerous to be noticed
Image Description: Freshly baked collection of Rose blossom apple tarts. The apples are sliced thin and carefully arranged in rings inside the pie crust to create rose shaped deserts.
This poem is an incredibly personal one. In it I express the emotional toll growing up in an unhealthy, legalistic, conservative Christian environment. I was once a loud, feral child who in grade one lost her voice from screaming so much both in the playground and in torment at home that I developed calluses on my vocal cords. I lost my voice, and there was concern by the doctors that the damage was permanent. Through extensive therapy and months of frustrating rules about being silent and not trying to talk unless it was an emergency and then only whisper, I eventually recovered my voice. I moulded myself into a perfect daughter to appease people who severely punished stepping out of line.
I was still the loudest person in my social circle but was far quieter than everyone else in my family. I gave up trying to be heard. At night I’d wait till my little sister was asleep then sob as quietly as I could into a pillow so I didn’t wake her. I wanted to protect her. I didn’t feel that I could let her show her how broken I was. As long as I kept my head down, I was generally unmolested.
I married early and was further crumpled under what was expected of me as wifely duties. In 2017 fissures developed in my emotional walls and over the next three years everything fell apart. Those around me, and I myself tried to force me into the mold of perfect daughter and perfect wife, yet all that crumbled into nearly deadly shards. It’s only been amid the debris of who I thought I’d be that life is slowly returning to my soul. I am often caught up on the jagged edges of my past and break down, but I now have safe people around me to move forward.
If you’re in an unsafe situation I hope you are able to find a way to escape. It hurts like perhaps nothing else ever will, but three years after I completely broke free I can say that for me at least, there is another side. It’s not perfect, but it’s better.