Mi papi, as the third eldest boy, was left alone to take care of his siblings and mother. The torch was not passed down to him, but he took it before it hit the ground. He not only took the torch but ran as fast as he could, and has not stopped running. He took care of his family better than his own dad ever did. My abuelita Candida never worked. My papi was a musician, as my abuelito had been, so mi papi got my grandfather’s band together and began to run everything. He played at clubs before he could even drink, and he even got to play for the president of our country. My dad’s band was successful, and he was able to pay off mi abuelita’s home and for the private education of his older sister and all his younger siblings. Mi papi at sixteen had to become the breadwinner for his siblings and his mami. Mi papi at sixteen became el hombre de la casa. Mi papi did not get to be a teenager for more than three years before his childhood was taken from him.
Mi papi is a proud man who cares for the well-being of others and would die trying to take care of everyone he loves. He has felt that responsibility longer than I have even been alive. That type of pressure, along with living in a country that was going through its most devastating civil war, meant that mi papi adjusted to his context. A war that was prolonged due to US interventions impacted mi papi, and whether he knows it or not, that trauma has stayed present in our lives.
Men in many communities appear to assign ideological weight on the outward attire and sexual purity of women in the community because they see women as 1) the community’s—or the nation’s—most valuable possession, 2) the principle vehicles for transmitting the whole nation’s values from one generation to the next, 3) bearers of the community future generations—or, crudely, nationalist wombs, 4) the members of the community most vulnerable to defilement and exploitation by oppressive alien rulers, and 5) those most susceptible to assimilation and cooption by insidious outsiders.
—Cynthia Enloe
Dr. Cynthia Enloe was the first person I read who indirectly humanized my experiences with mi papi. My parents lived through war and interventions by the United States, and they did not go unscathed. Enloe specifically talks about militarism and gender and the ways that it impacts men. Gender binaries become reinforced in times of war; for survival, women get restricted to the home and men get to protect them from “outsiders.” Learning this shaped how I view mi papi. I learned that the dangers I was being protected from came from the real dangers he protected his mami and sister from during Nicaragua’s civil unrest. I learned that the monster under mi papi’s bed was not just toxic masculinity. He had to contend with more than any child should have to, and he managed to do it well—and he is joyful despite it all.
Mi papi lived through traumatic experiences and he stepped up and did what was asked of him. He is a survivor. This does not excuse anything that occurred to me due to his unresolved trauma, but it gave me the ability and the skills to better comprehend it all. And there are so many things about mi papi that I love, things I will never forget, even as I try to heal from his abuses. I know now: hurt people hurt people.
Finding Enloe’s work gave me my life back. Finding the words allowed me to begin to self-soothe and then heal. I finally understood that it was not entirely mi papi’s fault, and I knew better where to direct my anger.
Women tend to do a lot of work to justify the actions of the men in our lives, while our men do little to nothing to acknowledge our pain, much less try to alleviate it. I thought of enrolling at the institution where Enloe teaches to earn my second master’s degree. Her work helped me understand mi papi. But while I was accepted into the program, I decided not to go in the end. I’m glad I did not go. I had almost made an academic career out of justifying mi papi’s behavior and treatment of me, my sister, and mi mami. I had almost allowed the monster under my bed to take over my life by becoming an expert on it.
[Women] learn to make an identity out of their suffering, their complaint, their bitterness.
—bell hooks
Dealing with mi papi has been hard. I have felt unfaithful and ungrateful for creating boundaries, even though they have kept me safe from him. I still experience the negative effects of fearing the most important male figure from my childhood. I struggle with doing anything that is not perfect, because the fear of being hit still lingers; my last beating was when I was twenty-three years old. But more so, I have a fear of authority figures. When I first encounter any authority figure, I’m still visibly insecure. I tend to assume that I bring nothing to the table. I get flooded with childhood memories, and I have to work hard to stay focused and present.
I do not trust easily, because I fear that trust will be exploited. I do not show vulnerability to romantic partners without calculation. I’m always on guard and anticipating that my vulnerability could be used against me. I go to a lot of therapy and I try to make sense of the lovelessness I felt in a home that lauded itself as being full of love.
But generally, I have the tools I need to frame mi papi’s experiences and my experiences with him. Yet I have not quite found a way to deal with sibling abuse, other than understanding that these behaviors are generationally passed down. I have not read much that talks about sibling abuse, and I have not talked to many people who have experienced it. But having an emotionally abusive older brother in a household that placed more value on men’s abilities meant that his abuse was routinely excused and tacitly supported. He was constantly emboldened to do and say whatever he pleased to me and my younger sister. Our church and thus our household revered patriarchy, which meant men in general were considered superior. Our brother was not treated like our sibling; he was treated like our prince.
My brother is cruel; when he is angry, he is vicious. He has this ability to make you feel interesting and funny, until his mood shifts. And his moods are never predictable. You never know if you are getting Jekyll or if you are about to interact with Hyde.
He can be calm and relaxed and engaging, or he can suddenly turn and start screaming insults for no reason. Then he’ll tell me that I deserve it and I am to blame. And then he’ll apologize. In this, he is very different from mi papi. My brother is a master of apologies.
After he has blown off some steam, said every cruel thing he could imagine, gotten close enough to my face that I can actually see his pupils dilated from rage, then he apologizes.
I will dare to say that my older brother is the best at begging for forgiveness for his rage-fueled tantrums. He will have tears streaming down his face after having called me names and insulted my appearance and my intelligence. He will make big promises of never saying what he said again. He love bombs, maybe to secure his place in our hearts despite his behavior. But these grand apologies are empty, always. He has always broken his promises to me of being better and curbing his temper. It is like he has no control over his anger, and I just have to accept it and know that he will come to his senses eventually.
Keeping a relationship with someone with an unpredictable and uncontrollable temper means that I have to make myself as small and as invisible as I can. I did not want to be the reason we got into a verbal altercation. I wanted to be easy, uncomplicated, just like my brother liked.
His rage is literally bursting at the seams, and you can almost see him building up for a temper tantrum. My brother scares me in ways mi papi never did. Without mi papi, my brother would not be who he is. His behavior was tolerated and his anger was seldom corrected. He freely became who he is today because of how we were raised.
I rarely write about my brother. I rarely mention him. I have made his existence minimal in my everyday life, as a way to erase the worst parts of my childhood. But he is crucial to understanding my childhood; I just choose to not give him that power. Unlike mi papi, who traveled for work often, we were stuck with the proxy “man of the house” twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
My brother understood that our household monitored the girls. Everyone was trusted to follow the church doctrines except my sister and me. My brother under
stood that his role was to police us, to “protect” us from ourselves, so he took it upon himself to weaponize this power he was given. The girls were to be controlled.
If he caught us breaking the guidelines for pure, Christian girls—even just watching a television show that seemed too secular—he would tell mi mami. I would then be reprimanded. On the surface this feels normal, this feels like “proper parenting,” but just underneath it was clear that it was a game that was built for his benefit. He knew this, and he enjoy playing this game of making me feel powerless. He needed to remind me that he was ranked higher and he was untouchable. I resented how often he did this, because it was not just sibling rivalry—it was a wielding of church-sanctioned, gendered power.
Our home was strict but conveniently stricter whenever my brother wanted it to be. I did what I could to subvert these rules, if only in secret. In my logic, if rules did not apply to my brother (who was only two years older than me), then they should not apply to me. But I rarely got away with much. And getting the truth beat out of me meant that I eventually gave in and just made myself as small and as invisible as I could be. I wanted to be easy, uncomplicated, just like everyone liked. And I waited for the day when I could leave.
If my brother got wind of me dating someone, he would drive to where he knew I would be, trying to gather “proof” for my parents of my impurity. My brother became the patrolman for my purity and the purity of my sister. It was he who revealed to my parents that my sister was no longer a virgin, which she was reamed out for. It was he who took it upon himself to find evidence of my sinning. It was he who eventually turned himself into our parents when he fornicated. He felt so ashamed, he suffered, too, at the hands of all this. He thought he had done a horrible thing, when all he had done was have sex with his girlfriend. I get it, it was not all him, it was bigger than us, but he took it upon himself to be judge and jury over my body and the body of my younger sister. Our church and home told him that was his rightful role: above us, acting as a constable.
After seventeen years of rage followed by exaggerated apologies and declarations of sibling love, I stopped talking to my brother. I had grown numb and I had grown tired of being told all the things I was doing wrong. I was tired of being small and making myself invisible. I understood that our church placed him on a pedestal, a place I could never reach. I grew cold, and I learned this very unreal skill of going from seeing someone every day for an entire childhood to shutting him entirely out of my life. I learned to not engage, to shut down my emotions around him. I learned to keep him away from me and everything I valued.
When I decided to bring home a boyfriend for the first time, I sought to protect him from my brother. I also wanted this boy to protect me from my brother. It was funny to discover that my brother did not challenge men. It was only little girls he liked to ridicule. I was safe whenever my boyfriend was in the room; my brother would be on his best behavior. I resented that only another man could rein him in. I resented that being born of the same parents meant nothing to him. I resented that he felt so cold toward me and so warm toward the men I dated. I resented that my boyfriends would meet my brother and then question my childhood stories of his abuse. I resented that these young men longed to like one another. I resented that my stories of abuse seemed “not that bad,” until one boyfriend actually witnessed my brother slip into cruelty. I resented that he had to see it to believe it.
I learned to tell my brother nothing. I knew anything I said would become ammunition against me. I trusted nothing about him. His intentions were always suspect at best. This way, I could be ready for whatever came at me. I was protected from being charmed by him.
The less he knew about me, the better. The less he heard about me, the more I knew I would be okay. My logic was: he cannot hurt me if I am always prepared.
I rarely write about my brother, because it requires me to ask hard questions of my parents. Why did they allow him to rule over me, to mistreat me, to belittle and dehumanize me? Mi mami would often say that her older brother was worse, as if that was supposed to answer my and my baby sister’s pleas to have his behavior corrected. I would never understand why this was allowed to happen to us.
My sister and I still bond over his behavior. She will call me and tell me about his new antics and his new insults and his new manipulation tactics. We find solace in knowing that we were not alone growing up and that we had one another to rely on and protect from him, even when our parents did not protect us. In fact, I was the one who threatened to call the cops when he hurt my sister badly enough that he made her sob from pain one evening. This all occurred in front of mi papi and mami, and mi mami left the room while mi papi told my sister that it was her fault.
I rarely write about my brother, because it requires that I turn the lens on myself. I rarely write about my brother, because I fear that I have not done enough to make him better, to stop his misogyny. But then I remember that voice that keeps telling me: I am socialized to rationalize the behavior of my abusers in order to survive a patriarchal culture. I have been socialized to do the emotional work to understand and heal relationships with men who believe themselves to be superior. This same culture socializes men to do little to no emotional work to heal my pain. So, I have chosen to walk away. And yet my brother will never be okay with my existing outside his control.
He has spent years telling me he loves me anyway. Mi papi plays that trick also; they passively stand back and give me room to apologize to them. They patiently wait. They position themselves as the victims of my shunning. I am the resentful person who cannot let anything go, and they are the victims of my self-preservation. They believe all this to their core. They do not see that surviving being around them means that I have to make myself as small and as invisible as I can.
They do not see that I do not want to be the reason we got into a verbal altercation. They do not see that all I want is to be easy, uncomplicated.
All they see is that I am a woman, and therefore histérica whenever emotional, and that their role is to dominate me at all costs. That is the thing about emotionally manipulative, toxic men: they will always frame themselves as innocent, and we will be led to believe that it is true. We will become their defenders and tell our own daughters to focus on the good. We are taught to be swallowed whole by someone’s foundational belief that he is better than us.
I have always suspected that our migration hit my brother harder than it hit me. I was younger and was able to pick up more of the culture. I learned English more easily, without much of an accent, while his accent remains. He was nine years old when we moved here and was bullied for his accent, a lot. His personality seemed to transform here.
In Nicaragua, he had a lot of friends and played outdoors often. He had his independence. We would bike to and from our school. But when we moved here, he became quiet and shy. His first experience with a bully in the United States was a girl, a fact he would be teased about by my dad for many years. He could not keep the few friends he managed to make, and so he rarely had friends. He is a loner and severely misunderstood. I have always believed that our migration was traumatic for him, and nobody really helped him. Toxic masculinity tells boys to bury their feelings, and I wonder how much that has impacted him. But I won’t excuse his behavior when he will not work to heal his own trauma.
Today I do not make myself small and invisible, for anyone. I have learned that if men do not like me or my work—and especially if they encourage their girlfriends, wives, or femme partners to stay away from me—then I must be doing something right. I am attempting to create a reality where women like me get to live boldly as ourselves—not like men, but as we are, in all of our fullness.
My friends, all who have been intentionally mutually selected, have helped me build this reality. I am part of a group of three recovering pastor’s daughters. We’re all from the same church, but from different church plants. I attended the Managua church plant and eventually the Miami church plant, and they atten
ded the Guatemala church plant and eventually the Chicago church plant—same church, doctrine, and leadership, but in different cities. We call ourselves Las Brujas, as an attempt to reclaim a word that Christians have long used against female outsiders. All three of us migrated to this country at around the same time. All three of us have been rejected by our home churches. All three of us have been the child that shamed our Christian pastoral families at some point or another. Together we process our pain, celebrate our victories, and honor our humanity.
Through them, I am attempting to create arenas where we do not have to make ourselves small for the comfort of the men in the room. I am attempting to find joy in my visibility, rather than safety in my invisibility. We do not all live in the same city, but when we gather, we revel in our vastness and take up all the space.
Both of them live in Chicago, and when I visit we go to a steak house that is owned by a Colombian husband and wife. The husband uses his wife as a punch line for his jokes often, and we have all made the decision to take her side and openly do so. These moments of not being silent and not rolling over, that is how we recover from the complicity we saw around us growing up. When the owners see us enter the restaurant, even if it has been months, they recognize us. In this restaurant, a space we lovingly refer to as “our restaurant,” we have created a home. Home is with us, with each other, and in the places where we can be ourselves. With these friends, I am attempting to find comfort within myself and radically accept all parts of myself. We hold one another accountable, and we challenge one another to grow. With them, I am the version of myself I could not be at home. My friends are my chosen family. We all have experienced rejection in our home and home church, and we have chosen to radically accept one another. We have accepted the tragedies within us.
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Page 13
