Dear Daughter by Lia Langworthy
Dear daughter,
Your body shook with tears as CNN declared him the winner. Numb and stoic, I held you, the circuits of my mind overloaded, broken, unable to process what I was hearing and seeing. I imploded with treacherous emotions. Comforting words eluded me.
I called your father, for him to deal with your fears and questions as I rubbed your back. I desperately wished I could cry with you but instead I waited for my body to catch up with my runaway emotions.
As you spoke with your father, I watched the television and heard my narcissistic black father in Donald Trump’s rhetoric. I saw my mother’s white privilege in the millions of white women who voted for him. I saw a sexual predator who went unpunished. I saw the ugliness of hate in the millions of racists that call this country home. I saw a system of white supremacy openly reclaiming the seat at the head of the table. I saw but was too frightened to feel. It was not safe, despite sitting safely on the couch beside you. The election results had rocketed my mind and my body to two different planets. When would they land and reunite?
I woke the next day, still having not shed a tear. Pain clenched my stomach and worked its way toward my heart. I was thankful for your Episcopal school, where you had chapel on Wednesdays and your brilliant female headmaster would try her best to make sense of the election outcome in a way I wasn’t yet able. We drove to school in silence. I couldn’t bring myself to turn on the radio. I pushed the hellish nightmare aside and focused on the space in our car and the matter at hand—getting you to school safely. I broke the silence only to remind you to gather your PE clothes. As we pulled up, relief crept into my lungs. You exited the car, and I exhaled deeply for the first time.
* * *
I drove my route home, up Wilcox to Franklin to Highland, onto the 101 toward Studio City. Nothing was normal, but everything appeared normal. People chatted on their phones, pumped gas, drank coffee. How could this be? Didn’t they know the world had just turned on its axis and we would all fall off into space? The last time I had this sensation was when my mother died.
* * *
She wanted to die at home. After weeks in the hospital, the social workers, doctors and nurses said the end was imminent, so an ambulance took her skeleton of a body back to her mobile home. She lay on the bed in her tiny living room, mouth agape, emitting horrid noises as she struggled to breathe. She held on. While I fed her ice chips, her two cats, Eartha and Kit, curled up and slept next to her head. Dozens sat in my mother’s tiny living room, all eyes on her, waiting for her spirit to leave her body.
I couldn’t stomach the sound of her labored breathing any longer and jumped on my bike for a ride. I rode long and hard. I cried even harder, finally releasing a small portion of my grief.
When I returned, my mother had gone and everything changed. I breathed air, but the air felt different. I ate and drank, but nothing tasted the same. I would never hold her, touch her, talk to her again. A huge monumental shift had happened in my life, but not in anyone else’s.
* * *
Driving home that day after the election, I felt the same exaggerated delineation in time, in space, irrevocable and unchangeable. Death had returned in the form of Trump’s victory.
* * *
Daughter, without you, alone for the first time since the election results, I felt safe enough to return to my body. As when my mother died, my body desperately needed to release my pent up fear, fury and grief. The release came as a scream. My screams shocked me as much as the passing drivers, who craned their necks to witness the crazy woman in her car. I didn’t care. The screams finally released tears, too frightened to appear before. My stomach hurt so badly I contemplated pulling over my car and taking a shit right there on the 101. Why not? Who would’ve stopped me? Fuck it. Grief fought with fear, but ultimately disgust won.
* * *
I drove toward home, crying and wondering how (and why) a highly educated, privileged, experienced white woman couldn’t win the highest office in our country, but a sexist, racist, sexual predator without any experience could. Oh, I knew how and why, but I wasn’t ready to accept the bitter truth.
* * *
After the election, I finally fell asleep around 4 a.m. I dreamt of my uncle, my white, racist, alcoholic Uncle Russ. In my dream I was helping him paint a room army green. He stood high on a ladder, where the wall meets the ceiling, and I stood below him, holding his wares. I loved my Uncle Russ, despite his constant racist jokes and insensitive name-calling. His pet name for me, his favorite niece, was his Little Niglett (nigger + piglet). He had a deep need to denigrate me, and my white mother allowed him to do so.
As a child, I always wished my mother would scream obscenities at my uncle or threaten to never speak to him again if he continued to insult me. Instead, she instructed me to ignore him, to take the high road. She claimed powerlessness and accepted my uncle’s sad excuse of “I mean no harm.” But harm me he did. His powerful and hurtful words, demeaning of my humanity, went unchecked. He took no responsibility for his actions and my mother was complicit. She chose to protect his power, to ensure her access to his privilege, however unequally it was shared. She couldn’t dare risk exposing my uncle for the racist, sexist pig he was. White women are collaborators of white male privilege, benefiting in part from their dominance, even if it’s not in their best interest.
* * *
As I drove home, thinking of my mother and her choice of white privilege over me, I grew enraged. The fact that millions of white women, like my mother, stood with Trump, not against him, enraged me further. I wanted to scream again, but instead cried as I exited the freeway onto Vineland.
* * *
Daughter, white privilege is real, even for an underprivileged, poor and uneducated white woman, like my mother. Raised by others as an unwanted orphan, my mother grew into a woman who demanded little. She accepted harassment as love. I knew my mother loved me, more than herself, but she was unable to stand up for me or herself. However, despite my mother’s difficult childhood, she nonetheless “belonged” as a white woman. When she bought nude nylons, they matched the color of her skin. When she turned on the TV, she saw her face reflected back at her. Being “underprivileged” did not negate all the subtle and unearned privileges her whiteness granted her.
My mother refused to accept she held any such privilege, and I accepted her ignorance, for she had been conditioned to believe such privileges didn’t exist. Yet history has shown, time and time again, white women choose their attachments to white men, the most powerful group in America, over themselves. They did so on Election Day. They chose to vote for a sexual predator ensuring the continuation of abusive white male dominance in this country.
Daughter, as a woman of color you will have many white women claim to be your allies. Be wary. I do not say this to inflict fear, hate or mistrust, but instead to share the truth, rooted in past betrayals. White women want women of color to join their feminist fight while failing to acknowledge their white privilege. Like my mother, many are completely unable to reconcile their powerlessness with their privilege.
During the suffrage movement of the early twentieth century, white women sought the right to vote yet fought blacks who demanded the same right, angrily claiming their inherent superiority over blacks. Historically, white women have abandoned their black sisters when their white privilege is threatened. White women who ignore their race-privilege and focus solely on sexism are blind to their status, power and authority.
Yet we women of color, with less status, power and authority, voted overwhelming for Hillary Clinton. Why could we see what white women could not? We don’t share their privilege. We women of color are of a different ilk. Our oppression is birthed from a different strain of contempt; one much deeper than most white women will ever know.
* * *
As I drove home, my frustration with the white women who decisively handed Trump the presidency became eclipsed by my rage for the narcissist himself.
* * *
Honey, take note, narcissists are pure evil unmasked, especially malignant ones. Pathological liars, master manipulators, out-right abusers: they believe they are above the law, above others, and don’t have to play by anyone’s rules. They crush all in their path without remorse. They negate others’ feelings yet demand honor, respect and reverence for their own. They refuse to see the error of their ways and instead deny, deflect or blame the innocent. They hate to apologize and admit defeat. They are easily enraged and hostile to anyone who challenges them. They spin lies into truth and truth into lies. Their intense sense of entitlement stems from a delusional belief they have an absolute right to fulfill their every want and lust. They are parasitical predators. They are moral and spiritual thieves, always on the hunt for that which is not theirs to take. I know because I had a narcissistic father.
My father usually got his way. He charmed, cajoled or bribed—whatever it took to ensure victory. Once he took me to a jazz bar and, when the bartender refused to give me a glass of wine, my father tried every trick in his book, but the bartender refused. I was your age—thirteen. He stormed out of the club and smoked all the way home.
My father was also defeated by a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. My black father hated my nose, and when I was a teenager he took me to a surgeon to remedy the situation, never mind I had no issue with my nose and still don’t. (Ironically my nose looks just like my white mother’s nose, but it was too black for my black father.) He claimed he knew what was best for me and I would thank him for my new and improved nose. He and the doctor talked like long lost frat brothers, ignoring my presence, hatching plans for my new nose. However, the surgeon grew silent after my father suggested the doctor falsely claim I had broken my nose in a swimming accident so insurance would cover the surgery. The surgeon shot me an “Is he for real?” look and requested I leave the room. I wish I could have stayed and witnessed the confrontation that followed. I heard only pieces of an angry conversation. I couldn’t help but smile when my dad busted through the door angry and upset. I knew the doctor had refused his request. I knew because my father was livid and speechless the entire ride home.
It didn’t matter to my father that he was asking the doctor to act illegally and unethically. It didn’t matter I didn’t want a nose job. It didn’t matter I was thirteen and not legally able to drink a glass of wine. All that mattered was my father’s needs.
* * *
As I drove home, I looked at my nose in the rearview mirror, glad my mother’s nose was intact, not some doctor’s re-creation. Honestly, I would have happily gone under the knife, if it meant the sexual abuse would stop.
* * *
My body was my father’s plaything, existing only for his sick amusement. The closest he came to physical abuse was once during dinner. I was eating spaghetti at the kitchen table when he suddenly appeared behind me and slid his hand down my top. I pulled away, and he threw my plate across the table, splattering spaghetti across the floor and walls. He screamed, “Look at what you’ve done. Look at what you made me do.” He forced me to clean up the mess and, after, made me sit topless at the kitchen table as he sucked on my breasts. I refused to show any emotion. I was stoic. I was not present. I stared at the wood grain tabletop. My refusal was my tiny victory.
Greater victory was mine when my father finally died, but he wouldn’t die easily. His cancer took a toll on me and my stepmom, but we played our roles in his tragic play to perfection. I watched him evaporate into a skeleton, one I couldn’t lift when he collapsed on his bedroom floor on the way to the bathroom. I watched with sick glee as he crawled to the bathroom on all fours, shit rolling down his legs. Beyond vain, my father couldn’t stomach such embarrassment and demanded to end his own life. His doctor gave into his demand.
My stepmother and I gave my father enough morphine to kill two elephants. We said our goodbyes. We cried. It was curtain call.
I went downstairs, believing my father was leaving the earth for good, and fell asleep in his brown Eames chair only to be woken by his skeleton hovering above me. Our goodbyes had been in vain. He stood in front of me, hungry. Minutes later, we ate scrambled eggs at the spaghetti table, in silence, my disappointment tasting bitter. The day my father finally succumbed to death, I was awash with relief.
* * *
I could taste that relief as I drove home, and I desperately clung to the euphoric fantasy. I yearned for the same release from this nightmare. I pleaded with the gods to let Trump join my father.
* * *
Escape fantasies were a normal part of my childhood, but I am no longer a child. I am your mother and it’s my job to protect and prepare you for the years ahead. My white mother was unable to educate me about the insidious ways of systemic racism. My mother was unwilling to call out my uncle’s racist bullshit or defend my mixed identity or humanity. I overlooked her limitations and inability to own her privilege because I needed to love her more than hate her, to excuse her blindness to my plight, but I will not follow her naïve and misguided advice to ignore racism, misogyny or oppression.
Instead, I will give you what I should have demanded from my mother. I will sit and share your discomfort. I will stand up against ugliness on your behalf. I will do what’s right even when my knees shake. I will not allow Trump’s ugly beliefs, policies or positions to infiltrate our home or your goodness.
I will channel my empathy toward all of those who received a painful and disempowering message when our country codified racism, misogyny, and bigotry. I will value the inherent human dignity of every person no matter what race, religion, age, identity or creed. I will invite Blacks, Muslims, dreamers, immigrants, and refugees to join our family. I will welcome LGBTQ friends and strangers alike to soldier on for love. I will celebrate women and our bodies, which belong to us and only us.
When I finally returned home, I crawled into bed and dreamt of my Uncle Russ. I screamed obscenities in his face, on my behalf and yours.
Lia Langworthy is a mom, writer, feminist, and native of Los Angeles. A published poet and TV writer (The Shield and Soul Food) and winner of the ABC Daytime Diversity Fellowship, FOX Diversity Writers Program and Writers Bootcamp Fellowship, Lia is currently writing a memoir. She holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley and is currently working on her MFA at UC Riverside Low-Residency Writing for the Performing Arts program.
Reading recommendation: Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison.