When you raise your shaking fist,
Screaming taunts and insults at me,
I wish you’d hit me
So there would be physical proof
Of the emotional turmoil you put me through.
I no longer have the patience to justify your violent behavior,
Nor your lack of affection.
How is it that you fled war, yet you create a battlefield inside your own home?
We could live in peace,
Yet you persist.
You tell us anecdotes of your time locked in jail by communists,
But don’t you see? You’re inflicting the same barriers upon us;
Creating a prison out of our home,
Forbidding us to leave without your explicit permission,
Demanding housework be done.
Would you treat us this way if we were your sons?
You would rather believe your anxious thoughts and gossiping family than trust me,
Your own daughter.
And so I sob,
Not because what you say about me is the truth,
I am strong enough to know it could not be further from it.
I sob because I am witnessing who you really are, father
And I can’t accept it.
I used to see you as a hero, now I see you as anything but heroic.
“He’s getting old,” they say.
“He’s just overwhelmed taking care of you girls all alone,” they say.
But it is his responsibility to care for us, I want to retort
And it does not excuse the violence.
Nothing will ever excuse it.
Is this my destiny?
Is this the destiny of all women before and after me?
Are my sisters and daughters all destined to shrink before the men who claim to love us?
Should we all accept what they say,
That we are nothing but baby making machines, household maids and cooks?
I look myself in the mirror once I escape your torment,
As I wipe the last of the tears blurring my vision,
And after assuring myself that the things you say are unwarranted,
I cry once more, because I’ve come to believe that
My sorrow “is not as bad as” women have it in Afghanistan,
Or “other” women who don’t have choices in how their lives unfold.
Women who have to put up with the anger and violence in silence,
Women who don’t live in western countries
Where all our rights are “guaranteed” and lives are “easy.”
But sorrows are our sorrows; they cannot be compared.
We each have our pain and that cannot be quantified.
Our pain is our reality.
We all deserve love and life free from violence.
Physical, emotional and spiritual.
Mother, I understand now,
I understand what you have been through.
He is putting us through the same.
Come back soon, please.
Not so that he turns his hateful gaze
Towards you once more,
But because together, we know
We are infinitely stronger than he is.
Stand with me, mother.
Stand with me, sisters.
He needs to see what women can do.
He needs to witness our resistance and rage.
–S.Y., Free Women Writers