They say that a father is the first man in his daughter’s life. And if a father treats a daughter with cold cruelty instead of loving acceptance, it colors the rest of her life with shadowy fear.
As Told To Leah Gebber
Guards can be eluded, bars dislodged. A prison built in the mind, though, needs special break-out tools. I have read of children born in the dark, dank prisons of Algeria. Their playmates are the scuttling, starving rats, the scope of their reality confined to the overcrowded cell that is their home. They have not even the imagination to play at jailbreak.
In my own way, I too was born in a prison. A pleasant prison, to be sure — not overcrowded, not rat-infested. On the outside, a warm, comfortable home. Inside, though, emotional repression reigned. But like that skeletal child in Algeria, I had no idea that I was incarcerated.
They say that a father is the first man in his daughter’s life. And if a father treats a daughter with cold cruelty instead of loving acceptance, it colors the rest of her life with shadowy fear.
My father is no overgrown child, whose vices can be explained away as problems. He’s thin and clean-shaven, with a razor-sharp mind and a predilection for deviousness. His hand, when I bend down and kiss it each Leil Shabbos, feels like sandpaper. Although he can walk like a young man, he carries a silver-topped cane, his only inheritance. He’s a person with presence, a person with an iron will, a person who quietly — oh, so quietly — demands that you conform. If you don’t, he’ll work it out, manipulating circumstances and people so that, without your knowledge or intervention, what he wants will happen.
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