Candace Chambliss
It Hurts
When you spend the weekend at your dad’s house, playing cards, eating McDonalds, and horseback riding and you return to your mother and happily announce that you want to live with daddy and she scoops you up by the armpits, places you on the stoop and says, “Well let’s see if his ass comes back for you then.” And she closes the door.
When you ask about cousin Rita, who wore red overalls and a smile as big as sun, and your dad says she’s on crack as if crack is something to be mounted like a horse, but perhaps it is and she rides hard and fast for five years and then ten and then twenty and she’s still riding even now that you have your own kids who will never meet your favorite cousin.
When you’re six inches shorter than everyone in your grade and a white girl asks whether your parents are Pygmies.
When you tell your mother what the girl said and she flares up and says it’s racist but you don’t want it to be racist so you say it’s not, the girl’s not racist, she’s not and you beg and beg your mother not to call the school and finally she complies. And the next time someone says something similar, you don’t tell your mother at all.
When you ask your mother if you’re beautiful and she says no, you’re pretty but that’s a better thing to be anyway, because beautiful comes with too many problems.
When your father calls to say he won’t be able to make it to your wedding after all. But then he does and you don’t dance with him. You have never danced with your father and you never will.
When you buy a notebook and vow to enter words of gratitude about your husband on a daily basis and you do this for a week and then another and then you notice yourself writing things like, “I’m glad he didn’t leave the car completely empty of gas though nearly,” or “I’m grateful that he only yelled for five minutes rather than scream for fifteen,” and finally, “Even though he’s an asshole, he could be more of an asshole, though I don’t see how that’s possible, but I’m grateful that he’s not even more of an asshole than he is.” And finally you stop writing in the notebook altogether.
When your daughter ties the shoe on her stuffed monkey for the first time and she is so excited and you are so excited and you tell her to go show her dad, show him you can tie shoes, not knowing that he is on the phone, and she runs off to tell him and in doing so, she interrupts and she is loud and she demands that he watch and she will not be quieted and she screams and runs back to you crying that daddy won’t listen and then daddy ends his call and comes into the room and grabs your daughter and yells that she is never to interrupt his work calls, and you say she didn’t know, you say you’re the one who sent her but he already has his belt off and he hits her with it even though you stand between them, even though you scream and cry, but he is bigger than you both and he says that if you continue to intervene he will make it worse for her. You believe him. So you are silent.
When you look your husband in the eye and tell him that everyday you wish he would die. And you mean it.
Candace Chambliss is a mother of three amazing children. She lives in Chicago, where she also serves as the Legal Director of a non-profit organization that seeks to reduce mass incarceration. When she’s not mothering or lawyering, she’s writing.