The Father Wound: The Forge & The Apprentice

For a long time, I believed I was carrying a mother wound.

Recently, I've begun to realize that the story was incomplete.

Trigger Warning! Physical, mental, and emotional abuse is discussed!

I explore the reality that the deepest pattern in my life didn't begin with my mother, but with the only father I ever truly knew: my grandfather. A brilliant, complicated man who taught me to think, reason, write, and question everything—while also shaping the invisible beliefs I carried about love, worth, intelligence, and what it means to be enough.

This isn't an episode about assigning blame or me attempting to rewrite history. It's an exploration of inheritance—of how we can receive extraordinary gifts and painful wounds from the same hands.

As always, these are not conclusions. They're field notes from an ongoing investigation into my own psyche.

I'm starting to see, and you are my witness. Thank you.

Transcript

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Well, here we are, another afternoon to talk about what lurks in the darkest recesses and in the shadows of my psyche. And first um warning. Anyone listening to this, it might be a bit triggering. I will be talking about themes of abuse, racism, and Jim Crow. This episode will not contain any sexual abuse, just descriptions of physical violence and psychological violence. So with that being said, I bring to you the origin of my father wound. The origin of my father wound is my grandfather. This is a black man who, black American man, who was forged by extraordinary deprivation and extraordinary discipline. A type of discipline that to this day, I literally have no words for. Of my roots, my origins, because my grandfather and my grandmother's hand, along with the hands of other grandfathers and grandmothers, other people who were subject to Jim Crow, survivors of sharecropper slavery, survivors of slavery, period. Those are the people who came together that forged the black community that I grew up in that made me who I am today. There is not anything that I'm excavating that could change or alter my pride in having grown up the way that I've grown up. But at the same time, the environment my grandfather created was also one that was marked by fear and violence towards others. And he utilized intellectual contempt as a form of correction. You see, this man is what I have come to understand as the forge. Because a forge does two things simultaneously. It creates and it burns. You cannot separate the strength of the steel from the violence of its making. He had me studying my aunts and uncles college-level books and textbooks that he would leave, that they would leave at home. In elementary school. And he would tap the side of my little head. And we black people know how that tapping can be just hard and violent. Tap the side of my little head and say, think you got a brain, think. And he would do this when he was teaching me any of the things that I just previously mentioned. And there was a belt. And anybody who's from that particular state that's in the center of the United States, the contiguous United States, the big one, the really, really big one. Everybody knows what those belts and those belt buckles look like. Cowboy belt and cowboy belt buckle. That would be on the corner of the kitchen table. While I am doing homework. While I am doing my homework from school and the homework that he's assigned to me. Now, mind you, these books, two grades levels ahead. My math, two grade levels ahead. Always. So I'm expected to understand the work of the grade that I am in reality at school. But I'm also expected to pick up rapidly what he's teaching me and testing me on as well. This is happening in elementary school. So I cannot separate the strength of the still and the forging from the violence of how it's made. I learned to think because of this man. I learned to write because of this man. Because my first experience of church as a little kid, there's a church that was in our neighborhood. I snuck out of it and I ran home, and my grandfather sitting in the backyard where he classically was. I said, Daddy, who is God? And he laughed. And he said, Oh, that old coop, that old Negro sitting up at the head of that pulpit trying to tell them niggas that they gotta come to God and big white man in the sky. Baby girl, God is in these dogs back here. God is in this vegetable garden that you eat. God is in you, as he tapped his two strong black fingers on my little bitty chest. And he said, You, baby girl, are God. I am God. The animals in that canyon that we hunt and fish and who provide our sustenance are God. There is no God that you need to pray to. God is in you. And that stuck with me forever. And that is how my grandfather always talked to me. Always. Those who are familiar with Yongian psychology will be familiar with the Synex, the old man archetype. At his best, the Synex is wisdom, structure, reason, and discipline. At his worst, he is rigidity. He is coldness. He is domination. He is contempt. My grandfather occupied these poles simultaneously and oftentimes vacillated between these poles in a moment. I remember one time my grandfather spanking my hands with a wooden spoon. But when I was done feeling the fear of getting a math problem wrong that morning, getting yelled at. And we love to joke currently on social media and TikTok about how parents yell at you. If Johnny had five couples, goddammit! We love to joke about that. And how we're crying, and it's like our brain is skipping like a record scratch and just skipping and skipping and skipping, and they keep yelling at you and pointing forcefully at the paper. Yeah. Raise his hand, yeah. And I learned to be very quick with my thinking. Very, very quick. Get those answers right. Quickly. Think quickly. Hurry up, Gabe. Hurry up, Gabe. Hurry up, Gabe. The math homework is done. I go to my room, which was directly across from our bathroom in the house. I go into my room to sit and regulate. Because again, I was born in this house and I'm the only child in this house up to this point. There is another one that comes, but I'm the only child in this house up to this point that day. And while I'm swallowing my fear, swallowing my anxiety. I hear splashing and I hear Pharaom, stop now, again, throughout this podcast, I will not be using anyone's real names. Because again, this is to protect both the innocent and the guilty. I choose Pharaom as my grandfather's name in this podcast because it means iron in Latin. And Ferum is on F E on the periodic table of elements. It is a abundant element here on Earth, in fact. The earth has an iron core. I'll let that sit with you for a second. He will be referred to as the forge because as I said, a forge does two things simultaneously. It creates and it burns. So back to this scene. I hear water splashing and I hear Ferum! Stop! I open my door. Again, I am an elementary school age child. And I see my grandfather holding my grandmother under the water in the bathtub. He's on top of her and she's kicking her feet. No one knows that I've seen this. I to this day don't think that either of my grandparents realized that I was standing right there in my doorway, which faced that bathroom. And I was watching it. And he was choking her. And he was holding her under a bathtub of water. Now my grandmother also had a heart condition and was on oxygen. For most of my young life. And what was her crime? You ask? What did she do? He was holding my grandfather. I mean, he was holding my grandmother responsible for the gap in my knowledge. And also for something that she didn't prepare food-wise in the kitchen. Great levels of head where I was actually in school. This told me you need to be perfect. There's no room for mistakes. This is a life or death situation, gabe. Or baby gabe. Because that's what I was. I was a baby. Get it right. Get it done the first time. And that's what I learned how to do. I learned how to be perfect. I learned how to execute under immense pressure to avoid pain. I learned how to perform perfection. Not just in how I looked and how I spoke and how I wrote and how I thought, because the alternative was violence. Now, that's not to say my grandfather never put his hands on me because he did. But it came in the more traditional form of spanking a child. Because my grandfather knew I was his God on some level. Or he was my God, rather. He was my God on some level. And that I feared him. I feared his violence. I feared his withdrawal of emotion because when we would have these philosophical discussions, if my thinking wasn't up to par as he deemed it so, he would be a bit moody and withdrawn. If I couldn't get a math problem right, or if he was discussing, oh God, I remember one of the first books that I got around this age, my grandmother was still alive, was The Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison. Man, just like that little girl. Boy, did I wish my eyes were blue. One of the results of being bussed to all white schools and also being bullied at said schools because I was one of often one white black girl in an all-white class with all white teachers. But I remember discussing that book or discussing any of the books that I read with my grandfather. And if I couldn't exhibit higher level thinking about it, you need to go back and read that again. But the way it would be said was with such contempt. Like, mm, you're stupid. Or I know you're smarter than that, but it's said again with contempt. Or I thought you were smarter than that. And then have the book shoved into your little chest and say, go read it again. Think about it and come back. And then you come back and you say something and it's wrong again. Go read it again. Think about it. Fucking come back. And you do it over and over and over and over, and your whole fucking day and night as a child is taken up. You go to school with the tired as fuck the next day. Because this form of psychological torture is taking place all night because of an adult feels that you as a child should be able to think on a much higher level about a fucking book by Tony Morrison! At seven, eight. Hell, there are adults that don't even fucking struggle with Tony Morrison's writing now! But this is what is expected of you at seven or eight. Read it again, do it right, get it right the first time. Meanwhile, you see your grandfather put somebody's head through a wall over Thanksgiving and Christmas, and you realize that could be you if you don't get it right, if you don't hammer it down the first time. See, for most women right now, there's so there's a lot of discussion about the mother wound, the mother wound, the mother being your first bully, the first person who called you ugly, the first person who called you fast when you wasn't even thinking about sex. And the only reason she's calling you fast is because she's starting to notice that men are looking at your fresh little boobs and your tight little buttons, but you're nine, and rather than lash out at the men, she's lashing out at you, calling you fast, saying you too available, questioning whether or not you're sexually active, you're still playing with dolls, you still have barrettes and beads in your hair. You're not even thinking about this, you still racing your cousins down the hill, trying to see who can run the fastest, and roller skating and getting skit knees, and justifiably, rightfully so, women are unpacking the mother wound and they are naming it and they're calling it out and dragging it into the light of day to be examined and healed, rightfully so. Because mothers do need to be held accountable for the special way, the very harmful way in which they wound their daughters. But I feel and I'm discovering that my original wound isn't a mother wound. My mother wound is secondary. My mother wound actually was obsphugating my access to the father wound. I was chalking up every relationship pattern that I could see, every relationship that showed a pattern, and these very specific relationships that I'll get into in episodes as we move forward. There is a particular set of relationships within my relationships that show this pattern, an undeniable pattern. And I was attributing that originally to a mother wound. Nope, I was wrong. It's a father wound for me, at least. I think it is. Again, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a guru, I'm just a person just trying to do deep archaeological excavation into their own psyche. That is the only thing I am trying to do. I am trying desperately to understand me and dig inside me so I can figure out how to get out of this life what it is that I actually might come to eventually believe that I deserve because I don't believe that I deserve. So yeah. Welcome to the forge. Welcome to the introduction of my grandfather. Welcome to the deconstruction of my father's woman.