Emmy shares a long-suppressed story about the dysfunctional dynamics between her and her father and her own wrestling with misogyny within her family.
"Emmy's latest podcast is not for the faint of heart. However, the cathartic, transformational process as well as the hope and love of all things beautiful prevails. With every bow of my head, the podcast is a work of art, a piece of theater: timely and eternal. "JLG, Cape May, NJ
"Powerfully touching. Triumphant. Human. Another beautiful gift from your life, your pen, and your exquisite voice. Thank you." LD, York, Maine
"Your story is searing and courageous." DC, Ashland, Oregon
Music and sound by: zapsplat.com
Photo: Joan of Arc by Anna Hyatt Huntington Bronze
www.sacred-truths.com
Emmy shares a long-suppressed story about the dysfunctional dynamics between her and her father and her own wrestling with misogyny within her family.
"Emmy's latest podcast is not for the faint of heart. However, the cathartic, transformational process as well as the hope and love of all things beautiful prevails. With every bow of my head, the podcast is a work of art, a piece of theater: timely and eternal. "JLG, Cape May, NJ
"Powerfully touching. Triumphant. Human. Another beautiful gift from your life, your pen, and your exquisite voice. Thank you." LD, York, Maine
"Your story is searing and courageous." DC, Ashland, Oregon
Music and sound by: zapsplat.com
Photo: Joan of Arc by Anna Hyatt Huntington Bronze
www.sacred-truths.com
Saint Blaise is the patron saint of throat disease. A 4th century bishop from Armenia, he is known for healing a boy who had a fishbone stuck in his throat. The Feast of St. Blaise is celebrated on February 3rd. When I was growing up in a small rural town in New York state, my church traditionally carried out an annual ritual associated with his feast day called the Blessing of the Throats. On that day, parishioners formed a line and waited to individually receive the priest’s blessing. This entailed the use of two blessed candles, tied together at their base with a red ribbon that the priest held in the form of an X, lightly placing the candles on each side of the person’s neck while the following blessing was recited: “Through the intercession of St. Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God deliver you free from every disease of the throat and from every other disease…in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
I loved the blessing of the throats, and when I was a girl, I faithfully stood in line every year to receive it. I gave no conscious connection to the throat blessing and the repeated strangulations that were taking place in my own home, but knew in my heart that this was important for me. I found the ritual to be reassuring. With ritual, we feel that something beyond the ordinary is happening, and with the Blessing of the Throats ritual, we are freed not only from disease, but from everything keeping us from God. Looking back, I truly believe that my throat was protected by this ritual. I did have some throat-related problems: for the entire year of 10th grade, for example, I stopped speaking. I spoke when spoken to, or when I was called on in school, but otherwise was silent and didn’t engage with anyone. Throughout my four years of high school, I often suffered from severe sore throats and coughs which frequently led to laryngitis. But overall, through the intercession of St. Blaise, I believe my throat was spared of any serious physical damage.
In the Introduction to her book, Down Girl: the logic of misogyny, Kate Manne, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University, launches straight away into strangulation as a prevalent form of intimate partner violence. A 2010 report from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that 1.1 million US women (.9%) had been strangled or suffocated in the previous 12 months, and 11.6 million (9.7%) had been strangled or suffocated in their lifetime. Susan Sorenson and her colleagues found similar results from 2 other US studies in a systematic review. A study by Susan Glass showed that if a victim is strangled even one time, she is 750% more likely to be killed at some point by her abuser. Most studies focus on strangulation as a form of domestic violence between intimate partners. While reports indicate that children are also vulnerable to it, I found no data accounting for children. Research shows that the majority of strangulation cases are committed against women by men. In light of this, Kate Manne asserts that strangulation is “a type of action paradigmatic of misogyny.”
I was the third and last child in my family, the only girl, and by the time I was born, my mother, who suffered from debilitating depression and emotional health problems, showed little interest in me and wasn’t very capable of taking proper care of me. It’s hard to explain. She was often distant, and depressed, or enraged, and I have no memories of her engaging with me, connecting to me or even looking at me. As a two-year old, I remember being equally fearful of her and desperately needing her. But, she mostly ignored me, or yelled at me in an outburst of anger for she had little patience for a toddler. This was to continue for most of my life. At some time when I was two, something happened to my mother which led her to be hospitalized for mental health reasons. After that, my father stepped in and became my primary care taker and cooked the meals and cleaned up for our family. He bred cows for a living, and drove to anywhere from 10 – 15 dairy farms in our rural community daily. I often went to work with him until I was old enough to go to school and even then I accompanied him on weekends for he worked 7 days a week. I enjoyed my time with him for he was easy to be with. But his love was imperfect; he wasn’t able to hug me or tell me he loved me, but he was all I had and I clung to him like my life depended on it – because it did.
This was in the 1960s when men did not traditionally take care of young children and oversee the domestic household duties. But my father did. He did the food shopping and the cooking. He paid the bills and took care of the house repairs. By the time I entered kindergarten, my mother was working full time and because of her job, I didn’t see her much and when she was home, she did not engage with me. She was often angry about something, and quite emotional, or she was depressed and she frightened me. But my father was my pal. He was mellow and calm and I regularly followed him around the house or ran errands with him to the grocery store, the hardware store, or the bank as needed. Usually there was a house project he was working on and I was right beside him. I learned how to do a lot of things working with him for as I grew older, he needed my help and encouraged my participation. Together we mixed cement and recemented the back stoop and sidewalk and I left my initials and a satisfying handprint in the wet cement. Every few years we had to dig up the septic tank and clear out some sewage from clogged pipes. At other times we replaced the cellar door, dug a drainage ditch, re-shingled the roof of the house, or painted the house – I did it all with him and slowly learned the art of home repair. Or we worked on his cars. By the time I was 10 I knew how to change a carburator, change the oil and put in new spark plugs. I could also change a tire. It was my job every fall to put on the rear snow tires and take them off every spring. My father sat in a lawn chair watching me while I cheerfully and expertly jacked up the car and removed one tire replacing it for another. Afterwards he tightened all the lug nuts with a lugwrench saying, “Good job, M. You’re a handy kid to have around.” And I would beam with pride. Typically at the end of one of our days, we might visit a bar in my small town. In those days kids could sit at the bar and if it was summer, I was usually bare-footed. The bar tender, a childhood friend of my father’s, knew my drink, and without asking, put an orange soda in front of me, placing it atop a Budweiser coaster, before serving my father his beer.
I loved my father. He was level-headed and practical. Predictable. He was not easily upset. He was not one to shout and yell, or have a temper like other fathers I knew. He was very funny and told great stories and I could openly and easily joke with him. He often made people laugh. Everyone loved my father. Sometimes he played little pranks on people, mostly with his friends in town and I enjoyed the shenanigans as did his friends. Like the time he sold cow corn to the Lindsley brothers, 2 barbers my father’s age, whose shop in town we visited daily, telling them it was sweet corn. They never let him forget it. Good, wholesome fun. Sometimes in the evenings, we watched professional baseball on TV. Growing up in the 1930s and 40s, my father had been a star athlete and baseball was his game. I strove to be an excellent ball player too and we played baseball in the backyard every summer night. One day he bought me a baseball glove and another time he took me to the city to see a Mets game.
It might have been around 5th grade when he started a new prank with me: he would strangle me as a funny sort of gimmick. At first I thought it was funny for it was part of our schtick, like a father and daughter might do an acrobatic trick in the living room. My father strangled me in the same way that Jackie Gleason, the television comedian, would threaten his wife with a fist on the Jackie Gleason Show only to end in a kiss: he didn’t really mean it, it was just sort of funny when he said “One of these days Alice, right to the moon!” After a while, I didn’t really like the strangling routine, because it was unpleasant to have one’s breath blocked off, but I went with it, because it was my father, someone I trusted, and everyone loved him, and so it must have been funny.
My father used to kid around with my friends when they visited the house, and they would kid him right back, because he was that kind of guy. One day, out of the blue, as he was joking around with my friend Amy who sat in my room with me, he, rather abruptly, grabbed Amy’s throat with both hands and did to her what he normally did to me. Amy’s eyes popped open and I remember her look of fear and alarm coupled with a half smile, because this was part of the joke, right? I started laughing to reassure her – it’s all right. This is just something he does. But something about it didn’t feel right. I was concerned about the look of fear in her eyes and felt embarrassed that maybe my father was a little weird.
My father routinely surprised me by randomly popping into my room to strangle me as I sat at my desk working on my homework or sewing or working on a project. It began to feel like his greeting. My parents never hugged us; no physical affection was ever displayed in my family: no arm on the shoulder, no hand pat, no loving gaze. It seemed like, instead of hugging me to show me he was happy to see me, my father strangled me. It was a bit unnerving, but it was just part of his funny way of being, so I never said anything. It was never pleasant though and I would have preferred a hug. I hoped with time it would grow old for him and he’d stop doing it.
One day we were visiting my 3 male cousins, who were roughly my age and lived nearby, and my uncle who was my father’s younger brother. The youngest, a 10-year-old, must have made some smart or silly remark, for my father unexpectedly jumped over to him and pressed his hands around his throat in a kind of mock assault. It surprised us all. Like most people, my cousin enjoyed my father and his visits, however, he appeared very alarmed by this act of aggression, but he also knew my father to be a jokester, and trusted him, and we all laughed at it. But it didn’t seem right. It felt like my father forgot himself. Somehow, I had normalized the strangulations when they happened to me, but I suddenly saw that when he did it to my cousin it was obscene.
As the years unfolded and I entered middle school, my father continued to randomly strangle me. It was always a surprise attack; I never heard him coming. He didn’t strangle me in front of my mother or anyone else. It was a private act and I didn’t talk about it with anyone. I’m quite sure he never strangled my 2 older brothers or my mother. By the time I had entered 8th grade, both of my brothers had both moved out of the house, and my mother was often not home or she returned home late in the evening so I was usually home alone with my father at the end of the day. I didn’t like the strangling, but I felt I couldn’t protest. If he knew it bothered me, I felt he would only strangle me more frequently, for he took a strange pleasure in taunting me. He only strangled me once a day, so once it was done, I knew I would be free until the next day. I never passed out, but I couldn’t breathe, and it was painful and extremely unpleasant, but I just endured it.
It’s a terrible sensation to be strangled. There is nothing at all enjoyable about it. It’s painful to have pressure on the fragile cartilage in the front of the throat. When one is strangled, blood and oxygen are blocked from reaching the brain. Your body might be ready to inhale when suddenly the assailant blocks your ability to breathe. It’s easy to panic for one has the feeling of being trapped and the realization that death by suffocation is only moments away is a haunting thought. I trained myself to remain calm and suffer through it because I knew sooner or later he would be done and remove his hands and I would be able to inhale again. It’s hard to lash out at your attacker when you are being strangled. Moving the body requires oxygen, and your instinct is to preserve your oxygen while being strangled. There is no energy to thrash out. And when one is seated at a desk, for instance and approached from the side, there isn’t much one can do to defend oneself. My father was remarkably quick with his hands.
What was my father thinking? I’m not sure, only that something that started should have been stopped, but instead was normalized to such a degree that it was habitual. It went on for years. You can create a habit to hug your child, you can also create a habit to hit your child or, in my case, strangle your child. It’s not like he was angry or in a rage, necessarily. But there were many messages imbedded in the strangulation. One was simply a greeting: hello! I’m here. I’m home. Good to see you! It also felt like a juvenile ribbing between us like when a friend or sibling throws a snowball as you’re walking down the sidewalk. But he was always the perpetrator and getting barraged with snow balls gets old after a while.
As I grew older, the message in his touch changed. Around 7th grade I felt a definite shame and anger associated with it. It felt like he was angry with me for developing into a woman. This shame I felt settled into my newly forming breasts. His regular throttles felt like he was saying “How could you?” I also felt he was saying, “You will never be a woman to me. You will always be nothing.”
By ninth grade I had developed an eating disorder that tormented me throughout my years of high school, that I was not able to stabilize until I went off to college. In my teenage mind, I felt that if I could just become thin enough, my parents would love me and we’d all be happy. I knew I brought them shame. In 9th grade I grew very thin and suffered from malnutrition and I had no idea how to eat like a normal person. I agonized greatly from what I viewed my shameful problem. I alienated myself. Seeking love and acceptance from my family, but receiving none, I was left with a deep hole which I either filled with food or punished through starvation. I wanted to disappear and die. In fact, by starving myself, I was slowly dying. My mother by now had developed into a terrible alcoholic and her alcoholism became worse with each passing year of my adolescence. She was essentially absent from my life and her anger towards me and abuse of me is another story. I avoided her.
By sophomore year I had gained too much weight, which shamed me deeply, and the strangling became more intense. That was the year I stopped speaking. My father now strangled me every day when I came home from school.
I dreaded going home and usually stayed late at school as much as I could. Often I walked the one mile home, carrying a pile of books. It was my father’s daily routine to wait for me to return home, and at the right moment, jump at me when I least expected it and strangle me. He was my constant bully and I could do nothing about it. No one else was ever home. I just let him get it out of his system, for once he strangled me, he’d be done for the evening and then I could continue on as usual. I didn’t feel I had any power over it. In addition, he wasn’t working as much so he was home more often. In the late 1970s, when I was in high school, there were fewer and fewer family-owned dairy farms in our area for they couldn’t compete with the corporate dairy operations which were becoming more common. This meant there were fewer cows to breed and my father had less work and his workday ended earlier and earlier. Sometimes, if I came home directly from school, he was already there. I felt his strangulations took on an additional level of shame for him. He spoke gruffly to me when I walked in the door and then strangled me, taking out his frustrations and his own shame at not working a full day, on me. He gritted his teeth and his face would contort in what appeared to be rage or fury while his hands were around my neck. The sensation I felt in his hands said, “I hate you. You shame me. You are no daughter of mine.”
I felt the shame for my sex in my breasts and in my pelvic floor. He either hated me for being a woman or for not being a woman correctly. I often wished I were a boy and lived in the skinny boy bodies my brothers inhabited.
This routine went on every day until one day, it may have been the start of my junior year in high school, I came in the door having walked home from school with an enormous and heavy pile of books. My arms were very tired from having carried them such a long way. My routine was to bolt down the hallway as fast as I could before he could get to me, but it never worked. On this day, he jumped out at me from the kitchen and with both hands around my neck, threw me against the wall in the hallway. His grip was fierce and his face was contorted. I waited while he strangled me and within a few seconds I had a feeling of blackness come over me. I was losing consciousness. I remember thinking, “I’m so tired. I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m tired of you. I’m tired of mom. Just kill me already. I’m absolutely ready for this life to be over.” I remember the sensation of my books falling from my arms, dropping to the floor as if in slow motion, the sound vaguely far away, and feeling that it was so nice to let go of them. Then I remember my knees buckling, no longer able to hold me up, as I sensed myself sliding down the wall to the floor. Then everything went black.
When I came to, I was lying on top of my heap of books. My first thought was, “Oh, I’m still alive.” Then I thought with annoyance, “OK. Now I’ll pick up all my books and take them to my room as I had intended, now that we’ve gotten THAT out of the way.” As I lifted my head, I saw that my father was walking quietly back into the kitchen, after he had seen that I was moving again. He said nothing.
The strangling was so normalized by this point that nothing was ever said about this incident. He didn’t say “Are you alright?” He didn’t say, “Oh, I didn’t mean for that to happen.” Nothing was said. I’m sure after a while I went out into the kitchen and helped him prepare supper as if nothing had happened.
I have sometimes wondered, if I had just strangled someone, and saw that they had collapsed to the floor in a heap on top of their pile of books, would I have simply walked away? Who walks away from a scene like that? Who shows no accountability? And we’re talking about someone who was my own flesh and blood, someone who was legally responsible for me, who was my guardian. My father walked away.
But it must have scared him. Because after that he never strangled me again.
Historically, nonfatal strangulation has not been treated as a crime, because typically there is no evidence, no obvious markings on the neck or physical wounds. Thanks to increased research on domestic violence, involvement of medical professionals, and increased law enforcement and police training, policies are now in place. Today, it is treated as a serious crime and in 48 states non-fatal strangulation is a felony. In some states, a class B felony. It is considered a violent, life-threatening assault. New York State, where I grew up, enacted the following laws in 2010.
When:
- Non-fatal Strangulation results in a criminal obstruction of breathing, this is a Class A misdemeanor and the perpetrator can get up to one year in jail, or 3 years probation plus a fine of up to $1000.
- When non-fatal strangulation causes loss of consciousness, it is a Class D felony, where, if the act is violent there is a 2-7 year jail sentence; if the act is non-violent, the consequences are probation to a 7 year jail sentence.
- When it causes serious physical injury, it is a Class C felony
Today, my father could go to prison for what he did. At the time, it had never occurred to me that what my father did to me might be a crime. To me, it was just another weird thing that happened in my family. I certainly didn’t want him to go to jail. It would have meant living alone with my mother, without him or his paycheck and she would not have been capable of handling it. It would have been a torment for me worse than daily strangulation.
Strangulation is a form of torture. Researcher Susan Sorenson compares strangulation to water boarding. Both are painful and terrifying.
Applying pressure to the neck impedes airflow or blood flow, resulting in disruption of brain function by asphyxiation. If the pressure is sustained the result can be unconsciousness, brain injury, instant death or delayed death. Unconsciousness can occur in 10-15 seconds if the carotid artery is completely blocked by 11 pounds of pressure. The difference between unconsciousness and brain damage or death, is only a matter of a few seconds of pressure.
Strangulation can result in long term internal and emotional injuries. Often there are no visual injuries. A 2014 Domestic Violence Report identified the following as a result of strangulation: temporary or permanent brain injury including problems with memory, inability to concentrate, headaches, anxiety, depression and sleep disorders. Physical injuries may include sore throat, neck pain, hoarse or raspy voice, coughing, and swallowing abnormalities. It may effect vision and could lead to seizures, amnesia and progressive dementia. A delayed effect includes stroke. Strangulation often results in serious psychological harm. It is an act of cruel domination, met with horror. The risk is commonly minimized.
I think about how I normalized the strangulations, so that I could just continue on with my life. I think it is common for people to normalize abuse. Nothing is black and white, and in fact, I experienced many fun and secure moments with my father. The day to day interactions were pleasant enough. However, both of my parents commandeered my life force energy with their steady bullying and abuse. With each strangulation, I believe, my father took some of my life force, and that can never be recovered. And each strangulation taught me to accept that I am ‘less than.’ It became my mantra. He could do this to me, I believed, because I am not a whole person to begin with. I am not worth as much as other people. After all, I unconsciously reasoned, even my own mother didn’t want me. And I carried this philosophy with me as I traversed adult hood. I allowed acts of rudeness and unkindness, and yes, abusive behavior because I expected it from others. I took it for granted that any form of love in my life would be damaged. It took me many years to form strong boundaries and see myself as a whole person, deserving of respect and kindness from others.
Once the routine strangling stopped, my father developed a new habit of hitting me. Always the same 3 spots: on my upper arm, on my thigh, or at my side on my rib cage. As with the strangling, I’d be engaged in an activity and he’d walk by and slug me, taking me by surprise. My father was a former boxer and knew how to throw a punch. These punches hurt. I did not normalize this behavior. Instead, I tried different tactics. I yelled at him, I ignored him, I spoke quietly and rationally to him asking him to stop, and once or twice I chased after him and punched him back. It didn’t feel good to hit my father and I knew if I wasn’t careful, he would surely win for he knew how to fight. None of these things worked and the punching continued for the next 25 years of my life. As an adult woman, my father still punched me. He thought it was funny and used to tease me about making a fuss, repeating my entreaties in a high pitched voice, in an attempt to imitate me. Once again, as with the strangling, his punches spoke volumes. They often felt like a replacement for hugging. My father’s way of expressing joy upon seeing me was to punch me because he couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t know how to hug me. I also felt many other subtle emotions that the punches conveyed: I am never going to accept you as a grown adult, you are less than, you shame me. It didn’t matter what I had accomplished in my adult life; nothing seemed to matter. As an adult, when I visited my parents or they visited me, it was like visiting the bullies I had lived with in high school all over again. I could dress the part of a healthy, mature woman, but my father would punch me to put me in my place. Teasing was another big part of my father’s way of interacting with me. And it was another form of torment. When I played sports in high school, my father came to a few of my events, not in an effort of support, but to later torment me about what he viewed as my poor athletic ability. He imitated my performance on the field or on the court or at the track meet, in an exaggerated, mocking way, to show me what a terrible athlete I was. Never mind that I was strong and had incredible endurance. He teased me about my athletic abilities my entire adult life, and continued to bring up my performance at a high school basketball game even into my mid 30s. He teased me about every major accomplishment. When I won awards through the 4-H or when I was selected to go to State Fair, he mocked my performance. When I performed in theatre or when I sang in the school concerts, or when a boy showed interest in me, I was teased. If I dressed nicely for an event, I was ridiculed. Every time he witnessed me making any kind of public appearance, where I was taken seriously, he felt the need to mock it: the way I received an award at my high school graduation, the way I walked across the stage at my Harvard commencement. The teasing told me that I was less than. That I was nothing special to him. It took a lot of energy to navigate through, what I would call his bullying.
Recently, in talking to a trusted male friend about my strangulation experience, he explained that men need to feel powerful. If their sense of power is threatened, he explained, if they feel powerless, they can often act out in destructive ways. “Emmy,” he said, “You just happened to be there.”
In other words, it wasn’t about me. It was about my father. Perhaps he was angry with his own marriage to my mother. He may have felt powerless in this relationship where he was essentially abandoned by his wife and left to parent alone and he may have felt powerless watching his job diminish. Perhaps he did to me what he could not do to his wife. I was the recipient of his dark, shadow side. I ponder this sometimes. I have also wondered what it might have been like had I been male. Would my father have strangled me? Would he have acted out in some other way? Was it an act of misogyny? When I sit quietly and feel into it, there is no mistaking the shame and disgust I felt from him that seemed directed at my sex.
The moment I lost consciousness, when I fell to the floor on top of my heap of books, was a pivotal moment in my life. Up until that point, I had been slowly dying; between my mother’s abuse and alcoholism, my eating disorder, and my father routinely wringing the life out of me, I had shut down more and more with each passing year. Lying on the floor as a 15-year-old, momentarily unconscious, I died to that way of life. It was in coming to, that I reclaimed my life, that my soul said ‘yes’ to life. Things started to shift for me after that. In junior year of high school, I made a conscious decision to start talking to my friends again, deepening old friendships and making new ones. My social life gradually blossomed and I started tasting life. From that day forward, the strangulations ceased and every conscious act of my being has been to say ‘yes’ to life.
Yoga and meditation teach that the aim is to stay present. For myself, when I’m in the present moment, there is no abuse. When we live in the present, we are free of the past. It’s a very good place to be. I don’t want to revisit the past, necessarily; I like and enjoy my present life. But sometimes the past visits us and then what can we do? However, in raising my now 15-year-old daughter, here lies the gift: I get to see me in her. When I see her radiant being, living to her fullest potential in a loving and supportive environment, I see the beauty of being female. I see and admire the life force energy she carries as a young person. I see her as someone with the potential of creating a better world for all of us. And in her, I see the 15-year-old girl I was, in all my beauty and vitality, and innocence. And I see the young 15-year-old girl I was never allowed to be. I did not have the environment to bloom to the extent that my beautiful daughter has. And it’s in that moment, of looking at her in all her splendor, that I truly see the sickness that was my parents, that certainly lived within my father. What compels someone to place one’s hands on the throat of a youthful innocent, your own flesh and blood, and squeeze with anger and rage and shame? And never show accountability or remorse? Day in and day out for years on end? Why should this ever be considered normal behavior?
When I allow myself to feel into my 15-year-old self, through the perspective of my now 57-year-old self, I note that the terror and the horror of the experience lie dormant in my body. Once it is roused and activated, however, it is like an old 1970s New York City subway express train that is roaring down the tracks in full force. The sound is distant, but it starts to grow until it is upon me. The loud train that passes through me is covered in raw, bold graffiti, carrying the potential for danger, and smelling of urine; it is deafening in its loud racket as it races through my body and it won’t end until it’s run its course. I sit in the pain and the horror of it, and finally, finally, allow myself to feel the incomprehensible feelings associated with the act of being strangled by one’s father. My throat begins to throb, my bones ache and I feel nauseated. The pain actually lives in my body. However, now, I don’t have to run, or numb it, or normalize it. I can sit in the muck and the mud that represents the abuse of my childhood and let it pass through. I don’t believe I will ever regain the life force energy that has been throttled out of me from each strangulation. I admit, my body aches, and I feel tired and old. But I always have hope. I know that from out of the muck grows the lotus flower, that blooms on the surface of the water.
My middle name is Joan and when I was a little girl, my mother had told me I was named for Joan of Arc, the patron saint of France. Let me tell you about Joan:
Joan of Arc was born around 1412 to peasant parents, during the Hundred Years War, a conflict between the kingdoms of England and France. Joan was a devote Catholic, and at age 13 she began to hear voices from God, and received visitations from saints, convincing her that, even though she had no military experience, she was chosen by God to lead the French military to recapture their vanquished territory and re-establish Charles VII, who had been dethroned by the English, as the rightful king. At age 16 Joan cropped her hair and dressed as a man and led famous battles on horseback that were successful and miraculous causing the English to retreat and crowning Charles VII king once again. Still, there were more battles to win, and in one, the now famous Joan was injured and taken captive by the enemy where she was imprisoned for a year. At her trial, she had over 70 charges against her, including witchcraft, heresy, and dressing like a man. It was a common belief then that women could not receive divine guidance from God, nor were they to dress in men’s clothing, so she was considered a heretic. At her trial, she had tearfully explained that she was sexually assaulted in prison by the other male prisoners when she dressed as a woman, but that they left her alone when she dressed in men’s clothes. She eventually succumbed and signed a confession denying that she had received divine guidance, and promising to dress as a woman. For this she received the sentence of life in prison. However, 4 days later, she heard the voices again telling her to dress like a man, and so she did, despite the fact that it was considered a violation of divine law. Once discovered, she was given the death sentence. On May 30th 1431, at the age of 19, Joan of Arc was burned alive at the stake, for wearing men’s clothing, a clear act of misogyny.
The other day I watched my daughter at breakfast. She was eating her cereal like any ordinary teenager and I thought of my father, now 13 years deceased, whipping his hands around her sweet, beautiful neck. And suddenly the archetype of Saint Joan the warrior and all her magnificence and power came to me. I was she, and she was I. And there I was, I’m wearing her armor and I’m on horseback, my sword raised high, for I am strong and absolutely fearless. With God on my side, Joan and I, as one person now, of one mind, gallop full force into battle. I am a soldier with a mission to protect my daughter through anything, but I also have another mission now, to reach back through time and space, and protect my 15-year-old self. My sword aloft, and galloping at full speed, I am ready to slay the enemy as I cry out in a voice strong and true, in full volume: “Don’t you dare touch her!”
Many people loved my father and see him as a good man. He was and they should. But he was a defective man and his love for me was broken. A father’s damaged love. But, I chose life.