The Why of Your Voice or Why I Felt So Bad after My Father Said He Read My Book

Before I published my memoir, I had my father read it because I wrote some things in it about him that were potentially embarrassing. I didn’t want to blindside him and put into print things he really, really didn’t want the world to know.

 It was an awful feeling, asking him to read it. I’d spent my life trying as best I could to be a good daughter, which, when you look at my actions that include lying and stealing and screaming terrible things, you might think it’s funny I still consider my good girl act a believable one.

The thing is, in my heart I am a good girl.

Here’s the other thing: in my heart I am not a good girl. 

Oh, the paradox of being alive! Good and bad. Nice and wicked. Valuable and worthless. Beautiful and ugly. Talented and worthless. Trustworthy and a threat.

Anyway, my father read my book four years ago and he said it was okay to publish. Such a relief! We even did a little Instagram video together last year where I asked him what it was like to read my book, and after he talked for a bit about how it was hard, I asked if he still loved me, and we had a sweet moment where he teared up and said yes and hugged me. I watched that video many times. 

He still loved me.

And I’d had the courage to ask if he still loved me. I had no idea where that question came from. I didn’t know it was on my mind. It just fell out of my mouth, and it was one of the most real questions I’ve ever asked. 

When he dies, I’ll probably watch that video on repeat for days. He loved me. He loved me. He loved me.

And I loved him. 

I love him.

Boy is that love complicated! A father who is technically, when it comes to DNA, not my father! I’m not sure I know what love is, but I think I love him as I believe many children love their parents: like he is mine. My dad. 

I haven’t even gotten to my point of this post yet! The other day I was talking to a friend, and she was doing this thing where she asked ten people who were close to her to describe her in three words. She suggested I do it, and so I did. 

I wrote to my dad and I asked him for the three words. A few hours later I got an email from him saying he was just back from visiting my brother, and that my brother had given him my book. My father said he was reading it, and that, while it was beautiful, it was very sad. He said he wasn’t in a position right then to give me the three words.

What? He was reading as if for the first time. Was he okay? What was he going to think about it this time? Were the hard things I had written about him going to hit him differently this time? I couldn’t believe that this was happening. I’d already had him read it! I’d already done the hard thing!

I didn’t sleep much that night. I went to someplace old emotionally, someplace I haven’t gone to in a while. It was a place of shame and heartbreak and wishing I were other. I couldn’t stop thinking of my aged dad alone during time of COVID reading a book by his daughter where she talked about her struggles, her pains, her problems with him, her father. I felt so sick. I was hurting my father. My life, my voice, my story was hurting my dad. 

I wanted life to be different. I didn’t want my story to be one that hurt people.

The next morning I was teaching a collage and memoir(ish) class with Mel Toth, and I had to get my head screwed on right. How could I teach about writing when I wanted to shove my book right up my ass and hide it? (Not literally. The book has sharp corners, but I liked writing that sentence because it made me laugh.)

I thought about the why of voice. Why did I think it was so important to tell my story. Why do I think it’s so important for everyone to have a voice they feel is authentically theirs? 

As I often do these days, I thought about the plants and flowers at Spirit Hill Farm and how I love them and how they are so themselves. They just are. The lavender lavenders and the corn corns and they waste no energy trying to be other. 

I thought about the few singing classes I took, and how I learned that the body, from the top of the head to the bottom of the feet, is a container for vibration. I thought about how, really, our body is our voice in that we vibrate whether we speak or not. The thing is, you can vibrate in a way that feels real to you just as you can vibrate in a way that makes you feel wrong, sick, tight, broken. (This, for me, was one of the complications of being adopted. I had a body that vibrated at a different level than my parents. It wasn’t until I met best friends that I found people who vibrated like me, and that was an incredible feeling. So much laughter. So much wildness. So many secrets shared.)

This is what I thought as I prepared for class: when I am living in a body that vibrates in a way that feels like home, I am in a cave of me. That means voice is also a cave, as my voice and I are one. I imagined how I spent so much of my life standing outside the cave, outside the truth of myself. In my mind, I saw that the mouth of the cave had a pile of boulders in front of it—all the things blocking me from living in my voice, in the cave of me. The boulder of fear, the boulder of playing small, the boulder of fake. All those things that kept me from vibrating like myself.

When I wrote my memoir, I wrote my way through so many of those big rocks! All those blog posts I wrote after, all those memes, all that time I spent with people with whom I resonated on a whole new level ground the boulders to sand.  

I live in the cave now. I can even tell you what it smells like: eucalyptus and lavender and leather. I can tell you what it sounds like: white silence. The walls, where I sit, feel like leather. It is home. If I close my eyes, I can feel it vibrate, just as, when I lie in bed and tune into my body, I can feel it vibrate. I am alive.

The why of voice is because I am alive, same as the why of a flower. 

I develop and use my voice because it pleases the universe when its parts bloom. 

I rolled out of my cave and lost my grounding, my rootedness in self and voice, when I focused on my father’s feelings instead of my own. His head and thoughts are not my business.  

Having an authentic voice takes courage for some of us, for me. It is also so so so so fun. I walk around singing and don’t care who hears. I say things that surprise both me and others! I laugh! I cry! I am so alive when my voice vibrates my whole body.

 This vibration has another name.

Love.

I spoke with my dad today and asked if everything was okay between us. He said he loves me. He said he likes were we are now in our relationship. The past is the past, he said. I’m sorry it was hard, he said.

Even writing that makes me want to cry. I wish I were easier. I wish I had no edges. It’s funny how I can handle my own suffering. The sadness of the past on a personal level is something I can handle. It’s so much harder when someone else is involved.

May we be well. May we be loved. May we be safe.