I don’t know how to be your daughter.

I don’t know how to be your daughter.

I don’t know how to be you, but different, but better, but everything you couldn’t be because of everything you couldn’t have, when I don’t even know who you are, or who you’ve been, or what your story is.

I don’t know it yet, and I hope I can say ‘yet’ and mean it, and I can only find parts of it peaking out in nights you have too many red wines; the reserves weakened too much to keep holding the bars closed, and only ever when I’ve had too many red wines to keep from prying them open.

I don’t know how to be your daughter when your gates are closed, and guarded by feral Rottweilers. Or was it your German Shepard, from when you were young? The one that you trained to perfection – like you couldn’t train me.

But didn’t he go wild, anyway?

Didn’t you have to put him down?

Didn’t you have to learn that some wild things can’t be caged?

At least not for too long. 

See, I don’t know how to be your daughter when I’m at the fork in this road, and one direction is an ice-cream fantasy land, like the one in the book about the cupboard, and the other is nettled and stormy and dark, but that’s the one I want to go down.

I don’t know how to be your daughter, when you want me to decorate my room with teddy bear drawer knobs you buy me from Bunnings but I want to decorate my skin with the tears you say I’ll have to get cosmetic surgery to cover up again. 

I don’t know how to be your daughter when you threaten to cut tattoos out of my skin, but when I do it, when I cut out the hurt tattooed into my bloodstream, you’re allowed to get mad then, too.

I don’t know how to be your daughter when being your daughter means, “just you wait until your father gets home,” like we could both never win, like I could never live up to the expectations and like you couldn’t meet me halfway.

I don’t know how to be your daughter when I’m supposed to be seen and not heard, but also heard at all the right times, and also perfect. When I’m supposed to be the two of you, but the good halves, not the ones who stumble.

See, you’ve set out for me a tightrope that you spent decades learning how to perform on and decided that for me there’ll be no time on the balance beam, no dress rehearsal.

And I don’t know how to be your daughter when problems and feelings and life is pushed down, down, down, until it can’t be seen; when passive aggressive is so normal I can’t see a real relationship when it’s right in front of me; when silence is preferred; when answers are supposedly at the bottom of this next bottle and I’m the only one who can’t see them; when I’m pretending to be asleep in the backseat after dinner and you’re saying: You’ll have to watch her. Like I’m not your responsibility when I’m bad, I’m not yours when I’m bad, I’m not allowed to be your daughter when I’m bad, and in case you forgot, I was only fourteen when you said that, and just because I wanted to fuck that guy in order to feel normal, doesn’t mean I did.

And so I don’t know how to be your daughter, because despite it all I need your approval.

Your words, your hug, your anything, and instead the only thing I know intimately is the way you get home late from work, the collar of your work shirt, the way we didn’t speak until it was me, your daughter, who had to swallow everything and make it happen.

I don’t know how to be your daughter when you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl, a fifteen year old girl, a seventeen year old girl, and you refuse to try to understand.

So instead of your daughter, at least for now, I’ll have to be just another girl with daddy issues. Just another woman stuck with the shame-label of being victim to the actions of men.