){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
I read in passing in a magazine that most people refer to their Dad mistreating Mom during their childhood as the first cause of their unhappiness. My son confirmed this to me: An interview with 30 drug trafficking leaders revealed that almost all associated their criminal careers with the violent treatment of their mothers by their fathers when they were children.
Truthfully, I do not have the exact sources of this data at hand, but they are not necessary; it seems that we can all take the statement for granted. We all know, or at least intuit, that no other experience causes (or would provoke, if it had happened to us) such tremendous, deep, disruptive sadness in our identities and love of life.
When we are born into this soapy reality (the simile comes to me from the Mexica sages, who described our world as “slippery” and full of falls), our parents braid the first loop with which we sustain ourselves and find our balance to learn to walk. Then comes the family, the neighborhood, the school, and the entire community, and we weave all of this starting from that initial bond.
Since when has this been the case? Maybe since the human being became human, but we don’t know. Because of this question, I raise the following conjectures about machismo and patriarchal society as mere personal fantasies, under the illusion that some shed a bit of light on the subject.
I begin my story (I insist, my fantasy) with a cruel premise: that human beings must live in a world in which they cannot live. It seems that we have been created for a different reality. It’s as if the ship that brought us came to the incorrect planet as if we had assembled a puzzle based on the wrong image. The analogies are endless and so stormy that over the centuries, many have flatly believed that we were sent here to pay for a horrendous guilt.
Be that as it may, in this reality, without handholds, with multiple senses and unexpected routes, with infinite voices coming from everywhere, our most remote ancestors will have had to hold on to the first thing that seemed firm to them. Looking at the sky, they must have been surprised by the reassuring regularity of the cycles of time, ruled by two luminous stars, one for the day and one for the night. This first constant would allow them to identify other cycles of nature, such as weather and blooming vegetation. Correlating one with another, they would have discovered new regularities and dreamed of one day achieving order. Of course, in the face of deranged reality, this would have seemed like a crazy business. But they had to try. The feat would require everyone’s participation and progress from generation to generation. The objective would be to discover and stick to all possible regularities, trying to know them in-depth and reproduce them in different circumstances. No one should fail.
I don’t know how many human communities have attempted different agreements, but most of them certainly went through what we can call a two-voice pact at one point. What comprised this? Since the two governing bodies were associated with day and night, and one, the nocturnal, with women (whose fertility dictated their monthly regularity), it was decided to assign to them the discovery and regulation of the dark cycles: night, sleeping, dreaming; gestation processes (not only women’s but of nature as a whole); also everything that happens far from the light, what eludes the gaze: the interior, the intimate, the emotional and furtive, the amorphous and unexpected, the invisible, the unpredictable, the care of the seeds, their sowing, the work of the land; the interior of the body and healing, poetry and song, fire (which always reflects something nocturnal), cooking and food, flavors (always unexpected and different), the essences, perfumes, and incense; the enigma of beauty, enigmas in general; the wisdom preserved in the hidden; prayer, petitioning, the sacred; the truth (always unattainable, untouched and virgin), death, burial, mourning; the crying and the pain.
The men, on the other hand, correlated with the sun, light, the diurnal cycles, and things more tiring (only in appearance): sweat, strength, direction, and evidence; the gaze; what remains constant, unchanged, what is the same every morning; The law, control, the punishable; the tool, the weapon, the hunt; the behavior of animals when they are visible; footprints; the mark and the rhythm; the regularity of the march, the armies (the spies were women); everything that demands repetition; naming things; to say, to opine, to discuss, to be right; war; knowledge, and above all recognition; the hunt, the feat; making oneself visible to themselves and others, exalting and exalting oneself, fame, history; time, and the measurement of time.
At first, women and men stuck to their assignments, respecting the pact. But they soon realized that things were not prospering that way. Nothing retained impeccable cycles except the solar father and the lunar mother – oh, and its progeny of stars! Otherwise, nothing obeyed, nothing submitted to what had been discovered: neither the law could govern the people nor magic the occult.
Both accused each other of not fulfilling their role well; however, force, which was on the men’s side, dictated the difference. They imposed their nuance on the pact: everything would remain the same, but they would have the last word. They would occupy the definitive positions, patriarchs of day and night. They would be priests and rulers, producing a single voice and enunciation capable of silencing all the others so that things would have a single meaning and path. This shortcut would allow for denying the thickness of the world and its diversity. With logical regularity (limited but therefore more reliable), it was established that intelligence was the best trait for survival, without understanding that although it was valuable for outmaneuvering other predators, it was not very helpful to navigate a meaningless world (or a reality with so many, even opposing meanings) like ours. Reason, called lucidity, took the reins, advancing the manly certainty of “If you listen to me, everything will be better.”
However, inevitably, time and again, that single masculine voice clashed with the unavoidable voice of women. Trying to silence them was in vain because, as we already know, the female voice eternally slipped through all the cracks of nature (and will continue to do so as long as femininity and the human species exist).
Thus, every time some women (and no doubt also some men) rebelled to reconsider the agreements, the dictator (the one with the voice) strove to sideline, subdue, and annihilate them. How angry he was when someone did not heed the pleas to stick to a single vision of the world! How furious he was that his tyranny (his only philanthropic aspiration was to bring well-being to the people) was not obeyed… as long as he obeyed!
That precisely depicts Dad, the only bearer of the voice, the dictator, when he hurts Mom. Among other harms, she cannot hear a single murmur when he speaks. The volume does not admit interruptions, avoiding any contradiction in the flow of the world. Its first objective is to correct any attempt to neglect order. It punishes those who rave, those who deviate from the forces that keep the world in a single channel; it violates every attempt to establish a new law, mutilating those who escape from the crate, those who wander at night exercising their power of unrestricted movement after working all day. (For many, women’s work is still a search for autonomy that deserves amendment.) It seeks to crush those who believe they can have sexuality and show off their bodies, those who question what they are told, those who do not understand that everyone should pay attention, those who disorder the small order they managed to impose, those who are suspicious and ask questions.
Whatever the damage, it always opens a small, large, or endless wound in us, the child. If Dad makes jokes about Mom or physically harms her (I’m quoting the two extremes of the Violentometro created by the National Polytechnic Institute), we will hate him. If he abandons her or is indifferent to her dignity, we will hate him. If he does not love her and shows it through abuse, we will hate him – all this regardless of how he treats us. It does not matter how much Dad gives us or how he treats us, nor how many university degrees he pays for us or how many cars he buys for us: If he mistreats Mom, we will hate him.
We sons and daughters receive the damage that dad does to mom as a fracture inside. Then the most terrible thing happens: Unable to bear and process this horrendous reality, we human beings try to stop and, if necessary, destroy the wrongdoer or – much more frequently – turn the hatred inward, allowing ourselves to be dragged into the deepest abysses of self-violence (abuse, depression, suicide) or the safeguarding of our identity through one of the cruelest forms of defense, the one that says, “If you can’t beat the enemy, join him.”
Allying ourselves and identifying with the executioner, we internalize the belief that women are guilty, that they “ask for it,” and we assume violence to make them come to their senses and remember the virtues of the patriarchal pact. Thus, when we grow up, we become instructive, sadistic moralists who, as Rita Serrato explains in an extraordinary, now classic text of feminist literature (The Pedagogy of Cruelty), hurt, rape, and kill them so they understand how they should behave if they do not want us to do what we do to them.
How does this abuse spread from generation to generation, causing the pained child to repeat the same attitudes as the abusive parent? How does the child, despite this visible injustice that harms him so much, end up identifying with the father and the oppressive system? In general terms, how does injustice become preserved over time when we all suffer and detest it?
This is undoubtedly one of those two or three questions that keep pedagogy permanently suspended. If we do not become aware of the pain that we have inherited, if we do not overcome our inertia to address the damage we do to ourselves and our children, if we do not put a forceful and loving stop to the abuse, if we do not regret, ask for forgiveness, and repair the damage committed – then the inheritance will pass intact to our children. It will become their responsibility (and the society that educates them) to end the internalization of violence and renounce the spoiling of lives that sinks the new generations into that infernal hole.
But how can children take that step?
Healing the wound requires, first of all, recognizing the damage done to us. Acknowledging the damage caused by one of our parents is nothing slight. We all know how difficult it is to confess this to each other. It risks being left without one of life’s very few fundamental supports. It seems better to suppress our feelings and underestimate and even ridicule our pain, sympathizing with violent behavior. Deciding to question it involves courage, patience, and even seeking therapeutic or spiritual support, which takes time. Realizing what we feel is a continuous task to which we must return again and again, and another time, and another time, considering at each turn that the feeling is something transforming that constantly finds new ways to show and hide itself.
The second step, we also know, is to express our feelings as often as necessary, preferably to our parents or at least to each separately. If this is too threatening, we can express them to our sisters and brothers (even if out of fear, they continue to adhere to their loyalty). If none of this is possible (because we are only children or because our parents have died), we can turn to our partners, friends, a therapist, or a spiritual guide; we can write it, paint it, dance it, sing it, act it, or at least cry it and do anything except keep it to ourselves and plunge into the abyss. We should not replace the pain with compulsions for money, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, work, sex, food, games, sports, knowledge, fame, power, information, consumption, order, cleanliness, physical attractiveness, fashion, social networks, public presence, power…
The “overcoming” of the damage by the sons and daughters is essential to avoid repeating the behavior in new generations. This makes bringing up the issue of forgiveness here inevitable. I say this because it is also one of the most difficult to dissect. This is not the time to review it thoroughly. I only want to say something about the so-called “therapeutic forgiveness,” a tool proposed to leave behind the damage and which admits several versions, from a very practical, almost utilitarian one, in which forgiveness is “convenient” for us. It is a unilateral forgiveness that does not necessarily involve the “forgiven” person and allows us to move on with our lives. I believe, however, that a pardon we make for our benefit is not genuine. It is just another self-defense that can be disguised with spiritual nuances but which, in the end, only intends to remove the offender from our path, to get rid of him, which is a contradiction. This is a selfish “forgiveness.” I believe true forgiveness unequivocably requires reconciliation, the restoration of the relationship as before. That is why forgiveness in the case of a father who mistreated Mom is so tricky, a father with whom before that abuse we had nothing to do except the fact – profound but ambiguous – that he gave us life.
I believe (and it is just one more fantasy) that authentically forgiving involves two actions. The first is to change our violent patterns ourselves, that is, to personally strive not to harm others in the way we were hurt. For me, it is difficult to think of forgiving Dad if it does not result from the love we have for our own children, our partners, and, in general, those who have hurt us.
The second action: I believe that the most resounding forgiveness, less self-centered, is the one that allows the offender to recognize his mistake and make amends. We thus return to the expression of our feelings, whose most mature version would be to talk to Dad, non-threateningly, about the damage he did to us by hurting Mom, making it clear that for us, it would be a source of pride, and not shame, if he came to regret it. For a macho father, this is not easy. The belief that one should never ask one’s children for forgiveness is central to patriarchal power. It is based on the ancient fear of losing control, which makes us violent. Genuinely asking for forgiveness from children and their mothers face-to-face is the ultimate challenge of opposition to patriarchy.
In any case, forgiveness, like any sign of love, is a second chance to restore the initial bond and establish new support for our lives, beautiful and dark, firm and luminous, reconciling our stay in this world.
Translation by: Daniel Wetta
){kind=icon}
){kind=icon}
This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
