My Great-Great-Great Grandfather's Granddaughter

So weird--my last name. It is really unusual--the only family with it in my state. And yet, my family has its share of "Smiths" and "Joneses." Why, by accident of birth, do I happen to have my father's father's father's father's father's last name? Or is there a reason for it? Just like my mitochondria are literally the descendants from my mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's--is there something in my soul that is descended only through the male side?

I was 11 when my father told me that no man would ever love me if I didn't lose weight. I told him to fuck off. Men were scum if that was the only way they judged women and why the hell would I want a relationship that was basically based on me being an object, a piece of meat?

And I simultaneously shut down my heart, learned to stop hoping and never, ever let anyone know I wasn't strong and couldn't take care of myself. I never learned to flirt. Never learned I was, or might possibly be seen as attractive. All I knew was that I would fail as a woman, but if I didn't let anyone know I might yearn for connection, I could still succeed as an asexual human being.

I can tell you exactly where I was standing, what the light looked like. My dad probably doesn't remember that moment, that day, but he remembers being unkind to me on a number of occasions, without even knowing where it came from.

He has tried SO hard to make up for it. And yet, telling me I'm beautiful a dozen times in the last year (which he has done) doesn't erase those marks he never meant to leave. Where did that voice come from? None of us really know, but I have my guess.

I don't know the details of when my father's father turned into a tyrant but it happened sometime after my grandfather proposed to my grandmother and before my father was cognizant of his surroundings. My father rebelled against his father's criticism and discipline. Until I was born. At that point, my father was lost and fell into old patterns. He did his VERY best to change those, but it took time, and my soul still bares the traces not of who my dad is now, but who he was then.

My grandfather left the country he grew up in because his father was such a tyrant to him. My grandmother used to comment that she fell in love with a happy loving man and married a dictatorial tyrant. She didn't know how it happened, and I bet he didn't either.

My great-grandfather hated his father for seeing him as a failure. In Germany you take aptitude tests at an early age and my grandfather ended up in trade school. He never forgave his father for the sense of betrayal the father expressed, and his father probably never forgave his son for failing. Or maybe part of his desperately wanted to forgive his son, but he didn't know how. Who knows?

I don't know much about my great-great-grandfather. But his father, my great-great-great grandfather, was fired from his job as a school teacher in Germany for being too cruel and strict with the students. I could be wrong, but I expect that 'too strict' in Germany in the 19th century meant something very different from 'too strict' today. And I expect that generation after generation, good men have tried to let go of their father's influence, and have been unable. They've all rebelled and they've probably promised to try and be different, and then a family happens and they've lost authorship of the details of their lives and they fall into the only patterns they know.

And so, it is fitting that I bear my great-great-great grandfather's name. To this day, I yearn for someone who is strict and sees the world as right and wrong to tell me I'm OK the way I am. I yearn for the love and the approval of someone in charge. I don't like those scars on my soul, but I accept them. And I realize the power they have for me, both in the erotic context and also with love.

My great-great-great grandfather has a great-great-great granddaughter who bears his name, has all the strength he would have wished for his sons and uses it to try and re-inscribe the patriarchal expectations in a way that is a little more loving and humane, truly, intensely and vitally in this moment.