He Sorry You Feel That Way
It was a crisp morning in a rural Arizona town. A quiet place people move to when they don’t like, well, people. A plate of pancakes and sausage steamed in front of me as I sat around the table with my husband, my father, and my step-mother. We drove up for a belated celebration. Our first attempt had been canceled when my dad felt his high blood pressure wasn’t under control.
As we made conversation, the topic of my future came up. You see, I married a man with dual citizenship and we planned on retiring someday in Italy. I guess this was too much for my father and step-mother to hear, with it layered on top of the fact that my brother not only lived abroad, but asked his French girlfriend to marry him. Thus cementing the reality that he was never planning on returning to live in the US.
My stepmother looked at us and calmly replied to our far-off future retirement plans with, “Any of our children who do not maintain a home in the US, will not be inheriting any money. It’s important for our money to stay in the United States.”
I chuckled and said, “Okay.”
Only it didn’t feel okay. It felt like another snippet into the minds of people who have been brainwashed. They consider themselves such patriots, that they must protect their country with the meager remains of their finances in death. I say meager, as the United States healthcare system is wonderfully efficient at stripping away assets from the elderly. This is something they also deny, because they “pay a lot of money for healthcare, so they don’t have to worry about it.”
Since 2016, I had endured increasingly uncomfortable conversations about patriotism and conspiracy theories. Climate change wasn’t real. There were more important things to worry about than Roe v. Wade. Trump’s comments about women were just locker room talk. In fact, when he first ran and I expressed my concerns, I didn’t even bring up his treatment of women. My stepmother instead, barged into the conversation I was having with my father to say, “Do you just not like him because of what he said about women?” She was referring to the grab ’em by the pussy scandal. Apparently, none of that was important to her. As a woman, she understood it was just locker room talk.
As the years went on, I would get phone calls about how Kari Lake was a good candidate that I should vote for (which also made me chuckle, as she is utterly insane). I was told Harris and Walz were communists. I was told to do my own research when I protested.
So I did my own research and forwarded it to him. His response? “Research for what?”
My father has never been to China, but he is quite sure that Tim Walz is a communist based on his visits. I reminded him that I spent a good chunk of my career traveling to China on business, spending an average of a month a year in Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Did he think I was a communist? Does he even know what communism is? He does not, because he believes liberals are fascist, socialist, and communist. Somehow, they are all three completely opposite things at once.
He believes Obama and Biden weaponized the Department of Justice to go after political opponents. Apparently, he is unaware that since 2022, Trump has threatened to prosecute, imprison, investigate, or somehow punish rivals more than 100 times. Trump has even said members of the Congressional committee that investigated January 6th “should go to jail.” He called The United States House Select Committee the “Unselect Committee.” It was one of his weaker comebacks.
Just before the election, my father hammered out an angry text devoid of all punctuation.
“Joe Biden is the most corrupt president in the history of America by far there’s not even a close second and I don’t want to talk anymore about politics you’re going to vote for Kamala I’m voting for Trump that’s the end of it see what happens”
After the November election, I couldn’t get the last eight-ish years out of my head. I couldn’t get a lifetime of disappointment out of my head. So I wrote my father a letter.
…
Dad,
I’m sure you already know that I’m likely disappointed in the presidential election, but I want you to know more about why.
I know your vote isn’t about me, but it does make me feel a terrible sadness to know my father voted for an abuser of women over a woman. The message so many women are receiving right now, is that we are worthless. That our fathers will listen to a man laugh as his rally crowd calls a female presidential candidate a whore, and still vote for him. That our fathers will vote for a rapist before they’d vote for a woman. That our fathers would believe a woman was a communist before they’d believe a man was an abuser. I don’t know how to begin to unpack how it makes me feel, because I also know you love me.
I’ve also never experienced so many women crying after a presidential election.
I flew to LA on NOV 6th for the day. I met with a vendor in downtown, who innocently asked me if I was happy with the election results. I told her how I really felt. That I thought Trump was a violent, dangerous, cruel man, and that it scared me so many people heard everything he had to say and said: yes, I like the sound of that. I told her I thought it empowered people to be the worst version of themselves. We ended up crying and hugging in the middle of her wholesale store. That has never happened to me over politics. These are not normal times, and this isn’t even political anymore. I had no idea, as we are not close, what her political background was. We just grieved together as women.
I know you want Trump and you support his authoritarian ideas, but I don’t know why.
Your life is good. You’ve been given everything needed to be successful and to feel important. You are the privileged class. You are the son of an American banker. You enjoy an astonishing high living standard compared to the majority of the world.
When you came to my house and slept with a gun next to the bed, as if I don’t sleep there every night without one, I laughed out of genuine shock. I asked if you were scared, and you replied that people were crazy.
You’ve wandered my neighborhood. You know we are a connected community. [Redacted] recently joined a committee to save the trees, as the 100-year-old Aleppo pines are dying off. The ground has become too hot for them and our increasingly long summers are killing them in record numbers. We are working to raise funds to save and replace them — starting a non-profit the people in the neighborhood can donate to, so at least the large expense of cutting the dead ones down is a tax write-off. Community education is another aspect. We asked our arborist if he wanted to be involved. The committee is getting free education/advice on how to tackle the problem, with the goal to go door-to-door to educate homeowners.
We make the coffee for the Breakfast in the Park event, where around 50 to 75 people gather in the park across from my house to have breakfast together. We have Halloween and Christmas celebrations. We put up public art, post poems on the community board, host live music from award winning musicians who just happen to be friends with a resident, and have public benches in our yards. I have one of three Free Little Libraries in my neighborhood.
When you talk about your neighbors, I don’t hear about the community. I hear about angry confrontations, dust, threats made with guns, an actual shooting … who is really living in fear here? It’s not my city neighborhood. My worst neighbor is a hippie commune that thought bad music could heal people.
Every time I go on a walk, I see the giant peace sign at the [redacted] intersection. You know who participates the most in making our neighborhood a fun, safe, and connected place to live? Two gay men. You met one of them when you visited me. He was out on the corner this Halloween scaring kids and laughing his ass off. He will be there this Christmas to put up the candy canes and light up [redacted] for the holidays.
I don’t live in a hellscape. I live in a place where people show up to fill 5,000 bags with sand and candles for luminarias at Christmas time.
I am not mad you are a Republican. I am mad you voted for such a horrible human being. For a man who has never once been part of any community. A man who got up in the morning, took an elevator to work in a building he owned, and never so much as walked past a grocery store, let alone been in one. A man who has never sat in a coffee shop or a honky tonk or a dive bar or driven through rural Nebraska for a meeting. A man for whom the real world is a destination he has never been. Worse, he’s not even a real billionaire — he’s in massive debt. He’s a wanna-be oligarch, who partnered with real billionaires, who will be unlikely to play nice once they all have to work together.
But even worse than all that, you voted for a rapist.
I am mad you are aligned with this kind of rhetoric:
“Spent her whole damn life on her knees.”
“Slept her way up.”
“Joe and the hoe.”
“Grab ’em by the pussy.”
And that you think it’s just masculinity. That men who demean women are showing strength. I am mad you think an insecure abuser, a felon, a liar, a con, a known sexual predator, a cheater, a fraud, a 6x bankrupted businessman is more fit for office than a woman. I am furious, because I have to live with that knowledge in my heart. I have to take the knowledge that my father would vote for an abuser of women over a woman, store it inside of myself, and feel it fester until the day I die.
This election made me ask myself, “Is the concept of a plan more important than a woman?”
This was after I had to volunteer my time and money to push back against the concept of a human having more worth than a woman.
I didn’t feel safe enough to sit on my sofa and get angry. I didn’t feel secure enough to inactively consume media that fuels my worst fears. I had to get active. For myself, my friends, and fellow woman. I have never gotten directly involved before. I got to see what it was like to work with and meet others who care deeply for this country. I canvased, I wrote postcards with the elderly volunteers who had more free time than I did, I collected signatures from my peers — sometimes driving directly to their homes to make it easier on them to participate, I went to fundraisers, I met lawyers and political families with long legacies, I drove a candidate around to door knock in the worst part of the city— maybe that’s why this hurts so much. I tried. I actively participated in democracy only to learn the majority of Americans hate women.
I am so proud we passed prop [redacted to preserve privacy of location], and I hope it’s not undone by the conservatives who have been espousing antiquated rhetoric that most of us don’t practice in our daily lives. You don’t, to my knowledge, practice it either.
The young men in my feed are empowered to tell women “your body, my choice” by the thousands. They gather at Texas State with signs that say women are property. Not just women, their signs say:
Types of property:
Women
Slaves
Animals
Cars
Land
Etc.
It’s 2024. Your vote is aligned with these people and I can’t make sense of it.
Blind allegiance to a leader has always led to dehumanization. It has always led to dictatorships. I am upset my father is on the same side as the people who think I am property. On the same side as the Nazis, white supremacists, KKK, and white nationalists. The same side as the Taliban, who congratulated Americans for not handing leadership of our great country over to a woman.
This is a dangerous direction to be headed in.
We all draw lines in the sand. We push them out and move them around, so that we can feel good about ourselves. The lines are stories we tell ourselves. We all need that — to believe we are fundamentally good people, it’s part of the human condition. And it comes with an enormous responsibility, it means we have to be very careful about those lines we draw.
I grew up believing I came from good people. I was not raised to feel that other people had to be bad in order for me to be good.
But that is exactly what I watched Trump do in every speech he ever gave — give Americans someone to hate. Knowing 72 million Americans listened to it and still voted for him, I’ll never get over it.
Doing that, making other people bad so that you can be good, is drawing a dangerous line in the sand. The women in my life are crying and hugging each other. We are sad. I am sad.
I don’t want to draw a line in the sand that excludes my own father. I am disappointed. Severely so. I have made many attempts to be understood, but you have rarely attempted to make yourself known to me. Truly known. You leave when conversations are too much or too emotional. I really don’t know why you are the kind of man who voted for an abuser of women. I have no idea at all. And dismissing that abuse as less important than whatever motivates you, doesn’t make it better.
It made me feel worthless. When you say it’s okay to speak this way about women, when you empower men who degrade women, it makes the women who are watching feel worthless. It almost hurts more, knowing you made me feel worthless while also knowing you love me. I can’t look up to you. I can’t admire you. And I want to so badly.
I feel like I have been living in my own fantasy my whole life. One where I was important. One where I could be anything I wanted to be.
I went through some old photos feeling very down. Photos of us. Photos of me in your arms. I need you to know how I feel. I need you to know this is not the first time I have felt so unimportant.
My fantasy was first cracked when I wanted to go to [redacted]. Hearing my grandmother say she had to pay for all the other grandchildren to go to college, all male, as a reason she couldn’t help me. God damn, I never forgot it. I never forgot how you sat there next to her and listened to it without standing up for me. I was just an irresponsible girl not worthy of an investment. Did you know I contemplated never speaking to you or my grandmother again? But I needed help. I really did. And she eventually gave me around 6k to secure student housing. I took that money and secured it with no idea how I was going to pay for the rest.
My mother tried to cosign a loan. She was denied. [The conman she married and divorced, who stole everything, who was investigated by the FBI, which included a raid on my house] had just ruined her life. So you know who did sign that loan for me? Her boyfriend. A guy I actually despised at the time. We didn’t even really get along. I was so angry over [redacted conman] that I was a teenager/young woman enraged at anyone orbiting my mother. I was truly cruel to him at times. Placing my anger on the man who came along as my stepfather harassed, stalked, and threatened to kill my mother. Not realizing she dated him to feel safe from her abuser.
I even tried to get away from it by moving to [redacted town where my father lived]. You did all that work for me, building me my own space, and it made me feel loved and safe. And important. And then I backed out. I was too scared to leave my mother alone — to leave someone I loved who had their whole world destroyed and chose to stay in that destroyed world for me.
The man I was so mean to, the man who moved in as [redacted conman] moved into prison, signed my loan and told me it was no big deal.
I literally paid that loan off this year. I’m sure he never realized that loan would follow him around for 20ish years. I almost thought of tracking him down to buy him a drink and I still think I am going to do that. He is a big reason I have the job I have today.
I still have 24k in federal student loans to go. Their predatory interest made it much harder to pay off than my private loan. They are currently frozen, waiting on a forgiveness decision that will likely never come now. A good friend of mine, a republican, had his PhD loans forgiven by the Biden administration. He voted for Kamala Harris this year. I know, because he was proud to tell me, after we spent many a night debating politics and current events, that he was voting for the potential first female president of the United States.
(Context: I want to add that my father came from a father who believed in getting an education and provided for him to get one. One that he did not finish. He also invested in him so that he could be a business owner. It is a privilege to have family with money bankroll your education, your success, your future. I did expect to have help paying for an education, I won’t deny it.
But my first stepfather was a conman who had targeted my mother — her life began to unravel when I was 14. She ended up in no position to help me. Her parents had spent a lot of money saving us from him, which included kidnapping and death threats. I eventually asked my dad’s mother for help, because my mother had just barely survived an abuser and my father said no, even knowing my mother had just barely survived an abuser. I also knew my mother’s parents paid a large sum to make dangerous people go away, and I didn’t feel like I could ask them for anything else, but they were a safer place for me to turn.
Still, I needed someone to cosign a loan, as I was young and had no credit. I was accepted to my dream school and 19 years later, I still currently work in my chosen profession — so it wasn’t wasted.
I did cave and first turned to my mother’s parents for a signature on a loan. That grandmother was a safer person to turn to than my father’s mother.
Her husband said it was not his responsibility. My maternal grandmother thought that maybe my father would step in for once if she stayed out of it. She had picked up my father’s financial slack my whole life at this point. I think she thought she was forcing him to be a father. I later learned this caused a huge rift between my grandmother and her husband.
My father’s mother was my last hope at this point. I had been biding my time in community college, because it was free. I had a scholarship. I will admit I wasted it. I felt aimless there. It wasn’t where I wanted to be. I hadn’t earned the scholarship. It was one given in kind, as my grandfather had given scholarships to baseball players when he had been alive.
A teacher of my favorite subject had also taught me a brand new life lesson that destroyed me for a moment. Art history was my favorite subject and I was her best student. I knew that, because she repeatedly told the class that I was the only one who did anything right.
When it was time to tell her about our big semester long projects, she responded in a way that shocked me. When I told her my plan, she looked at me and said, “You’re not smart enough to pull that off. Pick something easier.” Then she walked away.
The next week, she called out my name to stay after class. She had just moments before, read my essay out loud as an example of what she expected from everyone else, because no other student seemed to be paying attention. As I made my way to her desk, I could see the realization in her eyes. Her best student was the one she had just recently dismissed as “not smart enough.” I realized something in that moment too. Her previous assessment of me was only based on the way I looked. She hadn’t actually known who I was. She assumed I was not her best student, because blonde girls with big boobs are a stereotype of stupidity she bought into.
I walked out of her class and never came back.
Back to my father’s mother. She didn’t like what I wanted to do with my life. When I told her I was going to my dream school whether or not she helped me, she responded: oh yeah, how are you going to get there without my money? I excused myself after this comment to cry in the bathroom and my mother came in to council me to suck it up, because I did need her. By the end of the night, my grandmother agreed to help me secure housing before the deadline.)
…
I have been walking around with tears in my eyes and a blotchy face for two days — as I write this, I am crying.
I truly think the hope inside of me is dead or dying — maybe there’s an ember still there? It’s too soon to tell.
In my worst moments, my darkest thoughts say: People are not fundamentally good. We are fundamentally selfish. We are creative. We craft entire realities for ourselves to justify our belief in our rightness. We are motivated by fear and anger and hatred. It appeals to us over all else. Man is a self-preservationist, women be damned. Maybe seeing how I feel will be the most accurate way to describe it?
Ok, this one is a little funny — I needed comic relief.
I need to understand why. Why, dad?
…
It’s been a month. My father refuses to speak to me.
I had two brothers respond empathetically, offering support, understanding, and validation. I had another brother call to tell me my words were malicious and petty, and that I wrote the above letter to hurt my father on purpose. Guess who, of the three, also voted for Trump?
…
I was asked to delete this blog, I compromised and deleted two sentences that embarrassed someone I love. Two honest sentences that reflected my reality. Those two sentences mattered more to other people I love, than anything else I wrote. I have been thinking about this for days – I’m not sure how many.
It’s late, and I am sitting in bed trying to sleep. Still thinking about how you can write paragraphs of your own sadness and disappointment, but someone else’s embarrassment over their own behavior will matter more.
I’m thinking about how after rereading all of what I wrote, that it was most important to family, that I erase it.
