My Father and I Sitting Next to One Another Left Front

“Anna, you know that I’m writing my memoir. Can you help me fill in some missing pieces? I remember Dad beating me until I was bloody. But do you remember what I did to…?”

My sister interrupted me. “Just don’t write anything about me in that book of yours – just forgive and yes, forget.”

Forgive and forget, and above all, don’t air our family’s dirty laundry.

I understand why it was especially important to keep our family’s dirty laundry a secret. Our parents were Mennonite medical missionaries in Paraguay, South America. Strict, fundamentalist, God-fearing Christians whose primary purpose in life was to do the Lord’s work. They founded and ran a leprosy hospital in east Paraguay that eventually became a model for the treatment of leprosy around the world. In short, my father was a hero in the eyes of the medical world as well as the Mennonite church. That kind of hero surely never soils his laundry.

###

I remember it as though it was yesterday.

“I don’t know why you always make me do this.” Dad’s voice was thick with anger. He grabbed my arm and pulled me along behind him toward his room. Even though I knew I couldn’t win, I tugged back with all of my weight and dug my heels hard against the uneven tiles of the veranda. But my nine-year old body was no match against my father’s strong six-foot frame. With his free hand he turned the round wooden doorknob to his room and shoved me through the door. Without making a sound, I coiled my body away from him like a crazed wild animal.

Pulling me behind him, he snatched the leather strap from the hook in his bedroom and wet it in the water basin. I kicked and writhed to get out of his grip but it only made him grasp me more fiercely. His left hand dug into my skull and grabbed a handful of my thick reddish-brown hair, as he pushed my head down between the bed and his thigh, pinning me under his leg. While one arm held my thrashing body down against his leg, he pushed his other hand up under my skirt and yanked down my cotton panties.

“No, no, Daddy, no,” I howled into the coarse bedspread. But the strap came down hard. Once. Twice. Three times. Four. Five.

By the time he pushed me aside and stood to leave, I’d stopped screaming.

“Saj mie daot et die leet deit– tell me you’re sorry,” he said in our native Low-German. He glared at me, eyes burning with rage. I glowered back, saying nothing, panties dangling around my ankles.

“Then sit here and think about it, and come out when you are ready to say you are sorry,” he growled.

With angry tears still stinging my eyes, I knelt on the floor and twisted around to inspect my scorching buttocks. I knew what I would find there. I’d seen it many times before. Rows of welts were already beginning to form where each blow had struck me, and blood oozed from them, creating a maze of red trails across my backside.

Gingerly, I pulled up my homemade panties, the rough cotton scuffing against the gashes. “I will never, ever tell him I’m sorry,” I muttered to myself, still on my knees.

After what seemed like hours, I heard the wooden doorknob click and sensed rather than saw him moving toward me. I knelt by his bed, my eyes closed to keep from looking at him. But I held my head high, and my chin thrust out defiantly.

“Tell me you’re sorry,” he hissed. My body recoiled from the fury still in his voice and I knew it wasn’t over. I said nothing.

“You give me no choice,” he said through clenched teeth, and turned to wet the strap yet again.

###

Years passed. I married and had two children. Then I was divorced - -twice. It seemed that every time I got up on my feet, I fell, each time harder than the last. In the midst of that all-too-familiar place at rock bottom, I began to learn the futility of one more attempt to explain away or justify what was happening to me. And I gradually began to shed pieces of my defiant, angry outer shell.

Around the same time, I became aware that my father, the willful and powerful hero doctor who seemed invincible to the world and to me, was also experiencing blows to his ego. The great pioneer of the leprosy work eventually didn’t accept changing treatment protocols and was asked to step down. He tried one new venture after another, but never again found that perfect combination of adventure, grandeur and God’s work.

At the intersection of our brokenness, healing became possible. Seeing the rocky transition from defiance to defeat in each of our lives, we began to lean into each other with a compassion we had never before known. During the last twenty years of his life, my father and I enjoyed a very close relationship.

Without ever talking about any of the bad stuff.

But we began to say five important Low-German words to one another every time we said goodbye: “Doa ess nuscht tsweschen ons (there is nothing bad between us).”

###

So why air our dirty laundry now?

As painful as parts of our story may be, especially for people devoted to my father and to the Mennonite church that was his bedrock, I believe as widely respected spiritual teacher Richard Rohr has said, “Wisdom is where you see it all and you eliminate none of it and include all of it as important training. Finally, everything belongs. You are able to say, from some larger place that even surprises you, it is what it is, and even the bad was good.”

###

The last time I saw my father I was visiting my parents in the Chaco of west Paraguay. It was May 2003. He was a frail old man and I knew it was time to say goodbye.

At the end of the week’s visit, my brother drove up to take me to my bus. My parents and I had already hugged each other. They stood side by side in front of a brushy hedge as I stepped up into my brother’s dusty old pickup, both of them gripping their walkers. Mom was bent over. Dad’s back was arrow straight. The mid-day Chaco sun beat down on them, bathing them in blinding brightness and suffocating heat. Mom’s lips quivered ever so slightly. I couldn’t tell if there were tears since they both wore flip-down dark glasses.

Tears running down my cheeks, I rolled down the window, turned to Dad and said, “Doa ess nuscht…”

Before I could finish Dad stumbled forward against his walker, grasped it even more firmly with both hands to keep from falling, and roughly whispered, “Doa ess nuscht tweschen ons.”

“There’s nothing bad between us.”