And while my parents yelled at each other and my mother threw the rotating table fan across the room and threatened to leave, I would lay my head on my pillow and feel nothing but the sharp sting of my father’s betrayal.
(Diaz, 2019, P. 51)
In the first section of our reading for Ordinary Girls, Diaz touches on a number of very heavy topics in her early life. Like many children, one parent is favorited over the other – in the case of Diaz, this is her father. Her father was like an idol to her, and she did everything to try and be like him and saw him almost like a hero. While her mother was unstable and ready to lash out, and her brother bullied her and belittled her because of her looks and gender, Diaz’s father stuck out as a source of comfort for Diaz. Diaz spent many nights with him while he read to her and she would always try and read his books so that he could understand his secrets and be more like him. However, as she grew older, the idolization began to fail. She found her father selling drugs in the plaza at a vey young age, he was a womanizer and constantly betrayed her mother with women in and out of their apartment complex, and ultimately, he left one day and didn’t come back for a very long time. Over time as well he began to belittle her for her gender as well, and not stick up for his daughter and refused to take ownership of his transgressions – leading to the quote I selected above from the reading.
In many ways, I can relate to Diaz’s experience with her family. As a very young child, there is the tendency in our minds to idolize or demonize things, to work in extremes. I hate her because she stole my toy. My dad is the best and I love him very much. After having pizza for the first time, pizza is my favorite food in the whole world and I want to eat it for the rest of my life. This extreme way of thinking is natural when we are small children, but as we grow older we begin to grow out of it. However, sometimes in toxic, abusive, and chaotic homes, this process can be delayed or end up not happening at all. With all the extremes and prejudice Diaz otherwise experienced (about her looks, her gender, the extremes of sexuality from her mother before even hitting puberty, the fights and drama of the home and neighborhood), I don’t find it all too surprising that she wasn’t in the headspace to stop the idolization until much later – until she had her heart directly pierced by her father and he turned her mother on her for something he did. While I did not face nearly as many instabilities outside of home, my the home instabilities led to a similar experience for me. We think so many things are normal that really aren’t, as Diaz states when she reflects on her violent games that she played as a child. Only later do we realize how insanely messed up our experiences were, and how it all makes sense that we ended up behaving the way we did later on. The way we think about ourselves, the way we treat others, and our wellbeing is deeply tied to our childhood experiences – and in an environment like this, it’s only natural that the idolization a child feels can turn into something incredibly dangerous even decades into their life, for themselves and everyone around them. It’s very likely that Diaz’s mother’s experience with abuse in her own family led to her growing mental health issues with age as she ignored the effects and was thrust into an underage marriage in an extremely unstable environment.
Díaz, J. (2019). Ordinary girls: a memoir. First edition. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
