Words Girl

Only words could find me where I go to pray.

I am a words girl, not a numbers girl.

The story of my relationship with money is also the story of how my relationship with the men in my life who were supposed to protect me. It’s the story of what happens when a shadow of a girl grows up into a woman who has nothing but her words. My birth chart says that money finds me easily but it never says what happens when it does. Money found me the daughter of a sailor in the Navy because military money is safe money in towns where the military is the money. My mother was the breadwinner and my father hid behind stacks of paperwork — VA claims that would stretch on for years — appeals that turned into other appeals, 10% that eventually turned into 100%, arguments of what the military broke in him that were more likely already wrong before he went in. But my father, a hero in his mind, who charged headfirst into the Air Force after his best friend was killed in action in Vietnam, a black militant during the civil rights era, and a man who hated women because a woman hated him first.

My relationship with money is through a man who decided to make every woman pay for his mother’s sins and to take from them as he’d been taken from. My mother found him when she was hungry for love and he for a host to feed off of. I still don’t know how I came to be a product of this union but I know why I was the only one. This is the story I cannot untell — a girl who watched her mother dragged through life by a military that underappreciated her and a husband who hated her all for a daughter she bore in a Naval base hospital the night before Halloween. A man who repeatedly had her taken to Captain’s Mast for running up credit card statements and not paying bills until she finally came clean about the hell she was going through. And when they offered her a chance to escape, my mother had to take it or else this would be a very different story, I’m sure.

I am not a numbers girl. If I were, I’d have to sit down and count all the tragedies of my life and I quickly run out of fingers and toes and checklists only get as long as forever. When my mother escaped he turned to me like a hungry meal and decided that he’d get his fill one way or another. So I was told what I would do and who I would be — my dreams were obsolete and deemed unimportant. I was trained to perform like a puppet but the only thing made of cloth and string was my heart. Every bit of money that ever passed to me — from birthday cards to contest winnings to odd jobs — went into my father’s hands along with my self-esteem, self-worth, my marriage, at least 1 pregnancy, and other things he crushed like peanuts in his massive hands. Hands that wouldn’t work because he “stayed at home to take care of me” but there were no plans for him to ever do anything except live off others. My mother, the government, me.

I am not a numbers girl. I am a words girl because only words could find me where I go to pray.

Originally published at https://byjaztaihreen.substack.com.