Mama’s Little Windmill

First time my daddy laid his hands on me, I reckoned I deserved it. That trophy was important to him and I was a disrespectful little shit to have knocked it over. I should’ve been more careful, goddammit. What was I running through the house for anyway? If the golden bowling ball didn’t stay glued on, he was going to stomp my ass raw. Me and my bloody nose were glad that it did. 

Second time he laid his hands on me, I reckoned I deserved that, too. He was napping on his recliner and I shouldn’t have laughed so loud. He’d already warned me and I didn’t listen. I was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV watching Bugs Bunny make a fool out of Elmer Fudd when I heard the footrest snap shut. Before I could turn around and tell him I was sorry, he flew across the living room and popped me in the back of the head with a closed fist. It hurt and I cried, and it hurt again when he turned off the television and forbade me from using it whenever he was resting on the recliner from then on. But disobedience was disrespect, and he was right—I knew better.

I can’t say that I remember what I did the third and fourth times that he laid hands on me. Maybe I looked at him the wrong way after he had a long day at work, or maybe my room wasn’t cleaned well enough, or maybe I just wasn’t living up to the son that he thought I should be. Whatever it was, he told me that I deserved the beating so it must have been true.

My mom didn’t punish me the way that Daddy did, and I always loved her a little more because of that. She was a frail woman; small in stature with a voice like a church mouse. She was old school in her Baptist beliefs that a child should honor his father and mother, and that a wife should honor her husband in turn. Because she held so firmly to those beliefs, she never told my daddy that she didn’t agree with the way that he was punishing me, but I could read those thoughts on her face just as well as I could read a picture book. She’d stare off, find some heavenly oasis in the distance, and she wouldn’t come back to herself until the beating was done. I felt sorry for making Daddy get mad at me, but I felt even worse about putting my mama in that position. 

Beyond just being a God-fearing religious woman, my mother was spiritual in a different way. She saw signs; found meaning in everything. She connected dots that no one else could see. After a particularly bad beating, she’d pull me up in her lap and rock me back and forth until I stopped crying. She rubbed my head gently and called me “Mama’s Little Windmill” to cheer me up again. To her, windmills were a symbol of resiliency, of perseverance in a harsh environment. Knowing she felt that way about me made me feel like I was strong, even with those tears streaming down my face. It made the punishments easier to take.

The older I got, the beatings became less and less frequent. I was bigger than my dad by the time I was fourteen years old and that pissed him off more than I can put into words, but it also scared him a little bit, too. He didn’t like the thought of me being able to retaliate, so he kept his venom at bay except for the occasional off-handed remark and bitter tirade under his breath. Owning that realization made me feel powerful, and with every year that went by, I could feel that power growing into something that was harder to control. Every time Daddy said something nasty, I felt that power rising to the surface and my body actively working against it—chest muscles tightening, trying like hell to hold it in. 

I was seventeen on the night it finally broke through.

For all the damage my father had done to me, I’d never once seen him lay a finger on my mother. Deserved or not, violence was reserved for me. So when she barged into my room screaming—a sound I was hearing for the first time in my life—with a fresh welt swelling on her pointed cheek, the anger within me, the power I’d grown into, took over. It was instinct. It was genetics. 

First, I saw red, then I saw my hand pulling a knife from the wooden block in the kitchen, then I saw red again, spraying out of Daddy’s neck. His wide, petrified eyes were crystal balls reflecting a future we were always heading toward, but it didn’t occur to me until he slumped into the couch cushions and they came to a permanent close that his eyes had also been shut when I plunged the knife into him. He hadn’t even tried to fight back—he’d been asleep. And if he’d been asleep, he couldn’t have been the one to hurt Mama. 

She stood in the hallway behind me, back to her usual quiet self—but with that familiar vacant expression on her face, I knew that she had placed herself in another world altogether. Red and blue lights flashed through the curtains, but I didn’t need them to illuminate the truth of what had happened; what my mother had orchestrated. 

And yet, I understand it now. It was the only way she could be rid of him—the only way we could be rid of him. It took some time, but I forgave her for what she did, where I ended up because of it.

She still writes me sometimes, though not as often as she used to. Her life is better now. She’s married to a good man; a family man. They have themselves a little girl and he never lays a finger on her except to hug her against his chest and protect her from the storm. I reckon it all worked out.

I keep those letters beneath my mattress and I pull them out from time to time when this place gets to be too much. Her words make me strong just as they did all those years ago. I write her back whenever I can and I always sign my letters the same way—with warm thoughts and lots of love, from Mama’s Little Windmill.