Syed Muhammad Hur Jaffri — The Open Manuscript

Eight — What Water Does to Stone

The damage that a father does to a son is not usually dramatic. It is rarely the single, large, nameable event that the story prefers, the event that can be pointed to and dated and placed precisely in the narrative as the moment everything changed. The damage is usually smaller than that, and more consistent, and for this reason harder to discuss and harder to prove and harder to heal, because to heal it you must first be able to say what it was, and what it was is: nothing, specifically. Nothing, repeatedly.

Water does not destroy stone in a single moment. Water destroys stone by being present, consistently, in the same place, over time. The stone does not notice the water in any particular moment. The stone is stone; it has no mechanism for noticing. But the water keeps coming. The water is always coming. And one day the stone has a channel in it that was not there before, and the channel is the shape of the water's patience.

The channel in me is shaped like my father's consistency.

I am describing this not as accusation. Accusation implies a jury, implies a verdict, implies that the damage was intentional and malicious and chosen. I do not believe it was any of these things. I believe it was unconscious, which is both more forgivable and, in a particular way, more terrible — because unconscious damage cannot be argued with. You cannot confront a man about what he did not know he was doing. You cannot ask him to stop doing what he has no awareness of having started. You cannot negotiate with a river about the shape it makes in stone.

You can only live in the shape.

Which is what I did, and what I do. The channel is mine now. It is the channel in which certain things run and do not run, certain things collect and do not collect, certain things are possible and certain things require more effort than they should. It is mine. He made it, but it is mine.

The owning of it is the only available next step.

I am trying to describe, as precisely as I can, the specific texture of growing up in a house where approval exists theoretically but is administered sparingly and conditionally and always with the counterweight. What it produces in a person is not bitterness, initially. Initially it produces effort. The child who is not yet cynical believes that the approval is real and is available and that the path to it is simply more — more achievement, more correctness, more of whatever thing the father most recently seemed to want.

So the child produces more. The child works harder, achieves more carefully, calibrates behavior with increasing precision toward the imagined set of conditions that, when met, will trigger the approval. The child becomes very good at this. In the process, the child becomes very good at other things too — at school, at performance, at the management of external systems — because the effort put into the pursuit of approval produces genuine capability as a side effect.

This is the dark mercy of the arrangement: it works. Partially. The effort produces the capability and the capability produces results and some of the results are things the father acknowledges, briefly, before deploying the counterweight. And the brief acknowledgment is enough — just enough, calibrated with unerring precision to be just enough and no more — to keep the child trying. The acknowledgment is the bait. The counterweight is the trap. The trap and the bait are the same thing.

The child does not see this for years. By the time the child sees it, the trap has shaped the child's basic relationship with achievement, with approval, with the question of whether anything he does is ever enough — and these shapes are not easy to unlearn, because they were learned during the years when the self was being built rather than revised, and revision is always harder than construction.

I am still in revision. The construction was thorough.