Free Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism by Daisy Hernández, Bushra Rehman

can remember, it was him and us.
    At this point, whatever notion of family had been ingrained in me by my first family back in the Dominican Republic was slowly eroding. I started to understand that family means everyone involved doing their part to push forward, to get over the common hurdles and help each other overcome personal obstacles. Mom had exemplified that virtue for so long that it was easy for me to model it; doing much more than I thought was required of a young girl. At age twelve that meant I bagged groceries at the local supermarket. The couple of dollars I earned each day were lunch and snack money for my sister and me.
    Because of my stepfather’s lack of involvement with the family, socially prescribed roles didn’t fit in my house. The sisters were the mother. The mother was the man. Back then, my mother, sister and I didn’t philosophize about the meaning of our shifting roles. We never called it feminist or felt liberated or patted ourselves on the back for being self-sufficient. Each of us did what had to be done, from babysitting every weekend so Mom could work a double shift to lying about our age to get an after-school job at thirteen. My stepfather held steadfastly to what he understood as his place in our home: he would hand over a portion of his weekly earnings to my mother and spend his free time in church or playing dominoes with friends. He never really opined or questioned what we were doing to make it work, satisfied that he had done enough.
    Little by little his silence painted him invisible.
    We didn’t quite take him for granted. That would have required first recognizing his presence. We simply went about our lives, bumping into him like an old rocking chair left around for its evocative significance. My mother wasn’t much help either. She was so consumed by threading together the delicate coexistence of two families—she, my sister and I, and she, her husband and two new children—that his eventual erasure went unnoticed. At times it seemed she was still making sense of the big-city marriage meant to rescue her from the provincial life her first husband’s death had led to.
    In the beginning, my stepfather accepted his role as breadwinner with the grace and discipline of a mule conditioned to toil the earth. He went to work, went to church and played husband and father with the dignity his rural upbringing and elementary education had endowed. That suited everyone fine until I became a teenager full of ideas and opinions. Why didn’t my stepfather help around the house more? Why did I have to sacrifice my after-school activities to baby-sit his children? Church became his sanctuary, a place to run to when the demands of a full-time family became too great. He joined the choir, became a deacon’s assistant and rose to leader of the circle of prayer. My mother accepted his divine therapy, but I failed to understand why he was allowed to hide in church on weeknights while my mother, sister and I raised his kids.
     
    Soon my questions evolved into confrontations laced with spite and resentment. I started feeling trapped, but luckily college was around the corner. Like a soldier off to basic training, I came back from my first year with more ideas, questions and artillery. Even after just one semester of college I was armed with the arrogance and ignorance of an intellectual ashamed of her beginnings. Why was my family so incapable of getting it together? Why were we not as progressive as the families who dotted my college campus on Family Weekend?
    At this point in my college education I had been around well-off students long enough to envy their carefree attitude toward money and their families. Parents were striving to be friends with their kids, while their children worked hard to portray the idyllic campus setting advertised in college brochures. On the rare occasion of a visit, my family tried hard to imitate that sense of artificial familial and financial bliss. But