Free In My Skin by Brittney Griner Page B

never really seemed like home, feeling like he had no freedom. He enlisted in the Marines and served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969. The way he explained it to me, he wanted to prove he could make it on his own, show his aunt and uncle he could take care of himself. And I always said to him, “You wanted freedom, but you went to the Marines! Of all the places you could go, and that’s what you chose?” But he thought it proved how tough he was. He told me stories about wading through the swamps, covered in leeches, walking through the jungle and seeing people get blown up, watching his buddies fall into pits full of bamboo spikes. He even told me about the scar he got near his right eye, from a piece of flying shrapnel. He didn’t really talk about that stuff with Mom or my siblings, but I asked him a lot of questions, everything I could think of, and he was good about answering me, telling me what he could remember, sharing more stories as I got older, about the more violent and gruesome things he saw. He also had a trunk with a lot of stuff in it, photos and letters. He let me go through it and read the notes he wrote to his sister, telling her how much he wanted to come home.
    SOMETIMES, WHEN I THINK about how my dad rejected me for being gay, I try to remember he grew up at a different time, that he was raised by an older generation with old-fashioned thinking. But then I think about how close we used to be, and I can’t help feeling sad, crushed, and frustrated that our relationship is so superficial now. When I was little, I wanted nothing more than to make my dad happy. We were best friends. He put me on a pedestal and made me feel like I was the golden child. I would hear him bragging about me to my mom, to my siblings, to neighbors and friends. And I loved it. I wanted to keep being his go-to baby girl, the one who made him proud because I could change the oil and find the exact tool he wanted. He and Mom would occasionally argue about how much I was doing in the garage and in the yard, hard chores, all his different projects. She didn’t want me sliding underneath the car to see the inner workings of it, because she worried about a freak accident. Dad would say to her, “She can do what she wants. It’s good she’s learning this stuff. She’s a little tomboy, is all, and she’s helping me out.” I loved hearing him defend me like that, like we were on the same team.
    Things started changing between us when I was in the seventh and eighth grades. That’s when we began drifting apart. Actually, it wasn’t drifting so much as actively disagreeing about anything and everything. I was becoming my own person, and I think he liked it better when I was his little girl, absorbing every word he said like it was gospel. I was thinking for myself more, playing soccer and volleyball and trying to make friends, challenging his paranoid assumptions about everyone. There was a bit of a cold war going on between us, but I knew our relationship would become red hot if he discovered the truth about my sexuality. I knew if he found out, the walls would come crashing down around me. My dad has always had a very narrow view of the world, perceiving anything “different” as a threat. He saw bad things every day as a police officer, and his response was to keep me close, right there in the front yard. He wanted to keep me safe, and I knew he wouldn’t see being gay as a safe path to travel.
    When I told my mother I was gay, we both knew, without having a long discussion about it, that telling my father was out of the question. My mom didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell him. Whenever I even thought about what might happen if he found out—well, let’s just say I quickly pushed that thought out of my mind.
    There was no road map for how to handle my dad if he discovered my secret. All bets were off. And I think I started to believe the day would never come. I made