The inspiration behind Underwater Daughter, A Memoir of Survival and Healing, by Antonia Deignan

The inspiration behind Underwater Daughter, A Memoir of Survival and Healing, by Antonia Deignan:

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“Imagine how much easier it would be for us 

to learn how to love if we began with a 

shared definition.” — bell hooks

 

Imagine. Love inspires everything. 

Like many, I looked for love in the wrong places. I lacked a healthy definition. The template of love I had memorized and relied upon, was born out of a perverse representation of it shown to me by my parents. 

I was sexually objectified as a five-year-old by my father and dismissed and unprotected from him by my mother. This laid the groundwork for my understanding of what I thought love was. My father aroused me. My mother stayed silent. I thought that was normal. My biology, my language, my emotions, my sensory experiences, my perceptions were influenced by the abusive and powerful messages given to me by them. It wreaked havoc on my ability to understand who I was. 

I knew my body had mysterious power. But I also had an unexplainable feeling that this power was dirty and shameful. It was, after all, kept secret. They didn’t talk about it. I didn’t talk about it. The silence was safe. During that time, I began training very seriously in ballet and continued to do so throughout my childhood and adolescence. The act of dancing changed places with the role my voice should have had. If I felt a need to communicate my heart’s sorrows, I did so in a ballet studio.  My soul’s work, my want of love, or being seen, was explored as I learned port de bras, épaulement, tendus, pliés, jetés. I danced in the living room, the basement, my bedroom. This was my language. 

But as I got older, life presented more challenges. There was my inability to utter the word no. There was a growing shame and hate inside me, that became harder to counteract. I said yes to bulimia. I said yes to excessive alcohol. And I said yes to endlessly degrading and abusive sexual acts. I thought of it all as survival.

Then came my twenties. I bought into the idea that what I needed was the quintessentially armored man on a white horse ready to sweep my weaknesses under his cape. 

I was married and divorced, dumb. I was married and divorced, quiet. I thought marriage would heal me. I thought a wedding ring meant I won. But I still had no idea what love looked like. 

I don’t think I am alone in this. I believe a lot of women battle trauma wounds silently. Ashamed, hurt, fearful, women convince themselves, surviving abuse is good enough. 

What I also believe is our definitions of love could have been formed generations ago, by relatives we have never met. Families begetting families, passing down and through to the next of us, words, actions, gestures, assumptions, presumptions, behaviors, unchecked. Fathers and mothers, and the ways they love their children, inherit a template from their ancestors. 

I understand this now.

LOVE.

On Father’s Day, 2018, when I was fifty-five years old, I had a terrible bicycle accident. This event was transformational. In the two years it took me to recover, I revisited, finally, the trauma of my youth and took it apart, memory by memory. As I healed and implored my body to return to movement, I experienced my past traumas differently, with a more loving perspective. I gained strength to begin again. I have written about this many times, how after my accident, I started from scratch, like a complete do over, with gratitude as my guide and rewired the ways in which my mind and body expressed itself to me. Instead of languishing in fear and looking at my past through that fearful lens, I reexamined it with love. 

I produced a definition of love of my own creation. 

Writing my memoir, I changed my story, out loud. On that Father’s Day 2018, perhaps my now transitioned father was signaling me from beyond, stopping me in my tracks and saying, “Imagine us, all of us, beginning again. Imagine us finding an acceptable, empathic, compassionate love, a shared understanding.”

Imagine. Love inspiring everything.

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Antonia Deignan (Tuni) is a mother of five children by choice, a dance by calling, and a writer by necessity. She was born on the east coast, but lived primarily in the Midwest, where she danced with multiple dance companies and raised her children. She opened her own dance studio and directed a pre-professional dance company before a bike accident wish-boned her path, and her identity. She has multiple publications in magazine and online formats. Her memoir, Underwater Daughter will be published May 02, 2023, with She Writes Press.

UNDERWATER DAUGHTER

Tuni’s father began sexually abusing her when she was just four years old. Her mother, though aware of the abuse, was a silent witness—one either incapable or unwilling to intervene—and the abuse continued until Tuni was eleven. Three years later, when Tuni was fourteen, she was raped by an adult actor who was part of her cast in a professional theater production. These traumas would go on to shape much of her life.

Underwater Daughter follows how Tuni grappled with her relationship with her parents, the aftermath of her rape, an eating disorder, drug and alcohol excesses, and shame as she came of age and began to build a life. In order to not lose her inner innocence, in order to protect herself, in order to believe in love, she began early on to create imaginary worlds into which she could escape—to use dreams to transport her away from her fears. By early adulthood, she was well practiced at slapping lipstick (pink, frosty, kiss-me, gloss-over, perfect lipstick) over whatever darkness might be bubbling beneath.

Hired by a dance company right out of high school, she found success as a dancer in Chicago and New York, but in her personal and emotional life, she continued to struggle. Ultimately, it took her decades of dancing, hiding, faking, fucking, costuming, implanting, dissociating, marrying, divorcing, and purging—all while staying silent about her past trauma—before a bike accident at age fifty-five forced her to stop and truly take stock of her life. As she did, she came to a resting place, finally, in regard to her father; developed the loving relationship she’d always wanted with her mother; and came to understand that, in the end, love is all anyone wants—or needs.

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Category: On Writing