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I grew up an only girl with five brothers in a neighborhood full of boys. One of my brothers grew up to be the town bully. Because of this, mothers of girls my age would not allow their daughters to come over to my house to play. I could not afford to appear weak in the presence of all those boys. So I played and talked as rough as they did. Swearing was a tool I could use to blend in and protect myself. 

People thought I learned to talk like a sailor from my brothers. No, they were amateurs. Working on cars with my dad taught me the art of eloquent cussing. Working on cars was a byproduct of wanting to be with my father, whom I adored. He was a rural Nebraska doctor in a county of only 3000 people who had worked at a TV/radio station repairing equipment through medical school. He understood how so many things worked. TVs, radios, cars, and human bodies are all the same to him.

If my dad was working on a car on his rare days off, I would patiently wait for a time when my older brothers were not around. Both of my parents were strict adherents to conservative, biblical gender roles, so if my brothers were present, I was sent out of the garage. I had to be subversive.

There was a stairway in the back under which the trash containers were stored. It was a stinky spot, but from there, I could hear and see everything going on while staying out of the way, usually pretending to read a book. My dad was a talk-out-loud-er. When life was going smoothly, he would whistle or sing to himself. When the going got rough, so did the words. One of his favorites was a spicy lament about not having a paddle at a particular creek.

That was my opening, my cue: “How is it supposed to work, Daddy?”

My father could not resist a teaching moment, and my distraction gave his blood pressure a reprieve from that f ‘in part. It always worked. Without my brothers or mother to remind him I didn’t belong there, he would quickly get lost in rhythmic prose explaining how combustion engines and their supporting appendages worked.

At first, I would just listen and fetch things. Eventually, he let me use tools. He came to realize that I not only understood what he was doing, but that unlike my brothers, I enjoyed the whole process.

Earning his approval was very important, so I asked lots of questions and paid careful attention. I had patience with tedious tasks that my brothers did not. Carefully packing wheel bearings earned Dad’s coveted approval; however, Mother only scowled when she saw his pride and my greasy black fingernails. That was not ladylike. Neither was the swearing, but Dad preached the garage was a place for men and told me if I was going to be there, I’d better not be offended by some foul words or ideas. I wasn’t, and I took everything in, including the microaggression.

My favorite gift from him was a rusty old toolbox he filled with his odd cast-offs. The most valuable item in that collection was an 18-inch-long piece of steel pipe. When Dad taught me how to change a tire, he realized I wasn’t strong enough to loosen the lug nuts. So he made a “breaker bar” for me. The pipe slid over the handle of the wrench on the lug nut, and if I jumped with both feet, putting all my weight on the breaker, I could loosen the nuts and get the wheel off by myself. It was an empowering epiphany: With the right tool, I felt like I could do anything.

Now, I will tell you what else ended up in my toolbox. When my father talked either to me directly or someone else about my mechanical achievements, it always ended, “She does it so well for a girl.” He would have to assure people that I actually knew what I was doing because no grown man believed a teen girl could do those things. My parents wanted me to learn how to fly, but saddled me with the burden of having to work extra hard and not make any mistakes because the only way women could compete and succeed was to be exemplary and not just qualified. My parents both dished out heaps of generational, patriarchal microaggressions, like all compliments being followed with “for a girl.” The confidence my skills gave me was diluted somewhat by the self-doubt that hearing repeated misogynist dogma instills in very young women.

Growing up, I had to exist in a liminal space. Even at a young age, my values were different from those of the rest of my family. There was the confusion of seemingly being protected, and at the same time, being controlled and censored. Thankfully, my father showed me parental love. He listened genuinely, and we had deep conversations. He was the only person in my household I trusted. Our community adored him. He gave so much of himself he was hospitalized for exhaustion during a year when he was the only doctor in the county. He didn’t go after poorer people for not paying their medical bills. I could see the pain in his face when he talked about his patients’ suffering. 

He was a very good human in so many regards. But human nonetheless. He was also a racist and queerphobic. My best friend, Tony, was deeply closeted and bullied for his effeminate self. My father, like other adults in our town, addressed him not by his name but with an ugly slur. Tony expected to be verbally and sometimes physically struck on any given day, and we had that in common. I had to live with some of the mean bullies, my brothers, who regularly berated and beat him and who also regularly berated and beat me.

The ugly things my father thought and said remain in one corner of my toolbox, bound securely with a ratchet strap. They remind me that my authentic self will survive, even if it takes a hit or two. They remind me that I have a choice in what place they have in my life.

It turns out that I am resilient because of those unintended deposits into my toolbox. Dad and I stayed close until he passed in 2013. He was not pleased that I turned out liberal, and I used to get frustrated with his ideology as well. He came to acknowledge that he should temper his racist speech in public because society had shifted its practices, not because he was embracing interracial harmony. In terms of gender identity and sexual preference, he would not even curb his speech.

I think I am able to love and have empathy because of my flawed relationship with my imperfect father. His explanations of why others were less than white Europeans did not change how I felt. My arguments for why we are all alike did not change his opinion. We did not get angry or demand the other change their point of view. I was able to forgive him, and I came to understand grace in our relationship, that I could forgive his unforgivable behaviors and uplift only the love and the tremendous amount of good he did. His memory is a comfort and a blessing.

When I think of the scary things going on right now, I feel like I am back at home in that liminal space. Like in my childhood, I am feeling public distrust and a lack of safety. More than half of our country made a choice that I cannot fathom. That means that half of my neighbors, half of the people I see every day support policies that include attempts at erasing human rights, specifically mine and my family’s rights, to exist as we choose, as we are. But I have some tools and some skills.

I believe, I need to believe, that there are more people that have more love than hate in them.

Microaggressions are words or actions that are short, indirect, subtle and sometimes unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group. They demean and insult. They affect our society and eventually influence culture because their indirect and covert messaging can be accepted as they are casually and repeatedly woven into our everyday. Like my father trying to compliment me, but instead, I heard, “Oh, girls aren’t capable of doing anything.”

What if, as we are minding our vulnerabilities in our community, we look for micro-connections? I think micro-connections may be more potent than microaggressions.

Now we already know how to make and practice making and maintaining connections… it’s kinda our thing. I am proposing that we lift the intention of connection to a higher level.

What I mean is an action, word, or phrase that makes just the person you are interacting with smile or at least pause from what they are doing to make eye contact. A micro-connection can also be an authentic compliment. The point isn’t to find out who they voted for or what they believe. It is simply to walk away thinking, in this moment, “That was nice. At this moment, I like you. Even if it sounds overly simplistic, the small kindness you just exchanged gives love more face time than hate.”

I think that repeated kindness and love in the smallest doses can rob hate and aggression of the oxygen they need in our community. That is a very small victory, but small personal victories are how I built my resilience and changed my world. 

I am thinking about my father a lot these days. He would have voted Republican in this election. He would have struggled with my non-binary family. I also believe he would have found a way to continue our loving relationship.

It is sad that I had to think about my personal safety as a child because I was a girl. It is even more discouraging that 60 years later, I have to worry about my own and my family’s safety because of who we are. I was devastated on November 6 last year. It was a sucker punch as personally painful as the batterings I endured. But I am not a child anymore. I have a voice, a choice, and a will. It is my hope that as the incoming administration challenges our human rights, we will find our breaker bar, and all of our weight together will be enough to loosen the nuts.

Love is my breaker bar now, just as the steel pipe leveraged my strength so I could accomplish what I could not on my own. When we all land on love together, when we are together with love at the center, our strength is amplified.

Remember those ugly words and phrases in my toolbox? They will always be there because it really happened. It was my reality. I tried for most of my life to ignore, bury, and eradicate the trauma of childhood in a precarious environment. I did not find peace until I allowed the aggressions to have their silent resting space in my life. I could not have had the love of my father if I hadn’t given his offensive behaviors over to Grace; a grace that—to be honest—I don’t fully understand.

I keep them in my toolbox, and the fact that they live side by side with my greatest strengths robs them of any power. I chose to focus on love with my father because that is what I needed from him. I saw the gap, but I ventured in because there was love.

As I am negotiating the liminal space we are in now, I need to believe that there are more people who have more love than hate in them. We will work hard; we will live our values in our community.

And when we combine the collective power of all of our micro-connections and use love as our breaker bar, we will be enough. We can endure and resist attempts to eradicate our human rights together by using all of our tools, especially those that amplify our strength. Amen.

The Toolbox ©2025 by Kathleen Hall is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. 

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