✨ The Man They Told Me to Fear

(Memoir Teaser from Raised by Ghosts and Angels)

By Jill Smith | Mainely Mystics

The Man They Told Me to Fear

When I was a child, they told me to be afraid of my father.

They whispered warnings.

They painted him as unpredictable, unstable, someone to avoid.

And as a little girl, hearing adults speak with such hushed certainty,

I believed them.

But they were wrong.

My father — a man born with cerebral palsy, with an uneven gait, impaired hearing, and speech the world rarely had patience for — was the first person who ever loved me without condition or confusion.

The day I was born, he always said, was the happiest day of his life.

“I became a Daaaadddy that day,” he’d tell me with a sparkling smile and in his thick, determined voice — the voice I eventually learned to understand without effort.

He didn’t say it softly.

He said it like a man claiming a miracle.

Growing up, I was scared of him at first — not because of who he was, but because of how others framed him. The Hicks family misunderstood him, misrepresented him, and mistreated him. My father was different, and in their world, difference was something to fear.

But he showed up.

Every first of the month, without fail, he took me out.

Weather didn’t matter.

Money didn’t matter.

Nothing stopped him.

A Taurus Sun — loyal, stubborn, steadfast — he fought most of my childhood to get me back, even when the world underestimated him.

By the time I was ten, something shifted.

I stopped seeing him through the eyes of those who didn’t understand him…

and I started seeing him through my own.

His speech wasn’t confusing to me anymore.

His walk didn’t scare me.

I heard his soul long before I heard his words.

And we became anchors in each other’s journeys.

Later in life — when I interviewed him for a college project —

I asked him: “What was the happiest moment of your life?”

He didn’t hesitate.

“The day you were born.”

Even when I faltered as an adult, full of my own shame and shadows, he remained proud. Proud of me as a mother. Proud of me as a survivor. Proud of me as his daughter.

He wasn’t perfect.

He got angry.

He judged me sometimes.

He wrestled with his own wounds, his own loneliness, his own battles.

But he loved me in the way he knew how —

with presence, loyalty, and effort.

And I loved him in mine —

with empathy, understanding, and the ability to see his soul beyond the body the world misunderstood.

He was not the man they told me to fear.

He was the man I trusted.

My constant in an unstable world.

My teacher.

My mirror.

My friend.

This is a chapter from my memoir, Raised by Ghosts and Angels,

the story of healing a lineage of silence, trauma, resilience, and soul-level love.

Sometimes the people the world fears the most

are the ones who carry the purest hearts.