The Final Boss of Patriarchy

Is the most obvious and the most impossible to confront.

If you are familiar with my work as an artist and creator of billthepatriarchy.com, you may not know how much my Polish roots made me the feminist I am today.

But this is not going to be a place where I yell about smashing the patriarchy.

It’s the place where you will find out who the little girl was before she started yelling—and maybe a little bit of me trying to coax her back.

To me, it’s facing down the ultimate patriarch, the final boss of patriarchy if you will: my father.

I wasn’t allowed to talk about him when he was alive. There were years I only saw him a handful of times. I couldn't post his picture or even mention his whereabouts.

He was undocumented, wanted by the police, and in hiding.

But now I’m ready to tell the story I wasn’t allowed to tell when he was alive. Which I honestly wasn’t strong enough to tell until now. Because now that he’s gone, the story is all mine.

Allow me to reintroduce myself:

Patricia Maciesz is my full name.

It’s kind of clunky to say all at once—Puh-Trish-uh Motch-esh. I’ve gone by Patti for about thirty years, but lately I’ve been curious about the pre-Patti me.

Reclaiming the name Patricia Maciesz as my own also means redefining my Polish-American identity; sometimes it devolves into a trauma-bomb, other times it’s an entertaining party trick. Na zdrowie! (Cheers!)

Where do I even start?

But since I’ve lived in California, there are long stretches of time it doesn’t come up at all. Until one day I met someone. They had never been to New York and had never met a Polish person before. My mind went blank. It felt like a taunt.

How do I tell the story of ME without the context of my parents leaving communist Poland? Without the story of Greenpoint, Brooklyn? Is it even possible to just start at the California part of my life?

I fumbled something about it being a long story, but truly could not bring myself to put it into words. So I didn’t. I changed the subject. I smiled. But behind my eyes, a realization was forming.

I got home and started to write. A lot. I responded to that feeling of blankness with an essay reaching for meaning and an explanation of what it means to be a Polka and an amerikanka. I followed the initial prompt and turned it into a practice, then a discipline.

That was over ten years ago.

What I’ve found during that time is more complicated than what I had believed about myself for years. The more I wrote, the more wisdom there was to be culled from a life I had flattened into segments best avoided; a “rough childhood” and “crazy teen phase.” I found compassion for my “deadbeat father” and more dimension to my “hardworking single mother”.

I challenged myself to sit down and write the whole story, from beginning to end. To document all the magic and insanity that I saw growing up in the Polish diaspora.

A Story Worth Sharing

Because the hardest part about all of this wasn’t living it or even writing it. It’s this part right here—sharing it. Passing the words from my screen to yours.

I created this newsletter as a space to share this journey with you and a commitment to myself that the story is worth telling.

Every other week I’ll pull back the curtain on how I got from the realization that I had a big story I needed to tell, to a complete memoir manuscript.

Paid subscribers will get:

• an audio version of each post.

• visuals that illuminate each post.

• first publication updates.

• opportunities to join discussions on chat and live.

(following this post images will be behind the paywall)

All subscribers will get:

• A Bi-monthly essay on a major milestone of my journey.

• Book-reports and interviews with the people who inspired me to get here.

• Thought-provoking writing exploring grief, art, creativity, trauma, immigrant identities, the intersection of the personal and the political and more.

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