My father told me to take cold showers, always saying, “You smell horrible, go take a cold shower and use the soap I gave you.” And I did like five times a day — it was driving me mad. My mom stayed silent, which was strange since we were usually close.

One day, my boyfriend came over, and I asked, “Do I smell bad?”

He laughed, thinking I was joking, and headed to the bathroom. A moment later, he came back with a PALE look on his face, holding the soap I used to shower.

“Who gave you this?! Are you taking cold showers with this?!?”

My blood froze. “Yeah, why?!”

He started crying. “They didn’t tell you, did they?! Baby, this isn’t soap! It’s used to…”

“…scrub dead bodies. In morgues. It’s embalming prep soap. What the hell, Leila? Who gave this to you?”

My knees buckled, and I sat right on the cold tile floor. “My dad.” I whispered it like a secret I was afraid would bite back.

My boyfriend, Ansel, looked genuinely sick. He sat beside me, trying to breathe. “This isn’t just wrong—it’s disturbing. Why would your dad give you this? Do you know what’s in it? That stuff is used on corpses to disinfect before autopsies.”

And that’s when it hit me.

The smell.

That weird sterile, chemical scent that never went away no matter how much I scrubbed. It had this biting sharpness to it—clean but not in a good way. I thought it was just a strong antiseptic smell. I thought I was overthinking.

Apparently not.

I ran into the kitchen, my wet feet squeaking against the floor, and yanked open the cabinet where my dad kept the backup bars. There were four more of the same kind, wrapped tightly in wax paper. No label. No ingredients. Just plain wax paper with a small black stamp on the edge—“A12.”

“What even is that?” I asked, holding it out.

Ansel shook his head. “I don’t know. But it’s industrial. Medical, probably.”

I called my dad. He didn’t pick up. Called again. Straight to voicemail.

We sat in silence for a few minutes. Ansel eventually said, “You need to ask your mom. Now.”

She was in the garden, pulling weeds like she hadn’t just been part of a crime.

“Mom,” I started, trying not to yell. “Why is Dad giving me embalming soap to shower with?”

She paused, still crouched over a flower bed, then slowly stood and wiped her hands on her apron.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t find out like this.”

“That’s not an answer!” I shouted. “You let me scrub myself with this stuff! Cold showers! Five times a day! Do you know how messed up that is?”

Her face twisted in something between shame and grief.

“I didn’t know at first,” she said quietly. “But when I realized what it was, your father told me it was to ‘purify your body.’ That you had to cleanse something dark in you. I thought he was being spiritual. I didn’t know it was that kind of soap.”

Ansel stepped up beside me. “Why did he think she had something dark in her?”

My mom finally sat down on the garden bench, like the weight of it all had finally landed.

“After Grandma died,” she said, “your dad got weird. More religious, but not like church. Like… these obscure websites. He’d read them for hours. Started saying things about ‘unclean energy’ and ‘purification rituals.’ He told me you’d been infected by something — sin, maybe, I don’t even know — because you started dating Ansel. Because you weren’t listening to him as much.”

I felt my stomach drop.

“So this is because I have a boyfriend?”

“He thinks the world’s corrupted. That modern girls are… impure.”

“Mom. I was seventeen.”

“I know.” She looked away. “I should’ve stopped him.”

I couldn’t sleep that night. The soap, the cold water, the weird shame I couldn’t explain—it all started making sense. Every time I thought I was just being dramatic, just a moody teen, it was because I was literally being manipulated into feeling dirty.

And for what? For being normal?

The next morning, I walked into my dad’s home office. It smelled like must and printer ink. His bookshelf was lined with titles like Rebirth Through Discipline and Sacred Cleanliness: A Guide to Modern Purity.

I found a locked drawer. And in that drawer, after using a bobby pin like I’d seen in movies, I found papers. Receipts for bulk medical supplies, including “Disinfectant Pre-Autopsy Soap – Grade A12.”

There was also a journal.

And in that journal, things went from disturbing to straight-up delusional.

He wrote about how society was “infecting his daughter” and how “the body must be trained to resist comfort.” Pages and pages of this stuff. Cold showers. Minimal food. “Isolation to encourage reflection.”

It read like a cult manual. But I was the only member.

I moved out two days later. Ansel helped me pack. My mom didn’t try to stop me. She just cried as she handed me an envelope with some cash and a note that said, You didn’t deserve any of this. I’m sorry.

We got a small place on the edge of town. Nothing fancy—just a one-bedroom with a rusty balcony and a view of the gas station across the street. But for the first time in years, I felt like I could breathe.

The first shower I took there was warm. I cried the whole time.

But healing wasn’t linear. I kept second-guessing myself. Was I overreacting? Was it really that bad?

Until I got a call from my dad’s sister, Aunt Shira. She asked if I was okay. I asked how she even knew.

Turns out, my dad had started posting rants on obscure forums, and someone flagged them. She said the stuff he was writing had gone full-blown unhinged. Conspiracies. Rants about daughters and temptation. People online thought he was mentally unwell.

I wasn’t the only one seeing it anymore.

Months passed. Then one morning, my mom showed up at my doorstep with a suitcase.

She’d left him.

“He started taking cold showers himself,” she said. “Said it was the only way to keep his mind pure. Then he threw out all the regular food in the house. Only ate dry bread and boiled eggs. I couldn’t live like that anymore.”

We let her stay in the second bedroom Ansel and I had turned into a half-storage-half-office mess. She didn’t mind. She slept like someone who hadn’t slept in years.

It took weeks before she opened up more. She told me she met my dad when she was nineteen, when he was already thirty. She said he was charming, intense, persuasive. He isolated her slowly. She hadn’t even realized it until I started going through the same thing.

She said watching me suffer had jolted her awake—but she didn’t have the courage to leave until now.

Then, a twist none of us expected.

A letter arrived. Not from my dad, but from a lawyer. Apparently, my grandfather—my dad’s estranged father—had died and left behind a decent inheritance. But here’s the catch: it was split between my dad and me.

Fifty-fifty.

The lawyer asked if I wanted to waive my share in favor of my father. I didn’t even hesitate. “Absolutely not.”

When word got back to my dad, he tried to contact me for the first time in months. Voicemail after voicemail. Long, rambling apologies wrapped in spiritual language. “I see the error in my ways, Leila. You’re my daughter. I was trying to protect you from the darkness in the world. I only wanted to keep you safe.”

But not once did he say, I’m sorry. Not once did he admit he was wrong.

So I kept the inheritance. Used it to help Mom get a decent apartment nearby. Paid off some of Ansel’s student loans. Took a class in psychology, just to understand how control and manipulation work.

Funny enough, the class made me realize something deeper. My dad didn’t hate me. He feared me. Or more precisely, he feared losing control over me.

When I started growing up, when I started thinking for myself, dating, asking questions—he panicked. His fear turned into obsession, and he wrapped it in spiritual language to justify it.

But abuse doesn’t become love just because someone claims they meant well.

A year later, I’m in a better place.

Ansel and I still share that small place, but we’ve repainted it. Bright colors. Plants on every windowsill. The bathroom smells like lavender now.

I still take cold showers sometimes—not because someone told me to, but because I choose to. That small detail matters more than I can explain.

My mom has joined a women’s group. She’s smiling again. She wears colors now. For years she only wore beige and navy. Now it’s reds and greens and bright purples.

As for my dad, he’s apparently moved to a remote town and started teaching “purity seminars.” I wish I could say that part ended differently, but some people never change.

The twist? My mom inherited something else: my grandmother’s old journals. And in them, she found entries from her childhood.

Cold showers. Special soap. Rules. Shame.

Turns out, the cycle had started long before me.

My dad didn’t invent the madness—he inherited it.

But I stopped it.

That’s the legacy I’ll leave behind.

If you’re reading this and it hit close to home, I just want to say this: you are not crazy. When something feels off, it probably is. And when someone tells you that your instincts are wrong, question why they need you to ignore yourself.

We are allowed to outgrow the people who raised us. We are allowed to protect our peace, even if it makes others uncomfortable.

And we are allowed to write new stories for ourselves, starting right now.

Share this if it moved you. Someone out there might need to read it today. 💬❤️