“All throughout my childhood, there was a deep disjointedness inside me, something permanently bruised and always faintly aching, but it had been there so long I understood it as a native part of me ... I assumed that was all there was”
I did plenty of things I knew I shouldn’t have done in that red-brick colonial in suburban Georgia: smeared grime from the unfinished half of the basement on the walls of the finished half; spilled ruby red sweet-and-sour sauce on the pearly carpet. During a sleepover, a friend even knocked a hole in the sheetrock as we rode sleeping bags down the basement stairs like sleds.
Still, I was desperately afraid of what would happen if I finally transgressed too much — whatever that might mean, and whatever it would entail. The consequences were always nebulous. Maybe my father would leave us, and we would be poor. Maybe they would send me away somewhere, disown me.
All throughout my childhood, there was a deep disjointedness inside me, something permanently bruised and always faintly aching, but it had been there so long I understood it as a native part of me. I was just melancholy, I thought, when I did think about it. Usually, I was just getting by. I assumed that was all there was.
In my teenage years, I began to wonder if the echoing darkness his parents had instilled in him had been passed on to me. I suspected it had been. I hated the features we shared — the black, round eyes, the snub nose, the diminutive chin. Maybe I had always felt strange and lonely because I was like him: fundamentally unlikable. Maybe I found it hard to trust because I myself was devious, unworthy of trust. Maybe I would never feel any other way.
One night during this marathon struggle, my mother called me in tears to tell me that certain things were going to come out during the divorce that she wanted me to hear from her first. My father would say she was a whore, she warned. He would say she had group sex with strange men, so she wouldn’t get anything in the split.
My husband never asked me why I still had anything to do with my family. But I knew he wondered, and I know that you must wonder. So do I. But I had reasons to believe they wouldn’t. That abusive parents often target a particular child to the exclusion of siblings and grandchildren is a well-known, if little understood, phenomenon. My father had occasionally beaten my brother growing up — once standing over him and lashing him with a belt each time he made a mistake reciting multiplication tables — but never with the zeal and malice he reserved for me.
My train arrived after dark, on a cool evening. Jen and her husband pulled up outside the station in a dark SUV, and helped me put my luggage in the back. We chatted idly on the ride home, about shows we liked and social media. We ate in their kitchen, a vibrant, airy nook in their beautiful house, with its hardwood floors and walls full of framed artwork, some by professionals, some by their children.
Pain is didactic; it imparts knowledge. Abused children learn that the people who ought to love them unconditionally do not, and from that they deduce that they themselves are unlovable. But the fact of being unlovable never abrogates the need for love. Some abused kids look for it everywhere, some give up looking for it altogether, and some do both at once, desperately seeking love while convinced they can’t receive it.
There was nothing to do but see where it went. I liked chatting with Alan. He was in his mid-40s, with a good career and a curious, searching mind. He was witty and weird and self-effacing; he liked pulpy movies from the 1980s as well as high-minded nonfiction. We considered Martha Nussbaum and Mary Karr, mulled over Inside Llewyn Davis, mused about the news, and shared congruent politics.Once, I worried aloud I might be becoming a mommy blogger. “Good God!” Alan wrote instantly.
A message over 1,000 words long followed. “In 1999, I was going to kill myself by a combination of drugs that I had compiled and hanging,” Alan said. “I was living in Los Angeles and suffering from crippling anxiety, depression, and OCD. I was excusing myself from work to go weep uncontrollably in the bathroom. I couldn’t sleep for doing push-ups for hours and was adding an hour to my commute to park and re-park my car to get it positioned correctly between the lines in the garage.
That fall, I had an important business meeting in New York City. Alan rode up with me, strolled around the town while I conducted my interview, and then met up with me afterward. My husband, Jen, and their daughter arrived later in the evening, and we all convened for dinner. That was where Thanksgiving came up.
When we returned after the holiday, my father called me. That was rare; he ordinarily only called in the case of familial deaths. He was furious.Nobody was sleeping with anybody, I explained. I just thought it would be fun to spend Thanksgiving together. In February, we went on vacation with Alan, Jen, and their kids, each of whom brought friends along. Each morning, we all convened at the hotel’s breakfast buffet, brought our plates of crêpes and eggs and salmon and toast and fruit and yogurt to the table, talked about our plans for the day. I was pregnant again, so while the kids went skiing, Jen and I went to the spa, sat with Alan and my husband in the lodge’s cafe, or trekked through the snow to a neighboring town to shop and sightsee.
Most grandparents are indulgent, but my parents became excessively so. They refused my daughter nothing, even when it meant endangering her. When she complained about sitting in her carseat, my father would direct my mother, who was usually fumbling to secure the buckles and calm the toddler, to undo the fastenings and let her sit unsecured in the car.
Alan and Jen came to town last summer, when my second daughter was due. They sat with me and my husband in the delivery room, waited anxiously in the hallway as the anesthesiologist slipped the thin tube flush with fentanyl into the recesses of my spine. They held my newborn as soon as she was dried and dressed, and ferried drinks and snacks to my bedside. I watched Jen cradling her in the afternoon half-light, with her blonde hair glowing like a halo, her face beatific.
Jen took me outfit-shopping for a particularly big interview last fall, and lent me a blazer of hers. She hugged me as I headed up the Penn Station escalator to 34th.My parents can see all this happening; they know what I’m preparing to do, and they hate it. The final gift of good parents is an adult child’s preparation to live without them.
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