ebruary 27, 2022
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Empty Handed at the Table
When it comes to the rose, if I can just hold onto memory of the velvet of the petals, the way it perfumes the air, the firework of color as it blooms—will it ever override the pain from its thorns embedded in the fleshy pad of my thumb?
Sometimes the bouquet is beautiful, but it hurts too much to hold.
If I remember the violets and daffodils and bleeding hearts growing with abandon in the lush yard of my childhood home, will it help me forget the rest? If I zoom in with my mind’s lens to focus only on the Black Eyed Susans and the bird’s foot trefoil growing heartily in the ditches alongside the road, will it help me forget how they turned their fragile necks to watch him stalk me? Witnesses to his slow creep, his dread-inducing crawl…the buds open in a silent scream as he started up his car to follow slowly behind me as I rode my horse…just following behind me, as close as he was able to get to me at this point. His days of wallpapering my skin with his fingerprints and the glue of his spit were over with at this point. The bleeding hearts bushing out, thriving in a yard where we could not. If I remember the mock orange bush—will I replay just the plucking the tiny, fragrant white flowers from it to wear behind our ears? How do I forget everything else that happened by that bush & just remember my sisters & I as brides and princesses and fairies? How can I selectively forget that it was by this very same mock orange bush that he poured manure into our well? Prior to his sabotage, our well water was pure and just slightly sweet with the minerals of our land. If I allow myself to think hard enough about it, I can still remember the taste of it, guzzled from cheap plastic cups—but that one memory always opens me up to the rest of them. How do I rid my brain of him poisoning our fucking drinking water when the fallout was long-lasting? My childhood was full of copper-bottomed pots on the stove, boiling water just so we had something to drink. Everything smelling of shit inside our house. Showering under streams of water, reeking of cow shit…afraid it would take hold in my hair and skin, like it had to my uncle, afraid people would be able to smell my secrets on me. Is there a way to forget that he took away something as simple as drinking from the faucet after running around with siblings in your yard?
Of course, there was none of that either.
It was hard for me to play in a yard that looked out on his trailer…the place where he and his friend hurt me, just about 30 feet from the house. He made it impossible for me to be out there-always laughing and tormenting me. His friend, who would jerk off to my uncle assaulting me and sometimes hurt me with designs of his own, would throw money at me as he drove out the driveway, laughing. Payment for usage. As I spun in dizzying circles on the swing set, pennies and quarters thrown from his window would land at my feet, feeling no different than stones from an angry biblical mob. How do I erase that and remember just the swing set? I want to twice fighting with my older sister over who could swing higher, pumping our legs like pistons till the base of the swing set thumped up out of the ground. Little astronauts about to launch. I want to keep that memory without the painful punch of it. Just like how I want to remember the taste of a pack of Yikes Fruit Stripes and forget the way I earned the money to pay for it. The wrappers used to have temporary tattoos on them back then—I would cover bruises and scrapes all over my body with zebra cartoon characters in neon colors and backwards baseball caps.
I think about the land we owned. Full of life. 150 acres. Fields & woods. Timothy that swayed in the breeze, rippling gold….with flecks of purple alfalfa, chicory…Morning glories wound round the brush, flirting with the sun…winking closed at her when she got too high in the sky. When I was 10, my mom bought me this peacock blue Royal typewriter from Jervis Public Library book sale. It weighed a ton and was hard to find ribbons for, but I would lug it out into the field, sit on a rock and write and write and write. It’s anecdotal fodder, one of those things I tell others that points to who I would become later in life. The little writer, the eccentric. As an adult, I don’t want to sully the story…that I was out in the field to avoid abuse from my mother. I was out there to hide from my uncle, who by this point no longer physically touched me but found other ways to torture me…stood outside my window watching me undress, shooting at me as I waited for the bus, breaking into our house, having his friends harass and threaten us out in public. I was out in the field because we were so isolated. There were no friends. We were not allowed to have friends over because of the situation with my uncle living out back. We were not allowed to go to their houses, because my mother feared the stories we might tell. I sat out in the fields on beautiful spring days before the grass was leveled by sharp-bladed machinery to make hay…but I sat there because there was nowhere else. There was a field with a large rock to sit on, in the middle of a clump of flowering trees. And that is where the odd little girl had to go.
I’ve tried. I have tried for years to reframe, engage in creative storytelling. And because of this, while I have had friends that have loved me, most have never really truly known me—only the version of me that is presented. I don’t always know how to contribute to conversations, even what would be happy topics of conversation for others–such as vacations or holidays–leave me empty handed at the table. Only, not quite empty handed—left with stories tucked in my fists that I can never open and reveal… I don’t want to be a cave-dweller, a conversational tower of terror, headed downwards at high rates of speed…but my life has been calibrated to survival and bon vivant is not a setting on this human machine. Because my head is congested with ghosts that all look the same under their sheets, I have let alcohol and my brain erase most of the years before college. Leave it all behind–good and bad. It’s just easier that way.
However, now my children have started to ask questions. They want to know what their mother was like as a younger person…what I liked, what my life was like. They want to hold up the dark, mysterious bits of me to themselves to make connection–like Peter Pan trying to attach his shadow to his shoe. They want to know about my 3 siblings that they don’t know because of my choice not to have a relationship with them. Perhaps the more challenging thing is that they want to know what my mother was like as a mother…because they adore her as a grandmother.
I don’t know what to tell them.
I remember so little of my childhood by now…What I do remember of my father is his absence and what I remember of my mother is her violence. Both of their unlovingness.
But I cannot tell my daughter that her beloved Mimi once whipped me so badly when I was playing on the floor of my bedroom, that I fell forward and bashed my head into the hardwood floor and then just curled into fetal position, and waited for her to tire herself out beating on me…because I saw I had no ability to fight back and I didn’t want to give her the power of knowing she hurt me, all I could do was lay there and laugh at her as the blows landed…enraging her worse, fueling her. I cannot look in my daughter’s eyes and tell her how I slept on that fucking hardwood floor for years, while all the other kids had beds. I cannot tell her that my bed broke & her favorite person thought that I wasn’t worth buying another bed for. At night, I would lay and put my ear up to the speaker of my cd player, as my hip bone ached from the pressure of unyielding wood beneath it…just willing myself to fall asleep and get the night over with.
I can’t find the words to tell my children that their grandmother’s cruelty in treating me less than the others wasn’t a one-off with the bed. It was the norm.
My family did things to me that I would never dream of doing to my own children. As I got older, they would take trips and not just exclude me, not even tell me. I would come home from school or work to find everyone gone…toothbrushes missing, contact lens solution gone, hairbrushes no longer in the bathroom drawer …all the telltale signs of travel. I would have liked to have gone to some of the places they went, but I was not invited. I don’t mention how there was that year my mom would only allow me to go to work and school. I was not allowed to go anywhere for fun & was made to stay home, while she took my siblings to the mall or library or parks. She made me work multiple jobs while going to school, only for me to find out that they were taking funds out of my account to pay for my sister’s braces, my other sister’s private college. When I found out, at 16 years old, I was being used as a cash cow, I told her that I wanted to cut back to only one job. I was told that I would work both or she would kick me out. I remember telling her that maybe I would be better off, I would just take my violin and go. Her response still echoes, “I won’t let you take your violin either because I can’t wait to see you barely surviving.” How do I let them know about me when this is the material?
When my kids want to know about holidays—nothing happy registers. I search my brain, flip through the mental rolodex and come up empty. Usually, I think about how my parent left me alone one Christmas. They had to take my older sister back to college and they made arrangements for the other children to go and be with family on the holiday. I woke up to an empty house. My friend happened to call and when she found out I was alone, she braved a blizzard to come get me to spend the holidays with her and her family. I speak of this holiday often, my friend & I, avoiding all the fuss by watching A Christmas Story over and over, till we were acting it out ourselves. A+++++ Hand flutter +++. It is a holiday that sticks out in my mind because someone loved me and showed up in the moment—sacrificing their own safety to be there for me. But, I will never probably tell my children how much it crushed me that if my friend hadn’t prevailed over the massive snow drifts with her rusty old box of a SAAB, that I would have been alone on Christmas…And my parents? They simply didn’t care. The kids they did care about were taken care of.
My daughter frequently wants to know what memories I have of my parents. They are mostly unshareable—but they are the only memories I have. When I was in college, I attempted suicide. I didn’t even try to save myself. A friend happened to come over to see if I wanted a cigarette and found me. I would not be here if she hadn’t popped in. As we lay waiting for the ambulance to race against all the pills I took, I told my friend that I didn’t want my parents called. She understood, but told me regretfully that she didn’t think there was any choice in the matter…she was pretty sure the college was going to call my parents. And they did. I’m not sure why my parents even bothered to come, because they sat by my side in the ICU and bragged about my other siblings, as I sat there on monitors and tangled up in IVs. I pretended to sleep so they would leave. As they got up to go, it occurred to me that they never even asked me why I had wanted to die.
My parents had me committed after my suicide attempt…My dad never called me while I was in the hospital, which…eh…but my mother did. I would have to use the payphone in front of the nurses’ station when she called. It was humiliating to have staff listen in to conversations where my mother’s dislike of me eroded any work I was doing on self-esteem or well-being. She would tell me just to sign myself out and come home so I could work. That was always her main concern-how useful I could be to them, by working and earning money. I would point out, that she had had me committed and that I couldn’t sign myself out till the hospital felt I was ready. Another time, I remember her asking me if I had read my training manual for a job I was supposed to work that summer… I told her that I hadn’t. When she asked why not, I told her 1) I hadn’t packed it in the ambulance 2) I didn’t think summer was coming that year.
I just don’t know how a human says that to another human being under those circumstances, let alone a mother to their child who was clearly suffering.
When the hospital released me, my parents wouldn’t come get me-so I had to have friends come pick me up and take me back to my college. That summer, I looked at my suicide attempt as a reset button I had pushed. Maybe, because I was rebuilding myself, I could rebuild my relationship with my family. I sent my mother and father a letter telling them 100 things they had done for me that I was grateful for. I was sincere in my attempt. I really meant what I had written. My mother sent a list back in response. She got to 29 items—although, I guess it’s technically 28 items, since she put a “?” for 29. Many of the things she claimed to be grateful for were backhanded compliments…One of the items on the list was her thanking me for taking the bus back and forth to college even though she knew I didn’t like it much………she wrote that after knowing the last time I took the bus home, I was assaulted by another passenger. And she wrote that list, complete with ?, knowing there was so little I found worth living for. Just…such…heartlessness. My daughter and son can never know any of this, at least as long as their beloved Mimi and Pop are on this earth. Neither revenge or vindication is worth it, to ruin their relationship with my parents that they idolize…and who treat my children differently than they treated me. I can’t remember any happy memories of my own with my parents—but I will not prevent my child from making them with my parents.
That being said, I still don’t know how to answer their questions about my past. Maybe, eventually, I will find ways to separate the chaff from the wheat. Or maybe they will come to be mature enough to understand more than I feel capable of sharing at this point.
At this point, the only thing that gives me solace when remembering my own youth is to do it in comparison to my children’s youth. I tell my kids “I love you” more in a day than my parents have said to me in the past 38 years cumulatively. I have hugged and kissed my children in their short lives more than the total of all the hugs and kisses I never received. My children have never experienced violence of any kind in their house. They have been kept safe in the ways I dreamed of as a kid. They don’t have to lie to well-meaning teachers or kindly friends’ parents. They go to a good charter school and they are happy, healthy. They have friends. They are in extracurriculars. They are not anyone’s flotation device or hackeysack. Somehow, even in my fuckedupness, I have built a pretty decent house from an error-ridden blueprint.
Still…
I am ready for the flowers…
and less of the bullshit they grow in.
Song Choice: Reckoner by Radiohead
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