When I started writing about my daydreams two and a half years ago, writing the non-fiction was easy, and writing the fiction was hard. Gradually, the situation flipped. By now, it has flipped so spectacularly that writing the non-fiction feels like pulling teeth. My own teeth.
We had this cat once. All black. He’d follow you around the house like a shadow. Try to pet him, and he’d run away. Ignore him, and he’d reappear. Working on my non-fiction feels a little like living with that cat.
I’ve tried to write this essay about 15 times, and I’m turning up nothing but mediocre ideas, like an archaeologist finding only the same commonplace shards of pottery. I feel overwhelmed by your eyes, which impatiently ravage this page, asking the kinds of questions I have spent my life dodging:
Who are you?
What do you want?
What is your goal here?
And I’m tearing my hair out, screaming, “I’ll tell you whatever you want, just leave me alone, and for God’s sake don’t ask me that again!”
What hubris, to think I could write a memoir! Most of my life is a mixture of White privilege and left-wing self-righteousness, a concoction that the mainstream media already pours down our throats as if we were geese being fattened up for foie gras.
Not only do I feel I lack a story, I feel the lack acutely. No—chronically. I must remind myself that I was a child once, that I did not simply pop out of the womb last week. I grasp at the shreds of my story with clammy hands, while I try to explain to the teacher that the dog ate my homework, and she tries to explain to me that I don’t have a dog.
And so I found myself giving birth to the rough draft of this essay at midnight on a Wednesday, in nothing but my underwear, tearfully melting down faster than the chocolate I joylessly inhaled, praying for some inspiration for an autobiographical piece that could hold its own next to “The Calamity Part 2”. (I was not actually praying, of course, but at a certain point self-pity becomes a kind of prayer.)
In its earlier incarnations, this essay was supposed to be about my disastrous, short-lived marriage. I was going to describe Rick’s self-absorbed, dramatic rants, and the kind of hypnotic trance I inadvertently underwent to be able to tolerate them. I always viewed serenity as a virtue, and—though I never consciously considered it—my penchant for stupor was the ace up my sleeve.
Incidentally, at the same time that our friable relationship was crumbling, the two of us were regularly listening to podcasts about serial killers. I soaked up the violence like a sponge. I began to imagine that my daydream protagonist, John, was Jack the Ripper. Then I (John) began to imagine that I was terrorizing some poor innocent girl who had time traveled to the past and was now trapped in my decrepit home. I made her watch as I raped and dismembered young women, and then stashed their bodies under the floorboards, or burned them in the backyard. The girl lived in constant terror. I (Hope) might smile to you in the hallway, or even have a conversation with you over coffee, while in my mind I was torturing that poor girl in my creepy murder house. After a fight with Rick, the fantasies would be stronger. I was not okay with this state of affairs. I was horrified by my own capacity for cruelty, even if it was only imaginary.
In some ways, I envied Rick. He was quick-witted, and had a keen sense of empathy. He often understood peoples’ feelings better than they did. He was an incredibly talented artist. Meanwhile, I am somewhat ditzy and gullible, and creativity doesn’t come naturally to me. Rick was undoubtedly my inspiration for the character Martin Coventry, though, being a daydream, Martin always had a life of his own.
Most of all, I envied Rick’s memory. He had such detailed, vivid memories, and so many! He rigorously recorded so many details about his childhood friends and teachers, and about his parents. Especially his parents. Sometimes I felt like he had more memories of any given year of elementary school than I did of my whole childhood.
If you want to know what my marriage was like, you should really ask Rick. He always knew what was going on. He was the one who could remember our fights, and my promises. He was the one who was crestfallen when I didn’t remember certain “breakthroughs”. He was the one who would indignantly cry, “But you said the opposite last week!” To which I would merely shrug and say I didn’t remember, or I guess I changed my mind.
I hunger for memories. Sometimes I feel as if my memories are like the little beads of water that are left on the colander after washing it. Those beads—that’s what I remember. Everything that goes through the holes—that’s what I forget. What did I even do when I was fourteen? How did I feel? I remember getting ready for a school dance once at my friend Lena’s house. Lena, with the great boobs. I don’t remember the dance. A few years ago, my sister apologized for teasing me about my weight when we were kids. I don’t remember a single incident of it. My sister-in-law had to remind me that we had a fight on my birthday last year. I have to remind myself that I’m supposed to be mad about that.
At a certain point, I have to admit that I’m probably not ready to write about my marriage. If Autobiography were a subject in school, I think I’d need to take the remedial class. And that’s only after I’d passed the prerequisite course on Remembering.
Maybe that’s the ticket. Remembering. Plain and simple, without any clever thesis or argument layered on top of the memories. I shall simply remember my story. Not from the marriage, but from the beginning. Childhood. Again. Until I get it right.
No, no, no. That won’t do. I can’t simply write about my childhood. That’s not good writing. Who cares about my story? The essay may build on a memory, but it must be about something else to be interesting. I’ve got to make it clever, or it’ll sound like a dirge at Wisdom’s funeral.
More than that, surely I don’t deserve to criticize my upbringing. I’m only allowed to talk about how great it was, because it was overall pretty great. It was a childhood that anyone who suffered real adversity would envy, wouldn’t they? So where do I get off complaining?
I have a favor to ask of you, dear reader. Would you please, just, go away. Just put this essay down, go make yourself a sandwich, and forget about Hope Springs. It’s really unbearable, trying to write anything with you here, breathing down my neck like Chuck from IT watching me try to configure my VPN.
What? You’re still here! Hello, didn’t you hear me? Scram!
Well, well, well. You’re a stubborn one, I see. Fine. If you insist on staying, then you’d better bring your expectations way down. Because from here on out, this essay isn’t for you, got it? This is for me. I mean, more than usual. Here’s an idea. How about instead of simply ogling this disaster like a car crash on the highway, you start pulling your own weight around here? I need your help. (Ouch) I need you to persuade me that my memories—sparse, unreliable, and terribly biased—are, somehow, enough.
It feels extremely icky to recount my childhood in the way I’m about to recount it. Every bone in my body screams, “Stop!”
Stop being so dramatic.
Stop being self-centered.
Stop being ungrateful.
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
I suppose that’s how I know I’m on the right track.
~
By any material metrics, I had a happy childhood. We were White, middle-class Americans, and I was loved and wanted, despite the fact that I didn’t always believe it. I had good parents, and experienced no particular trauma, beyond the ordinary scrapes and bumps of the human condition.
Despite all my privilege, I do not recall being a happy child. The predominant feeling I recall is that of feeling disenfranchised. Nobody seemed to take me seriously, or to care what I wanted. I felt my legitimate questions were always dismissed with the ever-grating parental refrain, “Because I said so.” I felt I was a second-class citizen in a world made for adults. I couldn’t wait to enter ‘the real world,’ when I would finally have my own space, my own voice, and would receive as much respect as I was being instructed to give.
Growing up, Dad was ‘the fun parent.’ He worked hard, and spent more time in the office than I would have liked, but when he was around, he was easy-going. He is clumsy, silly, and a jokester, in a mellow sort of way. I have many memories of playing sports with him, or playing on teams he coached. When we kids complained about our family vacations being lame, or having to visit our oddball relatives, Dad would acknowledge our difficulties with a ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ pep talk.
Mom got things done, and kept us safe. She was a stay-at-home mom, so she was pretty much always there for us. She drove us to our weekend and after-school activities, helped us with our homework, and brought said homework to school when we forgot it. She is social and willing to lead, which explains how she ended up as both my Sunday school teacher and my girl scout troop leader. She has a sunny, optimistic disposition, and is as meticulous and cautious as my father is goofy and careless.
I’ve already introduced Dad as ‘the fun parent,’ from which you may have deduced that Mom was the ‘not-fun’ parent. She is a hard person to get along with. When a certain situation in her life begins to go south, she picks herself up and moves on, insisting that she is better off without that person who maligned her. Which is fine, as long as you’re not one of those malefactors.
When my siblings were in high school and I was in middle school, my mother began seeing a predatory therapist. The waters were already choppy, but that therapist plunged our family into some dark depths from which we never entirely recovered. On the day of their first session, my mother left the building with a prescription for an SSRI. When my father later commented that this seemed a bit hasty, the therapist became snappy and defensive. That was when we began to see her game. When I was about fourteen, the therapist told me that I was responsible for my mother’s depression. She said, “It’s my job to figure out why you’re such a bad daughter.” Only years later did I find out that she privately told each of my siblings and father that they were also a ‘bad daughter’, ‘bad son’, and ‘bad husband’, respectively. Again and again, my father returned to that office with my mother, to be berated like a kid in the principal’s office. Thank God Mom only dragged me there once. One visit left enough scars.
Mom was deeply unhappy for many years, and, like many unhappy people, she craved an explanation. The easiest explanation was us. She believed that if she could just make us behave like a good, happy family, then she would be happy, too.
Gradually, she grew increasingly irritable, impatient, and controlling. She talked as though anyone who didn’t comply with her demands was a problem. As far as I can tell, the therapist encouraged this, whispering in her ear like a devil on her shoulder. We all dreaded pushing my mom too far, lest she exclaim, “Oh boy, Dr. Silk is going to hear about this one.” Or, “If you keep this up, I’m going to have to bring you in to see Dr. Silk.” She wielded her misery like a weapon. My mother’s criticism was scary in its dramatic performance. She would grit her teeth, point a finger, and snarl, “I’ve told you, you’re not allowed to talk to me that way. Why are you like this? You’re ruining this occasion and upbraiding my authority.”
She wasn’t abusive. She was just difficult, in a way that’s hard to explain. You can point to a bruise, but you can’t point to fear, or tension. You can’t point to the rage in your belly when your mother treats your father like a dog who’s just shit on the rug. The rage you feel at yourself for doing nothing about it. My dad, my siblings, and I became fluent in a second language without words. It was a language of eye rolls, ironic smiles, and somber shrugs, which were supposed to translate to, “I know how you feel. I know it’s not fair. But I can’t stop her either.” For some reason, we could not bring ourselves to say such things out loud.
We walked on eggshells around her, avoiding any comment that smacked of criticism or negativity. I literally tip-toed around the house, like a fraudulent knight afraid to awaken the dragon he knew he ought to be fighting. I feared that if she found me, she’d give me some weird, unnecessary chore, simply to assert her dominance. If Mom sent you on a wild goose chase, you’d go on it, because reckoning with the goose was easier than reckoning with her.
I always thought my Dad was noble for tolerating her. Typically terse and conciliatory during their fights, I thought he was being the bigger person. Actually, he was just bottling up his emotions, which, as it turns out, doesn’t end well.
My parents got divorced when I was in my mid-twenties. After I got the call from my sister, my sister-in-law summed up everybody’s feelings: “He finally did it! He finally left her!” In a move no one saw coming, compliant, submissive Dad revealed that he had a secret girlfriend for whom he was leaving Mom.
I didn’t feel an ounce of pity for my Mom. Of course, Dad should have done the mature thing and left her much, much earlier, instead of wrapping himself in a warm blanket of secrets and lies. I know, intellectually, that he did a terrible thing. Yet in my heart, I have never once held it against him. Meanwhile, it takes all my spiritual training to admit that mom did not get what she deserved.
Mom was devastated, but she rationalized Dad’s betrayal as good riddance. She said she’d never liked the way he would jokingly tease people, including her. This accusation wasn’t entirely untrue. He didn’t know of any other way to express his resentment. His jokes and his gossip could be nasty, but to be honest, I hardly noticed. I hated her as much as he did, and I couldn’t have hated him if I’d wanted to. I couldn’t afford to hate both of them.
All my life, I’ve always thought I was very different from my siblings. The family lore is that my two older siblings were relatively quiet and obedient, and I—the youngest—was the wild child. I’ve never questioned that lore, perhaps because I rather liked being special. But if I’m honest with you, my dear, stubborn reader, the truth is, I’m not that special.
There are two types of people in my nuclear family: my mother, and everyone else. Despite our distinctive personality styles, my siblings and I have a lot in common. We are all ambitious, successful, punctual, easy-going, relatively tidy, self-disciplined, and aggressively minimalist. We gossip about how our mother is the opposite of all those things. We’re not big vacation people, but prefer to unwind in simple, solitary ways. We’re all low-drama, and are compliant when onerous obligations arise. We don’t talk about feelings any more than we have to. We all withhold our true selves, albeit in very different ways.
Most of all, though, I am like my dad. We withhold ourselves in the same way. We both laugh our pain away, we both fear our own anger, and we both pride ourselves on our capacity to suffer. I wonder if Dad ever escaped from an uncomfortable conversation through inadvertent self-hypnosis. I wonder if he ever had violent rape fantasies after a fight with Mom. I wonder if he ever squinted out the window on a bleary-eyed morning, congested from crying himself to sleep, hungover and still drunk at the same time, and prayed, “Dear God, what’s wrong with me, that I can neither love nor leave?”
Nobody in this family ever modeled a healthy relationship with feelings. Mom weaponized hers, and the rest of us suppressed ours, in one way or another. We lost touch with ourselves and each other for the sake of keeping the peace.
I like to think that we humans get a little wiser with each generation. To my parents’ credit, I figured out at age 28 what my dad figured out at 58. I left my husband, amicably. And while I have not yet managed to fall in love again, I… well… on second thought, maybe that is success. I have managed to not fall in love again. I have not yet cracked that nut, Love, but I have at least avoided choking on it a second time.
My mother and I are friends now, for lack of a better word. We can go to each other with certain kinds of problems, and receive genuine support. It’s been a long, bumpy road to get here. First, my marriage had to fall apart, so that I could discover the mistakes I’d made to produce that disaster. Then I needed to recognize those how mistakes show up in most of my relationships, including in my relationship with my mother. I needed to discover the true magnitude of the anger I felt at her, and acknowledge the anger I felt at myself, at my father, and at God. Finally, I needed to see that denying my anger was turning me into a bitter, passive-aggressive, and even violent person I didn’t want to be.
I’ve always felt I needed to keep a stiff upper lip and be grateful for my privilege, instead of complaining about my pain. But that kind of masochistic serenity isn’t real, and doesn’t last. If you don’t create some space to be a little selfish, you’ll end up being more selfish. You’ll end up hurting people you never meant to hurt, and telling jokes or lies you never meant to tell. The anger will fester inside of you, and if you’re lucky, you’ll notice it. If you’re unlucky, you’ll bury it so deep that you’ll be the last person to notice it.
The thing about serenity is, you can’t jump straight into it. At least, not without paying a terrible price eventually. You can’t rise above your pain, or your past, without first wallowing in it a little while. Maybe that’s why I’m finding it so hard to tell my story. I want to skip straight to the moral of the story, to the part where I’m the Enlightened storyteller and I’ve already figured out why this story matters. But I don’t have my story figured out, and I’m just beginning to accept that that’s okay.
Even though my parents were far from perfect, they gave me enough love and safety to get me pretty far. Few things in life are more powerful than the knowledge that somebody loves you. Surprisingly, it still works pretty well even if that person is deeply flawed, or even if they’re long gone, or even if they’ve never existed outside your own head. The important thing is, if you’re going to walk into a storm, you’d better be holding somebody’s hand. I’m walking into one now, and if I’ve made any progress, it’s because I’ve got a few hands to hold. I’m learning to see clearly, despite the rain and the stinging in my eyes. I am glad to keep going, because I’m slowly discovering that I’d rather be in pain than not know how much pain I’m in.