Hello World.

I always knew that people who grew up like me didn’t talk about it. I don’t know HOW I knew; I just did. We didn’t talk about it in childhood, and we don’t talk about it now. Not everyone has the same reasons, but the common themes are pretty easy to guess: embarrassment, guilt, fear, shame. For me, both as a young girl and a middle-aged woman, the main reason was/is betrayal. I loved both of my parents, and they loved me. I’ve never doubted that for a second. So talking to outsiders about their faults and failures, about the worst days of their lives and the incredible damage they unintentionally inflicted upon their children feels like a terrible betrayal. Because my mother wasn’t just a battered woman. My father wasn’t just a Vietnam vet with rage issues. I never want people to have that image of them. They were both so much more than that.

But I read a book recently that emphasized the value of sharing one’s experiences as a child of domestic violence. As a relatively private person, I don’t know if I completely agree. But I do know that aspects of my childhood continue to affect my life in a negative way, so I’m willing to give it a try. In a small, quiet corner of the internet, at least.

Looks Can Be Deceiving

I’ve never been the kind of person someone meets and thinks, “I bet she’s been through some shit.” I’m the quiet but sweet one, quick to smile at anyone who looks her way. I never rebelled, never caused trouble. No smoking, no drinking, no drama of any kind. The perfect child.

That’s because, very early in life, I adopted the role of peacekeeper. I was the family anchor, the one who kept everyone calm and grounded—the one voice that could sometimes quell the storm. And that meant never adding stress to anyone else’s life. I learned to deal with my own drama so well, and so privately, that no one even knew I had any.

And that’s still the case 40 years later. “Nothing ever bothers her!” “She never gets mad.” “She’s so sweet and calm no matter what craziness is going on.” If they had any idea about the constant flood of dark thoughts through my head, the ever-present fear and anxiety that have been a part of me as long as I can remember, they’d be shocked.

But what good would that do? Is there anything to be gained by letting them know I’m just as fucked up as everyone else, and maybe even more than most? Especially people who benefit from viewing me as the strong, stable one they can always count on? I don’t know. I have trouble imagining any benefit to telling everyone I know, or even more than a handful. But maybe it would help a few of them. Maybe it will, someday.

Remembering

Memory is a funny thing. Sometimes we think we remember something in great detail. But when we start to recount the story, we realize that it’s ONLY details we remember, not the whole story. That’s why I couldn’t tell you how many times my parents’ fights got violent, other than “at least three, less than ten.” Because I remember details but not which stories they were a part of.

The first time happened when I was six. My brother and I were watching Three’s Company in his bedroom. I don’t remember how the fight started or what it was about. I just remember running into the living room and seeing him hit her on the side of her head. Was that the time she ran for the phone and he pulled it out of the wall, so she yelled for my eight-year-old brother to go next door and call the police?

Another time, this one starting in the garage and then moving inside. Was that the one where my brother and two friends, maybe twelve years old, walked in the front door as it was happening? The friends froze in shock, but my brother knew what to do. Neighbor, police.

Was that when I lost the silver dollars? I think it was. You see, my mom worked as a cashier, and whenever someone paid with a silver dollar or half-dollar (surprisingly common in the 70s and 80s), she bought it and brought it home. They were kept in a ceramic cookie jar, and I adored them. Many, many hours of my childhood were spent spreading them onto the floor in various patterns, stacking, sorting, counting. Mom and I used to talk about how many we’d have by the time I grew up. But when you suddenly have to leave your house to stay with relatives for a week—relatives who are happy to feed and shelter you but who have no extra money to help you buy gas or other necessities—hanging onto $126 in silver coins is a luxury you can no longer afford. I cried for those coins, but I made sure no one ever knew or even suspected.

There was the fight that started while my brother and I were watching Stripes (the Bill Murray movie). That might have been the one where dad pulled us into the bedroom and our hysterical mother tried to break down the door, afraid he might hurt us.

There was a time the fight spilled into the yard It was dark, and mom lost her glasses. She panicked and begged me to find them, because she was effectively blind without them. Was that a separate fight or part of one I’ve already described? Which fight did he smash the ceramic goat? Punch the hole in the door? After which fight did they meet at Pizza Hut a few days later to talk about things, while my brother and I waited at our aunt’s house, terrified she might never come back?

I don’t know. I can only confidently talk about the last one, when I was fifteen. Plenty of other arguments had started over my brother, of whom my mom was very protective while my dad wanted to “make him a man.” But this was the one that got physical. I remember a brief scuffle between my dad and brother (17 at the time and strong for his age, but not yet a match for a grown man). My mother ran to the bedroom to get the pistol from the nightstand. My brother managed to pull away, ran out the door, and didn’t stop running until he reached my aunt’s house a few blocks away.

My parents wrestled over the gun, and my dad won. Then I jumped in front of the gun and screamed at him to stop.

And he did.

He unloaded the gun and put the bullets in his pocket.

Then I told him he had to leave, and he and I both knew I didn’t just mean for a night or a week. Doing that broke my heart for the first time, and possibly the worst time, because I truly loved him and still do. But I knew we wouldn’t all survive another night like that.

After that, it’s bits and pieces. Dad trying to find an alarm clock to pack. A very kind police officer who left his card and told me to call him if I wanted to talk. (I didn’t.) My brother asking my mom why I wouldn’t stop crying.

The First Rule of Fight Club is…

I mentioned in the first post that people who grow up like I did don’t talk about it. But that’s not EXACTLY true. I think we all TRY not to talk about it, but it occasionally bubbles to the surface. That happened to me for the first time at about 14. I was at a small slumber party (me and my two closest friends), and something along the lines of “my dad has hit my mom a few times” just popped out during a talk about families. I honestly don’t know if it was an accident or if I was feeling them out, getting a sense of whether I COULD talk about it. They were very sympathetic, but I sensed their shock and discomfort. They didn’t ask for details, and we never spoke of it again. That reinforced my belief that I shouldn’t mention it. But I don’t blame them. It was a topic few 14 year olds are equipped to deal with.

The next time was five years later. I met up and spent the day with someone I’d met online (in the long ago days of the early 90s, before that was a normal thing). I didn’t care much for him and didn’t expect to ever see him again—which might be why I told him a brief version of the gun story as he was driving me home. What did it matter if I made things awkward with someone I’d never talk to again? (The joke was on me, though. We ended up becoming friends and still are three decades later.) But this time it wasn’t uncomfortable. He reacted with sympathy like my other friends had, of course. But his face also showed something I didn’t expect and didn’t know I needed: respect. He looked at me as if I was brave and strong.

I’d never seen those traits in myself. I was nice. Smart. Creative. But strong? Never.

But I realized I liked being seen that way. I liked seeing MYSELF that way. Which is why, ironically, I haven’t talked about it much since then. My best friend and my husband know only a very basic version: my parents fought a lot and it got violent a few times. And that seemed like enough. Strong people don’t need to go around whining about their childhood drama, right? Why dwell on past pain? I’d survived it, I’d forgiven everyone involved, I’d moved on. I was fine.

Right?

I’ve Been Afraid

…every minute of every day, at least back to early childhood. Fear is in my bones, in my blood. It’s so much a part of me that I forget it’s there. It’s so much a part of me that I think I believed, for decades, that it’s just part of being human. It’s only been within the last few years that I’ve started to realize that not everyone feels this way.

Not everyone is constantly waiting for something terrible to happen and planning what to do when it does.

Not everyone sees potential danger everywhere they look.

Not everyone thinks about death (their own and that of their loved ones) multiple times every day.

I started a game with myself a few months ago. I asked myself, “What would it take for you to feel 100% safe?” There were no rules or parameters. Literally nothing was off the table. Pet dragons? Sure. Elephant armies? No problem. A million highly trained soldiers guarding an impenetrable castle? Yep!

The result? My mind isn’t creative enough to devise a scenario in which I’m 100% safe.

It IS creative enough to come up with a way I could be hurt under literally any circumstance.

That’s when I realized I had a problem. I mean, I’d always known that I worried about bad things happening more than I should. And I knew I had intense anxiety about some specific things (making a phone call is almost impossible for me, for example). But I’d never realized how much fear permeated my whole life.

And then it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize, and to accept, that there’s a direct link between my childhood trauma and my fear. I glossed over the idea for a while, because in my mind I’d “gotten over that” a long time ago. It didn’t affect me anymore.

But that was idiotic, of course. You can’t be scared 24/7 from the age of six to the age of fifteen and just “get over it.” The brain undergoes too much development during those years. That’s when it’s learning to understand the world. The world my brain learned to understand was one where terrifying things happen with little warning.

So I learned to always be on watch. A shift in tone of voice, a slight difference in body language—recognizing those things quickly gave me precious time to try to head off disaster, calm the storm, keep the peace. And even if I couldn’t, just knowing the storm was coming gave me a chance to mentally prepare (in so much as a child can prepare for something like that).

And now I’ve started trying to fix myself. To unlearn the fear. This blog is part of that. Anti-anxiety meds are another part. Books and meditation play a role. We’ll see what else.

Questions and Answers

You might wonder: How do I not hate my father for what he put us through? Am I not angry with my mother for staying so long?

And those are good questions.

To address the first: I WAS angry with my father for a very long time. I loved him, but I hated him, too. He had so much power to destroy my world and inflict incredible pain, without ever laying a hand on me or speaking a harsh word to me. Sometimes I think it would have been easier if he’d been like that all the time. Then I could have JUST hated him. Instead, I felt like I had two completely different fathers: one who was kind and loving and funny, and one who was utterly terrifying. And I never knew which one would be walking in the door. 

I was well into adulthood before I could make any sense of it. But gradually, I started to understand him. My first breakthrough was recognizing that he and I shared some neurological/sensory issues. I’ve never gotten violent with anyone, but I could if I were trapped in a loud or stressful situation and couldn’t escape. And then I remembered times in my parents’ fights when he tried to walk away, told her to drop the subject, tried to go to a quiet spot alone–but she followed him and kept arguing. Does that mean I’m blaming her or excusing him? ABSOLUTELY NOT. I’m just saying that’s the first time I felt like I could empathize with him just a little bit.

Over the next twenty years or so, I learned more. About his abusive home life growing up. About his experiences in the war and the terrible things he was forced to do to survive. And I realized that he was lucky to be as sane and stable as he was. I realized that he tried to be a good man. He may have failed miserably, but he did try. And no one is angrier at him for that failure than he is.

And so my anger gradually transformed into sadness. I grieved for the father and the life I might have had. I grieved for the life HE might have had. And I forgave him. 

As for my mother, I never felt an ounce of anger toward her. She loved her children with every fiber of her being, and every choice she ever made was about what was best for us. She just miscalculated what was best for us. I knew she’d never allow him, or anyone, to hurt us directly. That night with the gun–if my brother hadn’t gotten away, if my dad had injured him, she would have killed him or died trying.

But she WOULD allow herself to be hurt if it meant being able to take care of us. She had no education and a very low-paying job. She was terrified of not being able to give us the things we needed and wanted. And since we both seemed happy enough on the outside, she drastically underestimated the damage that was being done. She didn’t realize then that we’d have given up everything we owned just to be able to go to the movies or the skating rink and know she was safe at home.

She didn’t realize it until a couple of weeks after I kicked him out. She sat us down at the kitchen table and explained what living separately would mean. To put it simply, it would mean being poor. We didn’t have a lot of money as it was. Even if my dad still helped out financially (he did, even long after we were grown), we’d scrape by. We’d shop in thrift stores. Half of my brother’s paycheck from his fast food job would have to go toward supporting the family, and I’d do the same when I turned 16.

Then she asked us what we wanted, and I think she was shocked by how quickly we both said, “He needs to stay gone.”

She thought we’d have to think about it. She didn’t realize it wasn’t even a choice in our minds.

So we were poor. We struggled, we worried, but we took care of each other. A few months after dad left, I had a formal banquet at school. I didn’t mention it, because I knew we had no money for a dress. But they found out somehow, and my brother used the rest of his paycheck to buy me a dress. He did the same later when I needed eyeglasses. And he spent many, many weekends working on our crappy old cars to keep them running.

I did what I could as well. I worked a part-time job and handed over every penny to my mom to decide the best collective use for it. I went to community college on a scholarship, then transferred to a local commuter university. With my first credit card, I bought a rebuilt transmission for my brother’s truck. And while I occasionally resented other kids who had it easier, I’m grateful for the lessons those years taught me. Lessons about what’s really important and what’s not.

Coda

If you’ve read this far, you probably think I had a terrible childhood. But that actually couldn’t be further from the truth. Most of my memories are wonderful ones of a life surrounded by love and fun. The good in my life far exceeded the bad, and I’m grateful for that every day. I’m not a victim.

I think all lives are shades of grey, mixtures of black and white experiences that form a pattern unique to that person. The purpose of telling this story has been to examine the dark marbling in my otherwise sea of white. To begin sifting through the lessons I’ve learned, both good and bad. To see what’s made me stronger and what’s weakened me. To see what still serves me and what’s holding me back.

Time will tell what comes of this examination.