fitting the story into a nutshell

It feels like if I can get the story short enough, simple enough, maybe a paragraph long, that I can begin to move on. That somehow, the way I tell the story is the most important thing.

Because if I can tell the story in a way that is not painful, but is rather simply a telling, I can move beyond the pain, shame, grief and other aspects over which I have no control, to a part of the process that I can control: How I think about it.

So trying yet another telling in my ever-narrowing spiral:

I escaped into reading because that was the approved pain-escape method in my family, at least the one that I saw, understood and, as a child, was able to quickly mimic. My father sat and read for hours on end, ensconced in his comfortable chair in the living room. My brothers and I would sometimes sit there with him, each immersed in our own story. Parallel, but separate. Sharing nothing but the same physical space, and occasionally reading aloud an amusing bit. (It was considered acceptable to laugh aloud, even though the rest of us weren't privy to the joke. So we all adapted to this practice, as set forth by the parental example.)

Mom was always elsewhere: In another room, not visible - felt, but neither seen nor heard. I assume, far in retrospect, that she was busy performing her wifely duties: trying desperately to live up to whatever she perceived were dad's expectations of her. Striving, desperately, at all times, not to fail to measure up.

For I believe that mom, like so many women before her and since, sought in dad the father figure she never had. The approval, the appreciation. Which of course meant she was also subject to his disapproval, and therefor his anger. I think, above all, she sought to escape his anger. It too painfully reminded her of the alcoholic tirades of her own father, which she escaped at the ripe young age of 18.

She didn't manage to escape, not really - none of us do. As the saying has it, Wherever you go, there you are. And so it was with mom: She escaped the tyranny of her father to the superficially more mild-mannered, yet, underneath it all, still scathing sarcasm of our father.

He used to sing, at the top of his lungs: "I got along without ya, before I met ya get along without you nooowww." As if this were the height of comedy. And I think mom always smiled and went along with it, though inside me there was this curled-up, horrified place that thought/felt: How the fucking bloody hell can dad get away with talking to/about our mom like this, in front of all of us kids? In broad daylight? For all the world to hear? Isn't she angry? Resentful? Mortified? I sure as hell would be.

Many years later I brought it up to her, the ways in which he cut her, sliced her, made fun of her in front of the rest of the family. "How come you never stood up to him?" I pleaded, begging for some tiny scrap of maternal strength to be demonstrated, so that I could, even at this late date, learn how, and also see that it was ok to resist, to stand up to them, to fail, for once in your fucking life, to be a doormat.

No such example was ever forthcoming. But she did, at some point, quietly concede that maybe he was a bit abusive. Which actually shocked me - I'd given up, at that point, on ever hearing any kind of concession from her that dad's behavior was destructive, despite the fact that he was, on the surface, a gentle man, not given to physical violence. I needed someone to finally give the lie to the old Sticks and stones routine...


I tried so hard to convey to her that, even without blatant physical abuse, or even the fairly obvious daily shaming by an alcoholic father, the continual acid of disdain could eat away at one's soul, etching a kind of degradation permanently into what should have been the bedrock of one's being. Leaving behind a series of fracture lines, weak points at which, under pressure, the system would collapse. Words like quicksand, houses of cards, etc. come to mind here. The futile attempt to build strength on a feeble foundation of fear and insecurity. The certain knowledge that anything you built up, no matter how small or insignificant, would be torn to shreds by this monster for no other reason than because he could.

I used to have nightmares, as a very small child, of running screaming through the living room with a terrifying giant hand chasing me, a disembodied, ghostly sort of hand that wanted nothing more than to grab me. And dad sat there all the while, unmoved, laughing at my fears. He thought it was fucking funny that I was terrified. Fucking ASSHOLE.

I think I could have survived one or the other of my parents being totally unsympathetic to me. But BOTH? It was too much. A child needs some source of solace, comfort, warm arms to turn to. A child who must always fall back on her own inadequate childish resources is doomed to be trapped in those child-emotions forever more. For it is the parents' job to help her back to emotional dry land, to help her find a solid place to stand in the world of Brothers Grimm-like emotions of a child. To a child, all emotions are larger than life without the comforting arms of a parent to fend off the horrible monsters.

As somebody says, it 's the 'soft place to land' that's needed, that makes life bearable. We all need that, whether child or adult. It's what makes survival possible. It helps us get through the night.

To have one's primary source of solace turn out to be nothing more than a further source of shame, pain and humiliation is the source of deep childhood rage at being unable to get one's deepest needs for comfort and security met. After all, we are utterly dependent on these fickle and capricious adults, our parents. We need them to take care of us, look after us. Would that it were not so, that we had anywhere else to turn but to these laughing tormenters who never took us seriously or showed us how to bring the monsters down to size.

I can hear the voices accusing, Too sensitive, too sensitive, the horrible crime I've been charged with all my life. I want to go back to all those times, places and people and say, No, just right. It's you that's too insensitive, you jerk.