The Devil's in the Details

When I was a kid I had a lot of mornings that weren’t easy. I don’t think about it often because it makes me sad even now, but I can remember the feeling of my alarm going off, waking up to the memory of things that had transpired before I went to sleep. My mom and stepdad used to go out a lot, they were very social - which meant my mom used to come home after drinking a lot. I would always be in bed with the lights out and my bedroom door shut, but it didn’t matter if she was in the mood to brawl.

There’s a part of me that feels terrible sharing this with you, like I’m betraying her from beyond the grave. I want to rush to tell you she loved me, she had trauma, she was twenty-four when she had me, she didn’t mean it. I don’t want you to think badly of her. She had a lot of incredible qualities.

All of those things are true, and none of that changes the fact that she hurt me. She hurt me physically sometimes, but she hurt my heart pretty regularly for most of my life, all the way up until the end of hers. The last month when she was in the ICU we finally got to the part where there was nothing but love, but that’s a story for another day.

Sometimes I’d wake up and roll over, groggy the way kids are in the morning, and there’d be a physical reminder, a tender place that would make me wince - and memories would flood my brain. A flash of the way her face looked twisted up in rage. The way my sorry’s hadn’t mattered, maybe because I hadn’t known what I was sorry for, aside from existing.

Other times it was a thing she’d said that had hurt as much as if she’d punched me in the gut or sliced me across the jugular. I’d want to go back to sleep and never wake up. She went full throttle when she was enraged, and I used to have to convince myself she hadn’t meant it, whatever “it” happened to be that time.

I’d get up, get dressed, brush my teeth, wash my face, and try to focus on packing my lunch, or making sure my outfit looked right. If I could make things look good on the outside, no one would notice I wasn’t okay.

In seventh grade I started going to a school on the East side, and most mornings I’d put my earphones over my head and listen to my Walkman as I walked across Central Park. It was a long walk, especially from my mom’s. Her apartment was on West End Avenue (still is) and my school was on 1st Avenue - all the way across town, and also twenty blocks south. It took about forty-five minutes, but on harder mornings those walks helped me come back to myself.

I’d listen to Sarah McLachlan, Tori Amos, the Indigo Girls, Bonnie Raitt, Yaz…and somehow the music and the lyrics and the rhythm of walking and the tall trees and the familiar path past Balto the dog would soothe me - so by the time I got to school I could smile. I could joke around and answer questions when called on in class and focus on things I could handle. School made sense, I felt safe there.

Of course things would happen with friends, because that’s life and that’s certainly high school. I didn’t tell anyone what was going on at home, only my closest friends knew, and only because they’d see things themselves, eventually. My closest friend from elementary school - I followed her to high school - made new friends when we got to seventh grade. It hurt, but I didn’t want her to feel obligated to spend time with me.

We didn’t talk about it, she just found a new groove and I wasn’t part of it, and if I cried myself to sleep for months there wasn’t any reason to tell her about it. Eventually I found my own new friends and life went on the way it does, but I never stopped loving her. I’m a lifer.

I’ve always panicked when people leave me because the bottom fell out when I was four - and I suppose that’s the kind of thing that stays with you. It’s sad - but not as sad as a lot of things that happen to kids, and are happening to kids somewhere right now. My grandma died and I didn’t realize she was the glue holding everything together, because there’s no way to know that at four. My dad left the following week, and my mom drove me to a friend’s farm and left me there for a while. Maybe a week, maybe a few weeks, I don’t know. Long enough I wasn’t sure she was coming back.

I can understand as a grown woman that it is wildly painful to lose your mother - and my grandma was my mother’s best friend - and then have your husband leave the following week. I can see how you might not feel able to take care of your four-year-old. My mother was only twenty-eight at the time. I wish she’d left me with someone I knew, but I imagine she felt ashamed to ask for help, or to admit that she needed to not be responsible for her child for a while.

I remember the farm, and the moment I understood she was leaving me at the farm. I remember begging her not to do that and panicking and promising her I’d be good. I remember her hissing at me to stop crying, and the daughter of her friend standing behind her mother - peering out from behind her like I was some kind of strange species. I remember the feeling of my mother peeling my little hands off of her arms, and her friend scooping me up and putting me on her hip as my mom got in the car.

I remember kicking my legs until her friend let me down, and the dust kicking up as my mother’s car drove down the dirt driveway faster than I could run. I remember watching her car disappear around the corner at the end of the driveway, feeling more scared and sad than I had ever been. She was gone, and I didn’t know where anyone else was. Not my dad, not my aunt or uncle or cousins - not my grandma.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

That is the feeling I have when people exit my life, and it’s the feeling I have if I’m close to someone and they suddenly stop communicating with me. I feel “easy to leave” and alone in the world.

That’s my stuff to deal with, it belongs to me. It isn’t anyone else’s responsibility to take that on. I’ve done a lot of work on it, because I didn’t want to be an anxiously attached person my entire life, and I don’t want to be a person who walks on eggshells or chases unavailable people or takes it personally if someone doesn’t know how to communicate. I have tools. These days if something happens, I don’t feel “easy to leave” for long. I know my worth, even if I have to remind myself sometimes. We all have our stuff. That stuff is called context.

con·text

/ˈkäntekst/

noun

• the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.

• the parts of something written or spoken that immediately precede and follow a word or passage and clarify its meaning.

I am the way I am for all kinds of reasons. If other things had happened along the way, I’d be different. Some of the events that transpired were completely outside my control - certainly all the things I’ve described so far would fall into that category. As I got older, some of the things that happened were a result of choices I made, for better or worse - but I didn’t make those choices in a vacuum.

I’ve always been fascinated by the microcosm and the macrocosm. Every single one of us has a history - things we went through in childhood that shaped the way we feel about ourselves, our place in the world, the amount of power we had or didn’t have, whether our messy feelings were welcome or we were supposed to be “little adults with stiff upper lips”, whether it was okay to make mistakes or not, whether we felt safe, loved, cherished, celebrated - or if we had to walk carefully on a tightrope because love could be withdrawn. Those are, of course, only some of the possibilities.

Then you have generational trauma. It’s why so many people who grew up in an alcoholic household end up gravitating toward people who struggle with addiction, or why a person might marry a guy and wake up one morning realizing he’s their mom, except with a five o-clock shadow. Oops.

It’s not intentional, it’s that there’s something in the dynamic - early on - that feels familiar. It feels like home, and sometimes people mistake that feeling of “home” for being in love. The devil you know and all of that.

There are groups of people who have been through trauma together, and that can get passed down through the generations, too. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always been so enthralled by history. I like to understand what happened. How a person got to be the way they are, how a group of people developed a culture and an identity, how a country came to be the way it is. I suppose I have this idea if I know what happened before, I can head off disaster ahead. Classic child of an alcoholic thinking.

None of us are set in stone after all - we can evolve and make better choices moving forward. That’s the point of studying the past, whether it's our own decisions that have ended in spectacular heartache, or the choices of a nation. Looking back with a willingness to grapple with some of the painful chapters is the way we heal and understand ourselves. It’s how we avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and instead - hopefully - make better mistakes as we go.

My mother would never admit she was an alcoholic. It was really painful. As I got older, and eventually grew to be the same height, I wasn’t as scared anymore. Not the way I had been as a kid. By the time I was sixteen, my rage outweighed my fear of her, at least some of the time. I thought she didn’t love me - that was the only way I could make sense of things - and though it broke my heart and though I thought it must be me who was broken - eventually I’d had enough of the gaslighting.

I’d ask her why she was drinking, what it was she was trying to numb, but she’d insist she was a social drinker - she was fine and I was sensitive and dramatic. Her circle of friends backed her up, which is not unusual. They liked to party, too, and my mother was ferocious if you crossed her. No one wanted to be banished from the Queendom. Eventually I moved out and when that wasn’t working for us, I moved three thousand miles away.

That’s the problem when you won’t face the hard truths - there’s no chance for intimacy, for trust, for healing. You don’t allow the other person the space to have compassion for you. They’re too busy feeling enraged and exhausted that you won’t admit the sky is blue and water is wet. When you can’t agree on basic things, you can’t be close.

It’s not about considering the other person’s “point of view.” My mother was an alcoholic, that wasn’t my opinion, that was a painful reality. Her unwillingness to address it, talk about it, and get some help were the things that made me keep my distance. It was the only way to keep myself safe.

When someone who loves you asks you to look at a hard truth, you have options. You can tell them there’s nothing to look at, the problem is theirs, or you can reflect and possibly get some help if you need it. I think most of us have been in that position at one time or another. Someone close to you calls you out and you’re like, oh shit. This person just nailed it. I know they said something that’s a true thing about me, because now I feel shame, or I want to run or lash out or go to sleep.

If you insist the problem is theirs, you’ll probably lose them eventually. I’m not talking about opinions now, I’m talking about places where any objective outsider would look and say, yeah, that one’s on you.

Shame will shut you down. It’s a normal human emotion, and everyone feels it sometimes, but it’s not a feeling that invites exploration. It’s like that critical family member who tells you they have no filter - and secretly thinks that’s a good quality. It isn’t - there are gentle ways to tell people difficult things.

We all have our blind spots. Societies are made up of people - millions of imperfect human beings who all have places inside themselves where they can grow. If we’re at war within ourselves, we’re going to project that lack of acceptance, tolerance, patience and compassion outward.

Let’s say, for example, you are a white, thirty-year-old man, and you tell a Black, nineteen-year-old kid that whatever problems exist in the Black community are “coming from inside the house.” If only Black fathers would stick around, and Black culture did not make it “acceptable” for Black girls to show up pregnant without knowing who the father was - or if the expectation was that Black men would stand by the women they impregnated - then crime and poverty would go down.

Sidebar: What Black families make it acceptable for a girl to come home pregnant not knowing who the father is? The premise itself is offensive, and if you’re missing that, the man in this example did his work well with you.

Let’s say after slipping in this premise, you turned to the mostly white crowd and asked the young white women in attendance what would happen if they came home pregnant and didn’t know who the father was - would their families be accepting of that? Now you’ve brought your crowd of white fans into the conversation, convincing them this is a thing Black families accept.

Imagine you went on to say that every culture and race has “hard things happen that they have to overcome” so why is it Black people and Native Americans can’t rise above? Why can't they catch up?

I mean, hey, you’re just a white man debating ideas in a sea of young kids, right? It’s just a respectful debate where you happen to be taking current events out of their historical context.

It would be like a thirty-year-old man speaking with me in front of thousands of people when I was nineteen, respectfully asking why I couldn’t let it go if someone I cared about suddenly stopped returning my calls. What was it about me, particularly, that prevented growth and healing? Every other person was able to do it, so why not me? You know, just politely questioning what was wrong with me, at my core. It’s just an exchange of ideas. And if I started to say, “Well, it’s hard for me when people disappear because my whole family disappea-”

And he said, “Yeah, that sounds tough, I hear you. I don’t agree that’s a reason you should still be struggling though, and I’ll tell you why. Lots of people have bad things happen and they move on. Why not you?”

Let’s pretend the kid in the first example found his footing and pushed back, and said there’s a historical context that needs to be part of this conversation. It’s not just Black fathers leaving the home for no reason. Black men are 20% more likely to be pulled over for traffic stops, they’re more likely to be prosecuted for nonviolent crimes and Black men are still incarcerated at 5 times the rate of white men - and it isn’t because they are doing 5 times the number of crimes.

If you want Black fathers to stay in the home, stop shooting them when you pull them over for an expired registration tag.

You’re talking about all this as if slavery never happened, and Jim Crow laws never happened, and segregation never happened, and The Tulsa Race Massacre never happened and The Harlem Riot never happened - so either you don’t know your history, or you are hoping I don’t.

Maybe you’ve never heard of the Little Rock Nine or you have no idea about the ways federal infrastructure has impacted racial inequality from the moment we started building roads in this country. It’s like you want to pretend none of that happened, none of it is real, and whatever problems may exist, they exist in a vacuum. Like you want to take the entire experience of being Black in this country - out of context.

That's the kind of debate that might have happened between two adults. Except I don’t debate people who start off with a premise that doesn’t deserve oxygen, and blaming the victim is a tale as old as time, friends.

Let’s say the white man in this example had no sympathy for George Floyd and insisted he died of a fentanyl overdose even though we all saw what happened with our own eyes, and the Hennepin County medical examiner ruled George Floyd's death a homicide caused by "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression". There’s no need to debate whether water is wet, or compressing someone’s neck with your knee for nine minutes will kill them. We know.

I’ll tell you what, forget all the examples. The context is always there. It’s in the things you say and do, it’s in the things you feel, think and express. It's in the issues you decide to talk about and the ones you don’t, whatever your reasons. It’s there for everyone to see when you fight for something you believe in, or when you shrug and walk away. Of course we can all have a thing we say here or there taken out of context…but not our life’s work. Not a pattern of behavior. Not hours and hours of content we choose to produce.

We like what we like. Some ideas resonate, some don’t. We can debate all kinds of things, but not whether people should be judged by the amount of melanin in their skin. Anyway, if you wanted to do that and you’re white, you’re not going to like this: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/table-43

I’m having tough mornings again. I wake up feeling heartbroken about where we are and what’s happening in our country. I watch people I thought were friends posting things I never imagined I’d see. I get messages from people telling me I’m being divisive because I’m pointing out violent rhetoric. I’m watching us lose free speech as the president decides what we get to see on the television. It’s painful and scary and sad.

It’s like watching your country disappear down a dirt driveway, getting hit in the face with dust, wishing there was some way you could stop it.

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