Not long ago, Harvard University rescinded its acceptance offer to an incoming freshman upon discovering that the girl, when she was 14, had bludgeoned her mother to death with a lead candlestick holder. Though the girl served her time, there are those who think that wasn't enough. And these people, I think, just don't buy the story that the girl was abused to the point she felt her actions were, as she claimed, murder committed in self-defense:That if she was really so brutalized by her mother, she wouldn't have excelled as she did outside of home.
To a certain extent, this story reminds me of a girl I grew up with. Her name is Jackie. In school, she was very smart and very funny and very loud. Her hand shot up first, every time, for every question, and rare was a wrong answer that fell from her lips. I know now that it wasn't just about her accomplishing things, it wasn't so much about competition. I know now, more than anything, what she wanted most of all was approval, attention, acknowledgement that she was not, as her father often told her, good for nothing, another mouth to feed and a big mouth at that.
I know these things because I have kept in touch with her all these years. I've watched her go in and out of depressions and, despite success as an artist and a human, never find satisfaction or contentment in much of her work, many of her relationships. I'm a little embarrassed to say that part of me disbelieved that this could all hearken back to her father's constant rejection, his lack of love. After all, that was years ago and he was far away. But after witnessing yet another of her breakdowns, I finally accepted this and cried an unstoppable flood of tears for her. I told her to love herself, to look at her life, to believe her friends were her friends because they valued her and that should be enough. I told her to forget her father and to move on.
There were other things I did, too. I decided to help her as much as I could. I began by reading a book by Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge. Alice Miller, though she has the credentials, no longer calls herself a psychoanalyst. She has busied herself earning a reputation as someone who's a bit freakish and on the edge. And she's done this simply by putting forth the basic tenet that children are not born evil and, consequently, in need of being broken by parent/trainers. She holds that every prisoner of childhood, every "bad" person, every screwed-up adult, was somehow let down early on in life. And she backs up her claims with simple but powerful examples.
Miller emphasizes that an action perceived by an adult as an offhand comment or a passing moment of rage ("Hey, we all have bad days, right?") can have a tremendous impact on a little child who thinks its parents are gods of the universe. That, collected over years, too many wrong remarks, too much stifling, can blow a hole in the heart of a child and that child will spend forever unsuccessfully attempting to fill the hole.
When Jackie was four, an event occurred that has stayed with her all of these years. In her house, there was a marble hearthstone which doubled as a work area for her and her eight siblings. Jackie was coloring away, intently, when her mother announced it was bedtime. Jackie wanted to finish the picture - it was a very big deal - so she carried on. At this point, her father intervened, tearing the book first from her hands and then into pieces. In a sense, his rage worked: She went to bed and cried herself to sleep.
She grew into two people. At home she was angry, sullen, and withdrew into books like Little Women, where females ruled and were happy. At school, she got what she couldn't find in a home swimming with siblings, a mother too tired to give them time individually, a father whose footsteps in the hall meant everyone best shut up now and retreat. She continued to thrive on the outside, developing a biting wit, surpassing her classmates, being elected president of any club that would have her.
The popularity was nice. But Alice Miller, who says the shunned child will spend the rest of its life searching for whatever was missing, was right. None of it was ever enough to make up for the fact that Jackie's father never said he loved her, never said he was proud, and always bitched about having to drive her to this or that club meeting, about her choice in friends, about her attitude, about her inability to shut up and do what he said.
Over the years she met lots of people who told her childhood crap was just that, and to get over it. To them, the coloring book was just paper, her father's mood fleeting and forgiveable. But it stuck in her memory like a knife, the perfect example of a power struggle she could never win, a microcosm for a world in which yelling and screaming held far more weight than a determination to reach a goal. In fact, her father's temper was employed on countless occasions to stifle things that to him were petty but to her were crucial.
At 16, she began stealing scotch from the closet and drinking it in her room. At 18, she beat a hasty retreat to a college far away (something she financed herself when her father said he wouldn't help her, that college was stupid), not because she was so sure she should, but because he told her to skip school, get married, and be a secretary. He drove her to the airport, touched her elbow, and as a means of fond farewell, he told her "not to get into any trouble."
So she did. She drank as much as she could, throwing up what wouldn't always stay down. She fucked too many men because she felt certain that having sex meant they loved her. She was angrier than she knew and she took it out on herself.
The pattern continued for years. She drifted in and out of drunken binges and bad relationships and, despite her many talents and college degree, she became, for many, many years, a career waitress. After hours, she always won when bar chat turned into a contest of who could tell the worst childhood tales. This brought a bit of warped satisfaction - at least she was the "best" at something, at least people were listening to her.
But as she moved toward the third decade of her life, it occurred to her that she was, despite what others thought (that she was funny and happy), deeply sad with a dull ache that never went away. She wanted to get to the root of it and so she started digging.
Alice Miller has a term for a certain kind of person she calls the "enlightened witness." We're all eligible to earn the title, but it is not one without a price, and that price is involvement. As an example, Miller tells of the time she was in a grocery store and watched a mother yell at her child. She waited for the mother to walk away, approached the child, and simply said something like, "No one is allowed to talk to you like that. You don't deserve it." This was not intended to inspire a little child to attempt to reason with her angry mother. The idea is, the enlightened witness plants a seed the child can carry around and remember for life. A jolt of self-esteem that might not come in handy until later, but is given in the hope that maybe, just maybe, one kid will be a little less fucked up later on.
For Jackie, enlightened witnesses took the form of teachers, though none dared come out and tell her specifically that her father was a jerk. Maybe they didn't know. Maybe they preferred not deal with his wrath. Either way, she did manage to find, eventually, a sort of retro-witness to help her figure things out.
This person was one of her older sisters. One day, Jackie called to say she was fed up, that he'd done it again, called her and yelled at her and made her cry and Jesus Christ was he ever going to let up and leave her alone? The sister did an odd thing. In all the preceding years, through the four times the father disowned Jackie, through all the ruined holiday meals (family events which she'd long since stopped attending), through all the screaming matches that happened whenever she flew in, they all acted like it was her fault. Pre- and post-visit conversations were filled with one sibling or the other pleading with her to please accept that he was just grumpy, that he could never change, and that somehow it was her fault for provoking him. This time though, something was different.
Bridget listened to Jackie. And then she admitted what no one had before. That their father had treated her badly. That it wasn't her imagination. That he had freaked out, held her back in accomplishing, egged her on in her anger and sorrow, and ruled with an iron fist. That he'd insulted her. That yes, maybe he was responsible for how fucked up she was, how far and often she fell into the black hole that sucked her dry of anything but sadness.
Jackie, in turn, had an odd response. Her whole life, or so she thought, she'd been seeking just this information. Some validation, some consolation, someone on her side for once instead of all of them asking her to straighten up her act. It wasn't an act and at last someone admitted it: He had abused her and was continuing to abuse her. But there was no rush of relief, a rush she'd longed for. Instead she felt worse. She realized she would have preferred if they had convinced her she was the crazy one, that he had loved her, that she had it all wrong. Instead she rolled the words over and over in her mind, "I was abused, I was abused."
Sometimes, she feels wrong taking the word abuse and applying it to herself. She thinks of the beaten and the sexually molested who deserve the badge, the comfort, the nurturing. After all, he only yelled at her and called her stupid. Didn't someone tell her something once about sticks and stones versus words?
Some days, after Bridget's words had sunk in, she thought she had a decent grip on her sadness. Armed with the knowledge she was, in fact, broken, she set out to fix herself. And she did a decent job of losing the drinking problem and ditching the restaurant job in exchange for a career she loves. The pain grew smaller, but maintained a spot somewhere in her stomach, in her heart. Every time a man raised his voice - even if just in jest - every time someone said something that could remotely be perceived as rejection, she recoiled, she withdrew, and she cried and cried and cried.
Jackie still goes home to visit once in a while. Her father, aging, has simmered down a bit, taking breathers between insults. She now knows that if her sadness really is to be attributed to his hostility, then his hostility must also be somehow connected in some way to the child he was. She watches her nieces and nephews and her own child clamor to Pop-pop and wrap around his legs and beg to sit on his lap. She knows children are good barometers, that if he were truly evil they would stay away. She is a little jealous, still wishing he'd given her just one hug, just one kiss. He never, ever did.
She is resigned now, knows that the odds of a long pour-her-heart-out-and-be-apologized-to conversation, one that happens in the books and movies, are next to none. She knows that to confront him now, to scream "abuse," would only throw the family gameboard in the air, sending the pawns that are siblings and aunts and grandparents and her mother hurtling through space and crashing into each other with a debate of angry words in her defense or in his.
She waits for his death and wonders how it will feel. She wonders, though inside she knows the answer is no, if she'll ever fill the hole. But she is trying. She tells her own child, every day, of her great love for him. When she raises her voice at him, she quickly apologizes and explains, calmly, what it was she really meant. She reminds herself to stop self-deprecating so much, to look at the things she's done, to think of all she wants to do. And all these things give Jackie some hope, and the hole gets a little less big, and she thinks maybe one day, though it will not disappear, that she'll figure out for good how to quit peering into it at the distorted reflection of the person she no longer is.
In our society, we have this terrible habit of speaking of abuse in the third person. We don't want to listen to others bemoan days long gone, events unchangeable. We hang our own dirty laundry inside, and only point to them, those people over there. They're the bad parents, they're the messed-up families. Us? We're doing just fine. We don't want to think it could have happened to us, that maybe we're doing it to our own kids. We don't want to be called whiners, nor do we want to admit we are hurt. Third person is safe. Third person makes for a fascinating case study.
Believe me, I know. n