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University rescinded its acceptance offer to an incoming freshman upon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
This article appears in August 25 • 1995 and August 25 • 1995 (Cover).