Back in the Woods

A Memoir

Ginny McQueen

Copyright © 2019 by Ginny McQueen

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

The following story is the true and selective account of the year after my seventeenth birthday and the history behind it, told to the best of my recollection with the aid of an expired Ancestry.com account and a box of old photos. Names have been changed. Individuals edited out. Flashbacks are jumpy. Dialogue recalled though a twenty+ year gap.

But this is where I came from, for whatever that means. I wrote it down to put the current world I know into context. I’m sharing it to help others put their stories in context. I added the photos because I was a cute baby.

There are multiple triggering subjects discussed in this memoir including physical illness, mental illness, drug abuse, animal death, human death, child and domestic abuse, sexual assault, and rape.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. It’s a lot of my inside parts in word form.

Chapter One

Please let mom be okay.

Please let mom be okay.

God, please let my mom be okay.

I wouldn’t call it a prayer, really. It was something like a command at the universe to course-correct. This point in time was in flux, a coin still in the air; if I could convince the universe by wishing hard enough, it would land the way I needed it to. Whatever it was, it had begun to loop over and over in my head as I wrenched open the door to my 1980 Volkswagen Rabbit and thrust myself behind the wheel, and looked up to see dad’s pick-up already peeling out of the parking lot of the mall.

“Please let mom be okay.”

“Please let mom be okay.”

It was out loud now, as I maneuvered out of the parking lot and into the street.

I knew something was wrong. I had known for hours.

* * *

I was at what would have been a closing shift at my job in a department store at the local mall, about a 20-minute drive from home. It wasn’t uncommon for me to call my mom from work on occasion, but this particular evening I felt the overwhelming urge to get her on the phone as soon as I could.

I made the trek across the back of the store and to the break room on the second floor, where there was a landline you could use to dial out. It was around 5:30 which meant my mom should have been on her way home from her school and thus had her cell phone on. But she wasn’t answering.

Okay, I thought. She’s just running late. She’s talking to another teacher.

She had a hard time saying no to helping people, so it was plausible. But I wanted my mom on the damn phone and every second I wasn’t getting her to answer, I grew more concerned. I went back to my corner of the store for 30 minutes, then ducked back to the store room again, tried to call, and again got nothing. I tried at home, and got the answering machine.

I often worried that my mom wouldn’t make it home one day. Any time she would leave for an Al-Anon retreat for the weekend or was out late for a school function, I would act like a puppy who was waiting for their owner to come home. I would stare out my bedroom window scanning for her car’s headlights to show up, listening for the Toyota engine.

I was always anticipating the worst, expecting it, even. I would picture her never coming home, having died in some horrific accident. I had been down these panicked halls before. My dad had figured this out about me and sometimes when I was younger he would tell me mom was home and I’d run outside and she wouldn’t be there. He thought it was funny.

My dad was a troll who didn’t use the internet. He would get off on being hurtful and claiming to not understand why you are so mad at his “jokes”. My mother always described it as “he likes to push buttons,” which was a cutesy way of saying he liked to trigger negative emotional responses in his wife and daughter to manipulate them and cause them pain. Which is not cute at all. It’s actually Emotional Abuse 101.

My usual reaction to my father.

I never really got to wish my dad would never come home because he never went anywhere. By the time I was old enough to want him dead, he had stopped hunting as much, so there was much less of a risk he would end up shot. He was always home, always around, always demanding attention by starting fights.

I was certain there was only one way to get rid of him, and that was for me and my mom to run. I had just outgrown my teenage phase where I was either angry at or embarrassed by my mom, and we were spending more time together. It felt like maybe she was waiting for me to be old enough to be out of the house to get rid of him, and I was trying to nudge her to do it sooner.

* * *

Maybe another 30 minutes had passed, and I did the same dance again, trying to not seem out of place hauling myself up to the break room yet again. I tried both numbers multiple times and then meandered back across the store to my department, trying to look like I was doing something work-related.

As I turned a corner, I spotted my dad a few yards away and he didn’t look okay. He was standing in the back aisle of the store clearly searching for me. He was what I could probably describe as “high as a fucking kite.” He was also visibly upset, his glassy gaze only partially from the drugs.

“Dad, what are you doing here?” I rushed over, anxious to get him the hell away from other humans as quickly as possible before he said or did something embarrassing while also shocked and scared that my panicking could have been for a real reason.

His voice cracked and he inhaled sharply.

“Honey, Mom died.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “What?”

“She died, you need to come home,” he blubbered.

All of my panic about not being able to get my mom on the phone evaporated and I dove head-first into denial. My first thought was that this was some Vicodin-induced blunder, and now my idiot, drugged-out dad was standing in the middle of my workplace in stark fluorescent light for all to see, having a meltdown.

My boyfriend Bradley’s grandmother had just died, and his mother and my mother were friendly. It was plausible that my boyfriend’s mother had called my house trying to reach my mom and left a message on the answering machine mentioning her mother. My dad could have misheard it during his excessive pill-popping and got it in his head that the wrong person was dead. He had done weirder things.

The only thing I could discern was that my dad believed what he was saying. So I calmly but firmly told him to go home and that I would meet him there. I ran back to a coworker and asked them to relay to my manager that there was a family emergency and that I needed to leave right away.

* * *

“Please let my mom be okay.”

“Please let my mom be okay.”

I drove faster and it got louder. At some point I had started crying.

“Please let my mom be okay. Please, God, let my mommy be okay.”

I was yelling through sobs while speeding down narrow streets at twilight.

“PLEASE LET MY MOMMY BE OKAY. GOD PLEASE LET HER BE OKAY.”

At some point I cranked my driver’s side window down to dry the tears as I was driving. The headlights of other cars became more and more blurry. I gave maybe a glance to oncoming traffic as I powered through the last stop sign. My car hopped down the hills of the narrowing street as the woods closed in and everything darkened.

Suddenly, there was my dad’s truck in the street. It was partially in the ditch, and there was another person with a truck pulled over behind him. I came to a quick stop, pulling up behind the unknown second truck.

My dad hurried over to my car as I noticed blood on the street, pooling in front of his truck.

I manually cranked my window and shouted.

“What the fuck?” (Note: I do not actually remember saying “what the fuck” exactly, I’m sure it was something much less edgy like “what happened?” or even more probably just kind of a “WHAUFG?” sound, but the tone was definitely there.)

“I just hit a deer, it’s fine, go home.” He wiped some sweat from his forehead and waved me off.

“What?”

None of this made any sense. The tears that had been rolling down my cheeks were drying in the cold October air.

“I hit a deer. I have to take care of this, just go home.”

Then he just walked back to the front of his truck.

I took a beat and then rolled up my window and backed my car back out onto the street.

At this point I was having trouble processing information. Why would my dad stop to help with a dead deer if his wife just died? Wouldn’t he just… come home? His truck seemed fine. Someone else was there. It wasn’t far from the house. Why wouldn’t he come home? Was he so high that he had forgotten his wife died? I barely glanced at the mangled corpse of the doe laying in front of the truck as I sped past the last mile home.

In a minute I was down the last stretch of road; the prayer was back and had gotten more specific.

Please let her car be in the driveway. Please just let her car be in the driveway.

She could have gotten home since the last time I tried to call. She could be at home wondering what’s going on, or not even knowing anything is wrong. This is going to be just a crazy thing my drugged-up dad did. This will be the final straw. This will finally get her to leave him. Look at what he put me through!

* * *

I had just turned 17 two weeks ago. I had gotten our eighth cat (we lived out in the woods and they went outside in our huge backyard and woods, it was not a cat hoarding situation), a cute little black and white long-haired kitten from the SPCA, as a present at the beginning of the month. I didn’t want a party, but I did always insist on Dairy Queen ice cream cake. I allowed my mother the fanfare of putting a single candle in it and having me blow it out before my boyfriend and I grabbed our slices and retreated to my room upstairs. I didn’t believe in wishes the same way I didn’t really believe in praying. Wishing my dad would never come home was hard when he rarely left the house. But any hopeful view I had of a future was devoid of him, and I wished him gone any way possible.

I would often daydream about my mother leaving my father. There were even a few times I brought it up to my mom and she would let me try to convince her. I tried every tactic a teenager had in their arsenal. Guilt, anger, crying, logic. It obviously didn’t work, but there was always that hope that the next time would be the last time. The next fight, the next fuck-up. I would tell her we could escape. I talked about the kinds of places we could live and how we’d be free.

We had taken a few out of state drives, but I hadn’t really been anywhere. I’m sure my talk of whisking ourselves away to a new life, trying to make moving a township over sound like a jail break or a romantic grand gesture to womanhood, didn’t have much scope or imagination. But I like to think it made my mom feel like I cared, and that my wanting to leave wasn’t just because it would be better for me.

Mom had only ever lived in Pennsylvania. She grew up 30 minutes from where she bought the house we lived in. Our home was at the bottom of a hill on a winding, no lane road surrounded by acres of woodland. There were no sidewalks or street lamps, and many of the roads were still dirt. A small creek wound its way through our property, which bordered park land wilderness. I always felt this to be odd: my mother had a severe phobia of snakes, yet she made the conscious choice to buy a house in the woods next to a creek that caused a plethora of snakes, including venomous copperheads, to come very close to our door. If one was spotted, my mother would not venture outside for the rest of the day. I suspect the choice of house had to do more with her pleasing my father’s hunting hobby than anything else.

* * *

It was only a 40-something-minute drive during weekday rush hour from her school to our house. And so by the time I was careening down my street in the dark, she should have been home.

Just let the Rav4 be in the driveway.

Mom, just be home.

I approached the driveway, the headlights of my VW Rabbit illuminating the yard, the house, and the rest of the driveway as I pulled in.

Her car wasn’t there.

I pulled into my spot in the yard and ran inside.

The house was dark.

I don’t know if I went looking around the house. But I remember screaming. I screamed for her.

There was no answer.

* * *

Mom had only ever been a teacher. She explained to me once that she was really only given two options for a career: nurse or teacher. She grew up reading Nancy Drew novels and dreamed of being a private detective, but she went with teacher and settled for watching a lot of detective shows. I grew up watching a lot of Colombo and Murder, She Wrote as a result.

This is not to say that she did not love and respect teaching. She was by all accounts a good teacher who people genuinely liked. She ended up getting a job teaching special education and early elementary school (U.S. 9 to 11-year-olds, 2nd grade mostly) in the same school district she was born in.

I spent a lot of time with her at her school because she didn’t want to/couldn’t leave me at home alone with my father. I was always around helping to clean and decorate for holidays. Sometimes I would help grade tests. I remember many nights spent entertaining myself with a book or some markers and paper while my mom held her parent-teacher nights.

Every August we would drive over an hour to the “teacher store,” which was not a store where you purchase teachers but a supply store where you got things like decorative banners with ABCs on them and bulk sets of stickers and markers. (All of this was paid for out of pocket, of course. Most U.S. classroom supplies are paid for by the teachers with little reimbursement.) Mom liked having company and I was happy due to the aforementioned stickers.

Mom and a few of her fellow teachers had their picture taken for the local paper one year when their union went on strike. Mom was so excited about it and put the clipping in one of her photo books. I was too young to understand what unions were or indeed how dysfunctional the U.S. school system was and still is; only as I got older did I really understand her passion for teaching and her relationship with her students and community.

* * *

Mom dropped dead in the parking lot of her school as she was leaving to go home that afternoon.

Chapter Two

I had never been to a funeral before.

* * *

I was 5 years old and standing in my babysitter’s kitchen when I found out my mother’s father died. I don’t know if this is when my mom found out, or if it was when I was being dropped off so my mother could go to the funeral without me, most likely also without my dad. I get the feeling it was the latter, as I have a memory of being asked if I knew why my mom was sad while I was sat on a staircase petting my babysitter’s cocker spaniel, Buffy.

My mom as a baby being held by her dad and mother.

I don’t remember being sad, just upset that my mom was sad. I didn’t know much about my grandfather. He had been in the Air Force in World War II and married my grandmother two weeks after Little Boy and Fat Man were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sex and babies are a healthy, grounding thing in response to the violent trauma of war, I suppose. It makes people feel normal and in control in a world full of chaos.

Mom’s dad and mom, probably around the time they were married.

While I never got to the point of having candid discussions about anything with my grandfather, he seemed to like me well enough. He bought me a classic car Power Wheels for my 3rd birthday, and one time we went to Sesame Place. I had no other grandfathers to compare him to, as my dad’s dad was also dead, but I would say these actions indicate solid grandparenting. My mom was her parents’ only child, and her mother had died before I was born, so she was hit hard by her father’s death. To be left in the world with no one but your abusive husband and your small child couldn’t have felt great.

It made sense that my mom would keep as much pain from me as she could, though older me thinks I might have preferred the truth a little sooner. But there was no grieving process or witnessing of anyone else’s back then for me. Grandpa was just gone.

* * *

Having dealt with the dead deer, dad reappeared at the house sometime after my boyfriend and his parents showed up in response to my phone call. I had immediately retreated up to my bedroom with my boyfriend and didn’t see him come in, so I can only imagine a hilarious scenario where my dad stumbles in the front door with blood all over his hands to discover people in his living room who had just responded to a hysterical phone call from a teenage girl about a dead mom.

Either minutes or hours later (I have no concept of how long I sat in my room that night) a friend of the family who I hadn’t seen for years sat down next to me on the bed. She was a middle-aged woman named Katie (who for some reason in my memory is cast as Katie Sagal, and that is why her name is Katie in this story) whose husband was hunting/drinking buddies with my dad. They had lived right up the street for most of my childhood and I had spent a lot of time at their house when I was really young. I played my first video game on their son’s Atari and they had those Christmas lights with the bubbles in them that are filled with methylene chloride. And their dad was a drunk, too.

I assume my dad had just started calling phone numbers of anyone he knew, and I guess Katie felt she had enough history with me (or at least my mother, as being the wife of a shitty man is often a bonding experience for women) to come and try to help. I know she told me something about how much my mother loved me (everyone but my dad said this, it was the go-to sentiment) and probably some other stuff she thought was helpful. After this, I don’t ever remember seeing her again.

* * *

As a kid, there were often nights that I ended up sleeping on the couch, usually because I was watching TV and my mother was not one to limit my TV watching (or candy eating, or soda drinking…) So one night when I was about seven, Katie was ushered past me on the couch in the dark, back towards the kitchen. There was no door or walls between where I was and where they were, so I overheard enough to tell that this was not a happy surprise visit in the middle of the night. She was crying and upset, and people walked back and forth a few times past me. The voices eventually got quieter/calmer and I drifted back to sleep. Katie wasn’t there when I woke up.

What had happened, I later was told, was that Katie’s husband had gotten drunk (like most nights in a lot of homes) and pulled a knife on her in their kitchen. She managed to escape, and either drove or ran to our house for help. Her two teenage children were still in the house, and my dad was recruited to go to their house and assess the situation. I don’t have any memories of anyone calling the police, yet we called animal control at least once for rabid raccoons, and I feel like those are less dangerous than drunken men with knives.

* * *

Other people were in and out of the house, some probably checking on me while I cried or slept, which were the only two things I could really do. I maybe managed to make a cup of tea at one point. But a day or two later I was told to clean myself up and get in the car because we had to go to the funeral home and discuss the details of the funeral.

My dad had since picked up my mother’s Rav4 from the parking lot where she died, and that’s what we took to the funeral home. We met some other people there, and my dad and I were escorted into the coffin showroom.

Yes, the coffin showroom.

Maybe you’ve seen a coffin showroom depicted in film or TV. Maybe you’ve had the opportunity yourself to hang out in one, either because you, too, have had to oversee the funeral of a loved one, or you know someone who works in a funeral home. If you haven’t, it’s probably what you’d expect from something called a coffin showroom (though I think they use the less morbid term “casket” and either “display” or “selection” room). It is a dimly lit room with no windows, filled with empty coffins. A creepy person in a suit shows them to you like you are choosing a new car or a mattress, but it’s a wooden box for the dead body left behind by someone you cared about. It is excessively creepy. And I feel like of all the things you want to put a child through who just lost a parent, this is not one of them.

If my mother had been around, she never would have let me go to pick out coffins.

After meandering listlessly behind my dad and the coffin salesman as they maneuvered between the corpse crates, we were led past a large fish tank (because why wouldn’t the calming presence of fish in a glass box ease the anxiety of coffin shopping?) into another room with a conference table where we sat down to discuss the funeral.

This was when I found out that my mother was going to be cremated. For one thing, this made being subjected to the coffin showroom seem egregious since she was just going to be incinerated and not buried in a box. For another thing, mom had never said a word about being cremated to me. She had taken me to her parent’s graves, where they were buried, in the ground. So I had no reason to believe that she didn’t want to be buried in the same manner.

This was also when I found out that my father had denied allowing an autopsy. My mother had dropped dead and her death had been ruled “natural causes,” but that was it. There was no actual cause named. And now they were going to burn her body so no one could ever find out.

I raged at the idea that my father was the authority in any situation, the sole arbiter of my lifelong mourning experience. He was taking the last permanent thing I thought I would have – a grave to visit. It had nothing to do with her or her wishes; she was dead and I didn’t care what happened to her corpse. I just wanted there to be something left, somewhere to visit, somewhere near her parents who she loved. But he was going to put her in a vase.

Maybe this was the plan all along, I thought. Maybe my dad had somehow caused my mother’s death. Sure, she had been sick, but…

Okay, she had been sick a lot.

Actually, she’d been in the hospital for tests the day before she died.

* * *

Mom was actively trying to find out why she wasn’t well. She was anemic, would lose consciousness, had horrific menstrual cramps, migraines, and a litany of other symptoms. Maybe as many things were wrong with her as were/are wrong with me, and that’s a lot. I’m such a sickyface. But her health always took a backseat to mine, and it took her a while to start caring about herself.

The day before she died, she had a test scheduled at the hospital. It was a scan where they inject you with dye and then take pictures of your insides. And you aren’t supposed to eat anything for 12 hours before or drive yourself. Since I was homeschooled (we’ll get to that later), I was free to be my mom’s ride to the hospital. She drove us there and we parked and found our way to the correct wing. She checked in and we sat in a waiting room while she filled out forms. There was a waiver explaining the risks of the procedure, and she paused at it.

She was worried. Something about it had her worried.

“You don’t have to do it.” I told her. I could tell she was anxious. “There’s other tests, I’m sure. If this is making you uncomfortable, don’t do it.”

Maybe she was feeling crappy from low blood sugar from not eating since the night before. Maybe one of the waivers had some particularly alarming language. My mom wasn’t one to be afraid of doctors; she was taking me to one at least every few weeks for years. But for some reason, this was freaking her out.

I repeated that it wasn’t a big deal if she didn’t want to do it, because she looked like she wanted an out. She seemed to be leaning towards skipping the procedure and collecting her things when a nurse came out and called her name.

“Oh, hi!” The high-pitched tenor of a woman recognizing a fellow woman acquaintance burst forth from the nurse as she and my mother locked gaze. The nurse turned out to be someone she knew from her AlAnon meetings.

My mom told the nurse that she was feeling a little iffy about the test, and the nurse proceeded to calm her nerves and get her to agree to it. Mom genuinely seemed calmed, and I was sent off to occupy myself for an hour while she had the test done.

I went down to the car, killed some time, and eventually drove down the street to the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts to pick up a hot chocolate and a chocolate glazed donut. I was just getting through the drive-thru when I got the phone call that mom was finished and ready to go.

Soon she was in the car, this time in the passenger seat.

She made a vague complaint about being hungry and needing to eat soon, as I carefully maneuvered out of the hospital parking lot. I offered her the chocolate donut that was sitting in its paper bag between our seats. Usually she stayed away from extra sugary treats, but this time she thanked me and happily ate the donut as she tried not to critique my driving too much on the way home.

The next day, she was dead.

If she were to have had a reaction to the dye she was injected with, it would most likely have happened instantly. Not 30 hours later. But now I’d never know how she died. And my dad was just allowed to do that. That was it. No autopsy. No grave.

I voiced nearly none of these thoughts and complaints out loud. I quietly brought up that I had never heard my mother mention wanting to be cremated while we were sitting at that conference table debating flowers and music choices, but the adults immediately talked over me. I could tell I was not going to be permitted to make any funeral decisions, and I was really bitter about being forced along through the entire process.

* * *

One of my dad’s brothers was diagnosed with cancer when I was 8. The 80’s and 90’s weren’t a great time to have cancer, and he declined quickly. One evening, my mother brought me into the living room to sit on the arm of the couch so she could brush my hair. As she brushed, she asked me a question.

“Ginny, do you know what suicide is?”

“Yes!” I answered, eager to please at that age. “That’s when you kill yourself. Only stupid people kill themselves.”

I was so confident in my correctness. I’m sure that somewhere along the way, I was told that it was stupid to stick your finger in an electric socket or walk on train tracks. These are stupid things that would kill you, and so killing yourself must be something that stupid people do.

This was perhaps not the answer my mother was looking for. I think she just wanted to know how to frame the next part of this exchange which would be, after an extended pause, “Well, your Aunt Lacey committed suicide…”

Aunt Lacey couldn’t take watching Uncle Jamie suffer and die, so she shot herself in the head with the handgun they kept in their apartment in New Jersey. Uncle Jamie gave out to cancer 5 days later.

As my mother told me this, I was sitting 5 feet from a gun case. And this wasn’t some safe with a combination lock and a heavy metal door. This was a wood and glass display case that housed multiple guns of various types. There may have been a lock on it, but if there was, it was useless. A toddler could have punched through that glass if they really wanted to.

I don’t remember ever being told not to touch the guns, though I’m sure I must have been given that talk. Guns, camouflage, the whole hunter culture was forced on me at a young age, but past 5 years old I rejected it. I never liked guns, and certainly never had an urge to touch them. I was what they called a “tomboy” but I wasn’t into guns, or gross things, and certainly not dead animals. I loved animals. I consider it a large stroke of luck that having a multitude of guns in a household with a mentally ill drug addict and a small child did not result in disaster.

I was properly scared of guns, despite what this menacing expression might be conveying.

I didn’t attend either Aunt Lacey or Uncle Jamie’s funerals, either. I assume that Aunt Lacey’s was closed casket.

* * *

My mom’s body was laid out a day or two before the funeral proper so close family and whoever could come and talk to it for a bit. I don’t know what religion or culture this is from, besides vaguely Christian. We were technically Baptist I guess, but we weren’t religious past a vague, superstitious belief in God, and even mom had finally given up going to church. There were 3 other kids in my Sunday School class when I was younger and we just went out for donuts, mostly. So whatever made it normal to have your mom’s corpse in a box on display so you can talk to it privately – I declare it to be goddamn creepy. I thought it was creepy then, and I think it’s creepy now. Stop doing this.

I was dragged to the funeral home again, and not for the last time. I got as far as sitting outside of the room where she was lying in the box, but I did not go inside. I had nothing to say to the chemical-filled corpse that once housed my mother and was soon to be incinerated, and I refused to have a memory of my mother’s dead face living in my head forever. And it turns out my instincts were 100% correct on this, as I’ve since become familiar with several other people who have had to be in a room with a dead body and it was reported back that it was not a pleasant experience that they would wish to repeat.

I very much got why mom hadn’t taken me to a funeral before.

* * *

Mom had died at the end of October and we had to avoid not holding the funeral on Halloween, which just added an extra surreal sheen to the entire situation. I guess it was good that we lived back in the woods where trick-or-treaters wouldn’t be bothering us for candy. I drove myself to the service in my VW Rabbit, passing yard decorations of grim reapers and ghosts on the way.

A lot of people came to my mother’s funeral. I don’t know the number, but it was a really big room they filled up. I stood by the main entrance to the building while people started to arrive, trying to remain inconspicuous but not rude. A lot of people recognized me that I didn’t know. Teachers and friends of my mother I hadn’t seen since I was younger, friends from AlAnon, former students and parents of students, all with the same story to tell me.

“Your mother loved you so much.”

“You are all she ever talked about.”

“She cared about you more than anything.”

I nodded. I politely smiled. I gave hugs when they wanted. I said thank you.

I just wanted it to be over. I don’t know what is helpful or healing about a bunch of adults being polite and sad at you. People grieve at you, not with you. I was putting myself on display for some weird grieving ritual that I was not able to participate in, because my entire life had just been thrown into the trash, and I wasn’t interested in listening to a bunch of people talk about my mom like they cared about her or me. I would never see any of these people again.

I was supposed to sit in the front row directly in front of the casket, but I stuck to my “no looking at dead moms” rule and stood outside the door in the back. Enough people were blocking my view of the body, and no one would be looking at me. I was burning with rage and fear on the inside, but I was somehow also numb enough to go along with what people told me to do. Because what else can you do?

After the service there was a meal at some place with some people. I spent as much time there as I needed to, not really attempting to eat. I don’t eat when I’m depressed (or anxious, or even the least bit ill in any way). I escaped and went home to have sex with my boyfriend, still in my black dress. That was the only normal thing I had left.

Chapter Three

Travel Log: The Southern Alleghenies

Because mom was a teacher back when you could still make a living by being a teacher, she had summers off just like me and wasn’t forced to work a second job. But we also didn’t have the financial (or emotional, if dad was included) resources for trips anywhere fancy or far. There was never talk of places like Disney or the Grand Canyon, and I somehow knew to never ask for or about it.

But we did still go places.

Every summer, from age 7 until maybe 12, Mom would pack me up in the car and take me to Altoona (her dead mother’s hometown) and Boswell (her dead father’s hometown) and the general area for her father’s school reunion and other various old people meet-ups. Just what every young girl wants to do with her summer vacation.

A bugle corps posing in front of the Highland Inn which burned down in 1909. I assume that’s why it’s on a postcard?

The drive was mostly toll roads, and a couple of places where you need to drive under mountains through long tunnels that went on for miles. (My mother was a bit claustrophobic and this was not her favorite part of the drive.) One year it rained so hard that my mom had to pull over and wait out a storm as we came out of one of the tunnels. That was maybe the most exciting thing I remember happening on these trips. That, and one time having to fetch someone who worked at a department store we went into because my mom had gotten sick. Every once in a while, mom would just get sick.

Once we arrived, we would stay in a cheap motel or on the couch of a distant relative. It was a small group of people who had gone to school together in the 1920s that dwindled to only 6 or 7 left by the time we stopped going. I don’t know if that meant they stopped meeting, they all died, or my mother just stopped wanting to go. I think there was a great aunt we stayed with at one point whose house was very pink inside and had a lot of stuffed animals and dolls and everything smelled old.

Had I been older, maybe I could have appreciated hanging out with people who had fought Nazis in WWII. But to me it was just grey, boring places filled with grey, boring faces that I had to be polite to. It was a lonely trip; not child-hostile places, but not child-friendly either. More like child-boring. And there was only so much money we could spend on batteries for my Gameboy.

The most exciting place in the area was Horseshoe Curve, a bit of railroad that curves around a bit of mountain. Some Nazis were planning to blow it up during WWII, and there’s a visitor’s center. I think I got a souvenir conductor hat.

Me and grandpa standing in front of a train at Horseshoe Curve.

It’s hard to work out what was real and what was a misheard story, or two stories remembered wrong. This one sounds like the subject of some kitschy documentary that’ll get remade into a film starring Steve Carell. I very clearly remember meeting an old man who painted rocks. I think his name started with S. Could have been a first name or a last name, I have no idea. But this old dude painted rocks. Like, small, fit-in-your-hand rocks that would be good for skipping on large ponds. And he painted various things on these rocks like landscapes or squirrels or whatever, and gave them to people. And if you just wrote his name (again, whatever that S name was) and the 5-digit zip code where he lived, the post office would deliver to him. So people would send him letters from all over the world and he would paint rocks for them. He had started doing this in the war or something. All of the old people we knew were part of “the war” one way or another.

I know there is some sort of story here. If someone in Somerset County (I think that’s where this was?) can figure this out, let me know. Because I’m pretty sure there was a dude, who must be 110 or dead by now, who would get letters from all around the world for painting on rocks. That’s cute. That’s a kitchy NPR podcast story.

When you are 8 years old and your friends are telling you about their trip to Disney or the Grand Canyon, you don’t want to tell them you spent part of your summer with your mom meeting old people and one of them painted rocks for pen-pals. Later in life it sounds interesting enough to put in a book. Perspective is weird.

I didn’t like being mom’s only companion on these old people tours. Being her only family meant I felt both idealized and oppressed. I was the reason she stayed with my dad, but staying with dad meant having to come on the trips anyway. I was the reason we endured abuse, and also I couldn’t be left alone with the abuser? I should have been the reason we left, not the reason we stayed and just took shitty road trips in the Alleghenies sometimes.

I would have been less annoyed by the cross-county excursions to visit old people if we weren’t fleeing and returning to my dad. I would have said let’s go twice a year if it meant we could have rid ourselves of him. But those types of negotiations never went anywhere. The most I could do was guilt a new toy out of my mom for the inconvenience, because I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to understand that she was hauling me across the state because she wanted to feel connected to her family that was all dead but for me. She was scared and alone, which also happened to be the reason she wouldn’t leave him.

Chapter Four

I had to start school again a couple weeks after my mom’s funeral. We were starting to get phone calls about it, and I was trying to push it as far as I could. And by start school again I mean continue being educated in my own home by tutors provided by the school district (and supplemented with classes at the local community college). I hadn’t been to school in the sense of getting on a bus and going to a building filled with other kids since the middle of junior high, aside from an attempt at high school for the first few weeks of 10th grade.

There was no requirement that I be seen by any mental health professionals. There wasn’t even a phone call from a guidance counselor to check up on me. I had to start with my tutors again or I’d be kicked out and need to be re-evaluated for my homeschool situation (which meant making doctor’s appointments I didn’t have the authority to make, with money I didn’t have, on the health insurance policy of a dead woman). The risk of being stuck in a house with my dad and without a high school diploma for any time longer than necessary wasn’t worth it.

* * *

Before the teenage years hit, I liked school. I didn’t love it, but I was very good at it. Mostly because my mom did a lot of work prepping me, and the rest because the system was set up for kids like me. I was already reading by 3 and writing in cursive by 5. My mother knew what education meant in my younger years and used her teacher network to get me into a year of Montessori preschool which I really liked (except for nap time).

One day we had a bring your pets show-and-tell day and someone brought a horse. They brought a fuckin’ horse onto the wood-chipped playground. My mom had gotten the day off work to put our cat, Mooch, in a carrier and bring him to school. But you can imagine most everyone felt a bit upstaged by the horse. I don’t know how much my mother (and grandfather) paid to get me in for just that one year of preschool, but it was enough to be going to school with people who owned horses and could take the day to bring a horse to visit a pre-school.

My time in elementary school was mostly positive. Though, there was the nuclear power plant that we could see from our playground, which didn’t make for pleasant scenery. There were drills for what to do if there was a “meltdown”. I wouldn’t compare this to the traumatic active shooter drills currently forced on our kids in the U.S. right now, but I probably could have done without the nagging fear of being a victim in the next Chernobyl.

Me in my mandatory gym outfit that never did get very dirty due to my various doctor’s notes.

(And while we’re on about existential dread, I’d like to point out that as a child I felt like Ferngully: The Last Rainforest meant that the grown-ups had this whole environmental/climate thing under control. Way to fuck that up, grown-ups.)

I was in all the “advanced” classes including the special vocal ensemble, advanced art class, and the highest level math classes, and then within a year I was unable to even go to classes for more than a few days at a time.

* * *

It was only later that I realized how many symptoms of various mental and emotional issues were manifesting as obsessive or stimulation habits. For a long period of time, between around 7 years old and 12 years old, I had a problem with where my feet pointed. I had some sort of mental hang-up where I didn’t feel comfortable having my feet pointed toward something I didn’t like.

My hair had to be pulled back exactly and if it didn’t feel even or became that way throughout the day, I would become extremely anxious and wouldn’t be able to do anything until it felt better. I have more than one memory of going up to teachers when I was very young and asking them to fix my hair before I was old enough to do it. This still bothers me sometimes when my hair is in a ponytail. (You’ll notice throughout this book that there are no photos of me with my hair down, because none exist.)

I would chew the side of my tongue, shake my legs, pick my cuticles. (I still do all of these, why am I saying “would”?) I know some of these were picked-up habits from my mom. I can still hear my dad mocking my mother in the other room: “You picking your feet again?” Any time I touch my bare foot, I hear that voice.

I managed to “grow out of” some of these things, or they lessened greatly over time. I don’t point my feet away from things anymore, but every now and then I still get the impulse.

It wasn’t until the transition from elementary to junior high that things started to affect my performance in school. I still enjoyed the learning part, but the social part was immediately taking its toll. My quirky disposition, coupled with being sick and missing school all the time, made me a target for all sorts of things. There’s nothing like compounding the trauma of teenage anxiety and depression with daily performative social interactions.

I also had trouble being away from home for any amount of time. I always felt like I needed to be home, even though home was where my dad was and I decidedly didn’t want to be around him. I’ve never figured it out. To this day, I have horrific, sweating through clothes and feeling like I’m gonna barf kind of anxiety when trying to leave the house. I don’t know why, but I always feel like I’m in a game of tag and home is “base.” That relief of closing and locking your door behind you when you come home is a special kind of good feeling.

I was diagnosed with depression at 13. I cried a lot. I slept a lot. I struggled to get along socially at school, but most of the kids were horrible. By 8th grade, half of my mornings began with my guidance counselor having to come out to my mother’s car in the parking lot and coax me out of the back seat with the promise of only needing to go to their office or the nurse’s office and chill out. My mother often ended up late for work, not to mention emotionally drained before 8am. And I was getting physically ill all the time. At this point it became a chicken or egg question. Was the mental and emotional abuse at home making me so sick I couldn’t go to school? Or was being so sick and missing school all the time so stressful that I was too stressed out to go to school? Whatever the reasons, I clearly could not physically, mentally, or emotionally handle going to school anymore.

* * *

Sometimes my home school tutors were young student and substitute teachers, and they were always the nicest. My math teacher one year just dropped off tests with me and would pick them up the next week. She and I had a private understanding that neither of us wanted to waste the other’s time, and not in an unfriendly way. Other tutors weren’t so nice, and they were mostly the full-time teachers who felt put-out by having to come to my house and/or didn’t understand why they had to. But either way I got to sleep in and only worry about school for a couple hours a day and that’s hard to complain about.

Though, while being afforded the accommodation of home schooling made things easier in general, having people come into your home days after your parent dies to ask you where you are in your Social Studies reading and math worksheets was as awkward as you can believed. And it was only one week before we’d be off a week for Thanksgiving anyway. Couldn’t I just have a few more days? I was tired. I was in shock. I was in the midst of a near-constant panic attack that was lasting weeks.

All this while my dad was being peak dad, high as hell, hovering around the dining room table we were sat at and hoping one of my tutors would pay him some attention because he had a narcissistic habit of extracting validation from strangers by roping them into listening to carefully edited sob stories about how hard his life was. It was not a conducive learning environment. But it was this or no diploma and so the tutors came and went that week.

* * *

I had been in and out of counseling, since I was 10. First, my mom had convinced my dad and I to go with her to family counseling. Sometimes I was made to sit outside of the room in a dimly-lit, burnt orange waiting room while the therapist or counselor or whoever talked to my parents without me. Mom soon gave up on trying to get my dad to do anything, and concentrated all her efforts on me. I saw multiple therapists but I wasn’t getting any “better.” Instead, I was starting to fight back.

One of the major symptoms of my depression (and really, “depression” could be interchanged with “living with my father”) was anger. It was frustration that had welled up inside me from 14 years of being a victim of and witness to abuse. Being in a powerless situation for long enough will make most anyone snap.

I started to physically lash out. I would slam doors. I once broke our glass front door with a booted kick. At barely more than 5 feet tall and at most 96 pounds, there was only so much damage I could do. But I knew not to use my feeble arms and wrists and instead used my newly-aquired punk aesthetic to give my feet the steel-toed enhancement they needed to truly do damage.

Due to the general rage that had set in, I was taken to a psychiatrist and put on Zoloft. I was on it for a month, maybe two, before I realized that I wasn’t angry anymore. In fact, it dulled just about everything. I felt like nothing. Soon, I was upset over the fact that I wasn’t upset. My father wasn’t being any less terrible to me or my mother. Our situation wasn’t any better. But I couldn’t react to it anymore. And the injustice of being drugged into submission so I could endure more abuse became unacceptable to me in a very short period of time. I stopped taking the drugs and my mother went looking for other options.

Mom was struggling with me struggling. At one point she contemplated sending me away to live somewhere else, which I took as a horrific insult. I still kind of do. I just could not imagine what sounded to me like choosing her abusive, drug-addicted husband over her only child who didn’t do any drugs or abuse anyone. I wasn’t the one who needed fixing.

Well, I needed some fixing, but I wasn’t the one who needed to leave.

* * *

And as it turned out, I was right and that one week back before the holiday was a bad idea.

Chapter Five

It was probably one of my tutors who got me sick. In hindsight it was probably silly to have assumed that an emotional trauma coupled with flu season would not have adverse health repercussions on a 17-year-old girl with known chronic health issues. And let’s not discount neglect either, because no one was there to see if I was eating or generally functioning as a person. (I was not.)

So just after a week of awkward meetings with my tutors after my mother’s death, I was laying on the couch in the living room in my pajamas struggling to breathe. My asthma inhaler wasn’t helping, and every time I coughed, pain tore through my chest, which escalated my panic and caused me to cry more, which made me cough more. I wheezed through enough tears to convince my father to get me in his truck and take me to the hospital.

I only now give thought to what he must have been thinking, having to drive with his 17-year-old daughter, struggling to breathe, racing to the same hospital where he had been called not a month ago to see his dead wife. It’s hard because I don’t know how sober he was that night. It may have affected him, but I can’t know how deeply or in what way. Maybe it was one of the most traumatic nights of his life. Or maybe he was glad of another sob story to tell.

I look so healthy on the outside.

When I was between pre-school and around 8 years old I would get what I guess would be called a whooping cough several times a year, and it would last for weeks. I sounded like a wounded sea lion barking in distress. I was sent home from school at least once because while I was no longer contagiously sick, the sound of my coughing was so loud it was disrupting class.

Many of my sick days were spent with large sippy cups filled with hot tea and large dollops of honey, sitting in my parents’ bed watching TV shows like The A-Team and Jem. I had a metal Strawberry Shortcake TV tray for when I could eat soup or ice cream. Mom had to miss some days of work because leaving me at home alone with my dad wasn’t always the safest option, as I think I mentioned. One day when I was home sick and my mom ventured to work, Dad couldn’t figure out how to heat a can of soup to feed me.

As I aged out of the whooping cough, I graduated into having asthma. Unlike the majority of asthma sufferers, my asthma did not improve with age. Rescue inhalers, peakflow meters, and almost dying a lot was almost made up for by routinely getting out of gym class activities with doctor’s notes. It quickly progressed to what my latest ER doctor called “severe and life-threatening.”

I was 12 years old when the chronic bronchitis began. By 14, I was missing at least a week per month of school. For years I was given antibiotics to the point that they no longer helped so now my body couldn’t fight off anything anymore.

* * *

My next memory after crying on the couch in the living room is being on a stretcher in the hospital, still in my pajama pants, vomiting green fluid all over the floor of the ER. They had given me a nebulizer (a machine that turns albuterol or other medicine in liquid form into vapor you breathe in from a tube) to suck on. I guess whatever concoction they had put into the nebulizer was green-tinted and when that and all the mucus loosened up from my throat, some of it must have hit my empty stomach and – wheeee – neon green liquid vomit!

Eventually I was put in a room in the critical care ward. I was critical but stable, pneumonia with asthma complications. I was a little confused because I was being treated like I was very sick, but I felt just as sick as I often felt. I now recognize that I was just deathly ill a lot more than anyone wanted to tell me, but back then I didn’t know.

I was given a private room, my own TV and VCR to watch anime on, and I was allowed to have Chinese food brought in the next day. I was coming to realize that those are things they let people who are dying get away with, not just anyone with a dead teacher’s health insurance. Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that my father had disappeared after dropping me in the emergency room. Maybe they felt bad for me? Who knows.

After a few days I was finally moved out of critical care and into a regular room up a few flights. This meant I was treated a little more like a “normal” patient, but it also meant endless awkward interactions when a nurse would ask me things like “What are you doing for Christmas?” and “Are you expecting any visitors?” My boyfriend came by when he could, although I wasn’t really encouraging it as I hadn’t showered in days and probably looked and smelled as bad as I felt. My dad wasn’t calling or coming to check on me at all. There were days I didn’t see anyone but doctors and nurses who gave me polite smiles and no answers.

And then David started calling.

David worked at the department store with me. He had asked me out when I first started working there, and I had said no. I had told him I had a boyfriend. But I was eager to be liked, and what was wrong with being friends with older guys? I could take care of myself, and I was a cool girl. These were all things I told myself as to why I behaved as I did; honestly, I was yielding and friendly to most men because they were men, and you never want to make men angry at you. I had, in fact, no desire to be friends with him. He was not very smart, or interesting, or nice, or good-looking. But I gave in because it was the safest route at the time.

And so we were “friends”. He was making a point to check up on me when I came back to work after my mom’s death. I was asked by other coworkers on his behalf how I was.

When he got word that I was in the hospital, he decided he had to come visit me. Because he cared. Of course, an adult man cannot just come visit a 17-year-old girl in the hospital. At least, this was the rule we were operating under. I don’t actually remember if anyone could come visit me during visiting hours or not. But I definitely told him he couldn’t. So while I had to field multiple phone calls to my hospital room from him trying to find a way in to see me, I could at least feign my lack of control over the situation.

After a week, I was starting to get antsy. I wanted to go home. I had always had considerable anxiety about not being able to leave somewhere when I wanted, and I was worried about what was happening at home. I wanted to check on the cats. I wanted to be back in my bedroom. I wanted to go back into hiding. I finally had enough energy to worry again. But according to my doctors, my oxygen count was too low.

* * *

I was 7 or 8 when I was given one of those allergy tests where they pin prick you with a smattering of allergens and sit you in a room to see which parts of you react. I don’t think there was one thing I didn’t react to. Dust. Mold. Horses. I was allergic to animals, plants, and what pretty much came to just, the air. I spent a lot of my time either sneezing or being groggy from medication.

By 5th grade I had a huge, round air purifier in my room, plastic pillow cases, and all the carpet ripped up in my room. I was supposedly allergic to all animals, but we had always had cats (and hamsters, and guinea pigs). They just weren’t supposed to be in my room anymore.

And then came the allergy shots. I would have to go to the doctor’s office every 2 weeks, have a nurse stab my arm with an enormous needle that would make my bicep swell with a giant, beanbag-sized welt, and then sit there for an hour to make sure my body didn’t have a bad reaction. This went on for over a year or so before I convinced my mother to let me stop because we had seen zero improvement.

There wasn’t a week I wasn’t on an antibiotics or steroids, coupled with loads of antihistamines and cough syrup. My asthma was (is) triggered multiple times a day. It was not only sensitive to any perceived allergen, but could also be set off by physical exertion, laughing, humidity changes or just cold air.

I was not what anyone would call “healthy” at any point.

I was allowed to eat cake or candy or cookies every day, so birthday cake probably wasn’t even that special.

No one in my house had a healthy relationship with food, and yet for the thousands of doctor’s visits we went on, no one talked about what I ate. My family wasn’t food insecure. There was always a can or two of Chef Boyardee or a box of Kraft mac and cheese in the cupboard. But my diet up until my teenage years was canned or boxed pasta, candy, soda, hot dogs and pizza, and I don’t know what came first – my strange eating habits or my food options.

Mom sustained herself on plain pasta, sometimes with fake butter (my dad and I got real butter), and salads while counting Weight Watcher points and going to weigh-ins. I wouldn’t eat fast food, but sometimes she would get a McDonald’s Happy Meal so I could have the toy and she could have the food, and get a tiny Diet Coke (with “extra ice” so she could chew on the ice, which was a compulsion she had that’s similar to pica). Dad ate whatever and had his own personal glass salt shaker that was almost the size of a 40 with an avocado green top that didn’t so much shake salt onto his food as it did pour it out of ten large holes. Piles of salt on steaks, pizza, grapefruit – anything. I’ve never met anyone else with their own special salt shaker.

I inherited my dad’s metabolism and body type, which meant I could eat bags of candy and chug soda with no implications to my weight, and so that’s what I was allowed to do. (Unfortunately I also got my dad’s teeth and no amount of brushing can combat tooth enamel that acts like drywall.) I can’t imagine my diet did any good for my actual health, but no one really thought that far into it. No one cooked. My breakfast was a Tastycake, my lunch was a thermos of Spaghetti-Os, then when I got home it was candy and whatever I could microwave. Sometimes there was a breakfast with eggs, which I liked because I could share it with one of my cats who really liked eggs. No one ever made a pancake or waffle in my house, not even the frozen kind. That’s weird, right? Kids on TV are always eating stacks of pancakes.

* * *

So while I wasn’t nearly as picky of an eater at 17 years old than I did was at 8, I wasn’t able to eat much at the hospital on top of being sick and depressed anyway. I hadn’t eaten and was so stressed to the point where I didn’t use the bathroom except to pee for the entire time I was there. It took a lot of explaining but eventually I got them to believe me that I just didn’t eat much and I’d eat more when I got home. I didn’t mention not going to the bathroom, for fear they’d keep me longer and make me eat more hospital food.

Finally my oxygen count was high enough that I was given permission to go home, and somehow my father was summoned. He didn’t come in to get me. Instead I was given all of the medication instructions, allowed to change, and wheeled out to the door where my dad pulled up in his truck.

It was afternoon when we got home. Dad pulled in the driveway but didn’t park. Instead, he told me he had to run some errands and he’d be back. I remember just being tired and desperate to be back home so I crawled out of the truck, in the same pajama bottoms I had left in, and he peeled backwards into the street and pulled away. I pet one of the cats on the way in the door and I headed straight up the stairs to my room.

I unlatched the door (it was just a flimsy attic door made of a couple planks of wood and a hook-in-eye latch) to find my room in shambles. Ramshackle would be a proper description. Shades on the windows hanging crooked. A poster ripped partially from the wall. Drawers open with clothing exploding out, a couple of drawers completely uncoupled from the dresser. I stumbled around the room trying to figure out what had happened, and was confounded for a few minutes until I found my green, plastic Sanrio Keroppi wallet laying empty on top of my dresser.

I grabbed some clean pajamas and went downstairs to the bathroom. I still remember the smell of the hospital that had seeped into my clothes and my skin. It smelled like old chemicals and sick sweat. I have never been someone that enjoys showering much, mostly because hot water often aggravates my asthma and it’s hard to relax when you can’t breathe. But when you’re pumped full of breathing treatments and steroids and you haven’t bathed in 8 or 9 days, a shower feels great.

I spent a good, long time in the bathroom that afternoon. My bedroom and the bathroom were the two rooms in the house I felt safe and my bedroom had just gotten knocked off that list.

Dad, of course, had taken off the minute I was out of the truck so he wouldn’t have to deal with me finding my room looking like a werewolf had transformed inside of it. When he came home hours later, the explanation I got was that he needed money for his “prescriptions,” and that the rest of my complaints were exaggerated. I was used to the gaslighting and having just got home from nearly dying in the hospital, I didn’t have the energy to fight it. I told him to pay me back and went back up to my room, pulling my dresser in front of the door once I was inside.

Chapter Six

Travel Log: Amusement Parks

While there was no Disneyland or Disneyworld or Disney whatever (I never remember which is which, which seems to really upsets people who like Disneyland. Or World. Whichever.), Pennsylvania has its own amazing theme park in Lancaster county called Dutch Wonderland.

80s Dutch Wonderland sticker

Before you get confused, the Pennsylvania Dutch people are not, in fact, Dutch. They were German (Deutsch or Deitsch, which was the dialect spoken) immigrants from the 1600s and 1700s that settled most of southern PA, and only a percentage of them were Anabaptist (present day Amish). I’m German/Austrian via a pair of great-grandparents, but they didn’t head to the states until a little over 100 years ago (or so said Ancestry,com that one time I could afford to use it).

Aside from the location, the Amish branding of Dutch Wonderland was more than a little strange and haphazard, but I guess that’s to be expected from a small amusement park built by a potato farmer in 1963. The front of the park was a false stone “castle” wall at the entrance that if I remember correctly took you through the gift shop– castles and gift shops being famously Amish..?

There were things like the “Silo Slide,” which was a small silo that you (you being a child of age 4 to 8) climbed up steps inside and then went down on a slide that wrapped around the outside. There was also “The Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe Slide” which was smaller, and the “Giant Slide” which was, as you guessed, a bit bigger. So, a lot of slides.

One attraction was the “Dutch Wonder House” where you sat on a bench inside a tiny house and the house rotated like a reverse porch swing around. This one could be disorienting, and I don’t think my mom liked it very much. My mom enjoyed riding the “Sky Ride” which was just a ski lift type deal that you could hop on and off around the park, or just stay on it and cruise the whole park around however many times you wanted to.

My mom and I also loved this simulator ride they had called the “Astroliner” that had different movies/scenarios it would play (I assume they were all space themed) while shaking and bouncing around to whatever was happening on screen. I have a very vivid memory of my mom and I finding one of these scenes to be just the funniest/most hilarious thing we had ever seen. It was something about being on a spaceship and then crashing to Earth and chasing some alien thing. We went on that ride three or four times that trip and would just come out giggling.

At the time, the park was surrounded by pasture, cows lazily chewing grass a few yards from little kids on log flumes. There was also a fake cow you could milk water out of. You could bring your own food and sit at the plentiful picnic tables. I’ve been to Disneyland since and it was not nearly as fun.

I also got to go to Sesame Place, but only once when Grandpa was still alive (probably because he paid for it), so I only have vague memories of things like posing in a bathtub with Ernie and his rubber ducky. My mom loved Bert and Ernie. My third or fourth Halloween she dressed me up as Ernie and she was Bert. Mom was very positive about Sesame Street and PBS in general, and so was/am I. Also, Muppets. We were a Muppet family.

2nd birthday.

Appetizing?

I don’t have a single bad memory from these places because dad wasn’t there. When I was little, I was always so hurt by how my dad never came to my recitals or my art shows, never wanted to see my straight A report card or asked about my day. I didn’t notice how much better we were without him.

The amount of energy my mother poured into being “okay” for me was nearly endless. She tried so hard to be “normal” and have us do “normal” things. At home she cried a lot, but out in the world, she was always on. Always friendly. Always making jokes. She used her silliness to mask her pain and make sure others around her weren’t uncomfortable. We call that emotional labor, now.

But also, my mom was just weird and silly because she was a fun person when she wasn’t being tormented, and thank fuck for that. Mom and I had fun together. And while the rest of the world is currently drowning in irony, I am grateful to have learned how to genuinely enjoy things and sometimes be able to communicate with others without several layers of nihilism and snark.

Chapter Seven

When I made it back from the hospital I had maybe two weeks left before the Christmas break. I was very obviously not okay, but no one really seemed to notice. Or they did but decided to treat me like I was okay. It was kind of like being gaslight by everyone in the world at the same time. My only real parent had died, I had nearly died, I was in the care of a drug addict, and no one thought to ask if maybe that wasn’t the best situation for me to be in.

There’s a line in Eddie Izzard’s stand-up show Glorious where he’s talking about Princess Diana’s death “My Mum died when I was six, my brother was eight, and no one gave a shit!” This line often echoes in my head.

* * *

Dad was in and out of rehab since I can remember, first for alcoholism. By age 3, my mom was buying me stuffed animals and telling me they were gifts from my dad because he wasn’t around for weeks at a time. She would tell me he visited while I was sleeping when really he was detoxing in a facility somewhere. We would “go see daddy in the hospital” a lot. Daddy was sick. Daddy was in a place to get better. Sometimes the places we’d visit did look like medical facilities with everyone in sweatpants or hospital gowns, and separate waiting rooms and visiting rooms. Other times we visited him in places that looked like housing communities.

I spent a lot of time in extended stays at various people’s homes. Babysitters, friends of my mother from school, friends of friends with kids my same age, all opening their home to me while my mother dealt with my dad’s spirals and withdrawals. I don’t even remember being told a reason, it was usually just presented as “You’re going to stay with __ for a few days! Fun!” and that was that. I was too young to question it.

The rest of the time I was attached at the hip to my mom. I sat on the floors of department stores while she shopped, ran around empty classrooms while she was in meetings, and sat politely while she met with friends for tea. My mom and I only had each other. We didn’t tell each other everything or completely share interests, but we were both people who cared very deeply about things including each other. As I got older I got more combative with her, as teenagers are wont to do. But much of that was frustration from not being able to help myself or protect her. Or help her and protect myself.

* * *

As much as I had known my mom and I only really had each other, I didn’t know how much that was actually the case until she was gone. I was devastated because I loved her and missed her, but also because she was the only person keeping me alive. Who was going to make sure I had food? Who would schedule my doctor’s appointments? What about school. What about the entire rest of my life? I think I still hoped that there was some adult info I just wasn’t privy to, and someone was going to step up and make sure I was okay. But once I was back from nearly dying in the hospital, alone in my house with a drug addict who was stealing from me for drug money, the hopelessness of my situation started to set in and my only defense was avoidance.

I found any way and reason to not be home. I spent a lot of time driving my mom’s Rav4 anywhere I could think to go. I was going to bed at sun-up and spending the night driving around and playing video games. This would probably have been more exciting/dangerous had I lived anywhere more populated than in the woods but it was the most distraction I could find.

* * *

Dad had bounced from rehab program to rehab program in attempts to give up drinking until he hurt his back. During my early childhood he had taken random plumbing and construction-type jobs, but nothing was ever for longer than a week or so. I highly doubt he had any training and he most certainly didn’t have a license. And while I’m unsure if the back injury happened “at work” or not, it ended his farcical struggle of trying to work. He was diagnosed with a herniated disc and given Vicodin.

Dad.

He started wearing a back brace. He needed surgery. Then he got surgery, but the doctor “screwed up”. Malpractice was mentioned. Chiropractors. All with an increasing dose of opioids from any and every doctor. Who needed beer when you had a legal, unchecked flow of highly-potent narcotics?

They used to talk about “gateway drugs” when I was in school to scare kids away from doing things like smoking weed. Meanwhile, doctors were drugging our parents with highly addictive painkillers in scarily increasing numbers, and then drugging the kids when they had emotional reactions to the whole mess.

Good job, everyone.

As I got older, I was clued into what was happening. My mom could no longer hide what was happening with leaving me for days at other people’s homes or taking me along on trips. I often had to come along to my mother’s Al-Anon meetings on Friday nights, sitting alone in a dusty extra room in a church while my mom sat at a table filled with sad, abused women reciting bible quotes and swapping victim stories. This isn’t to shit on support groups, this was just the opinion of an angry kid who did not fully comprehend the trauma surrounding her. I saw someone who was going to support groups but otherwise doing nothing to improve her situation or mine.

At one point, Mom did get particularly bold and tried to cut off Dad’s supply. We drove to a pharmacy a few towns over that was, from my memory, run by the friend of a friend or something similar. Mom brought me along and filled me in on her plan which was to ask one of the employees who didn’t know my mom for a print-out of our family’s prescription records with the story that she needed them for an issue with our health insurance.

Unfortunately, whoever it was who knew us (either the pharmacist or the owner of the pharmacy) was there and when the employee who was asked for the records went back to print things, the person who knew us emerged from the back room and told my mother there was something wrong with the computer or printer and she’d need to come back another day. Everyone there kind of knew what was happening, but everyone just smiled at each other and acted like they all bought each other’s stories. We went back to the car and my mom drove home defeated. She knew not only would she not get the evidence she needed about where my dad’s drugs were coming from, the people who were probably supplying it were now tipped off.

More than likely she had tried other backhanded ways to thwart my dad’s drug acquisitions and just didn’t tell me about it. There had obviously been some lead up to that trip to the pharmacy. I think she tried a lot of things that weren’t leaving him. So a lot of useless things.

* * *

The last rehab attempt I remember came when I was about 12 or 13. Dad had a breakdown and was checked in to a facility about 30 miles away. By this time, I was old enough to be rooting for my mother to leave him, and I was having a particularly happy time knowing he wasn’t anywhere nearby. But then the next evening there was a phone call late at night from the center. My dad had busted out and was on his way home. He had no car, and apparently the person on the phone had indicated he was intending to hitchhike.

I remember standing in the living room that night in pajamas, just the yellow light from the staircase illuminating the look of abject defeat on my mother’s face. It’s one of the few scenes I remember where she looks small to me. She had been shorter than me for years, but rarely did she seem smaller to me in my memories. In this one, she’s so small.

I was upset. I was angry. My rage issues were just finding their footing.

“Can’t you call the cops on him? Drag him back there?”

“No. He can leave if he wants.”

“Tell him not to come back here!”

“How? He’s already on his way.”

“Lock the doors! Don’t let him in!”

She just looked at me, slightly shook her head and said very calmly, “Honey, he’ll just break a window.”

And so we went back to bed. And 4 or so hours later, he showed up and let himself in the front door.

It was a surrender. My mother was surrendering. And I, in my hubris of youth, did not understand surrender. I did not understand staying quiet. I was told to speak up if something was wrong. My mother owned the house. Everything was hers. There would be no question of custody. We could move anywhere. I remember the afternoons of tears spent in her bedroom, begging her. Talking about all the details of our new dream home, if only we could just leave.

Over the years having since dealt with more of my own abuse, I came to understand my mother’s position. It was scary. She was overwhelmed. My father was a nightmare and trying to wake up from that felt like too much to bear. I wanted to learn to forgive her choices. But I think that impulse comes from our strange need to have our love be uncomplicated. To dehumanize in an attempt to preserve. Like how my mother’s body probably looked in her coffin that I refused to be in the same room with. I refused to have a memory of her lifeless corpse, and I refuse to have a memory of her as a saint. My mother was the victim of years of abuse, and she also enabled 17 years of abuse on her daughter and left me in the sole hands of that abuser when she died. None are without sin.

I love you, mom, but damn it.

* * *

Without the unknowns of my mother’s health, the odds were in our favor that my dad would be the one to drop dead. His back injury was not the first nor last time he had hurt himself, as he was a) constantly on something and b) always trying to “fix” or “build” things. He was calloused, scarred, and there was a crutch in the closet that got a lot of use.

One afternoon when I was 14, my boyfriend and I were in my house looking at something on the computer when we heard a pained howl in the distance.

We froze and looked at each other.

Another yell.

We got up and made our way to the back of the house, following the noise. I opened the heavy, wooden door to what anyone would have an easy time believing was the first shot in a zombie movie. My dad was staggering out of the woods in the distance, limping and yelling like a scared, wounded animal.

My boyfriend and I rushed out to help him inside. Once we maneuvered him onto the couch, we were able to make out that he was in his tree stand and had fallen the 10 or so feet onto the ground.

I went to call 911 and my dad started yelling again.

“No! I’m fine! Don’t call an ambulance. I’m fine. Call your mother.”

He was dripping blood on the couch.

Perplexed, I attempted to call my mother on the cell phone. This was when mobile phones were making that transition between “car phone” and “cell phone”. My mother would only be reachable if she had her phone on and plugged in in the car. Lucky for me, she was on her way home.

“Mom, Dad fell out of the tree stand and he won’t let me call 911.”

I’m sure that was a fun call for her to get.

My dad started yelling in the background “I’m fine! Just come home! I’m fine! Tell her not to call anyone!”

I don’t know if I remember hearing my mother sigh or if I added that in my own remembering, but it sounds correct. There would have been an exasperated sigh. She was 20 minutes away, so she told us to wait. We waited.

I didn’t yet understand what opioids did exactly. My dad would get this wide-eyed look of awake but not aware that I singularly associated with him until I was older and able to recognize what it was. To me, that was dad’s “crazy” look. And he had it when he came staggering out of the woods that afternoon.

I didn’t get that my dad was so high that he had fallen out of a tree, or that he was so high that he was unable to register just how much pain he should have been in. Nor did I understand that my father was extremely paranoid about having authorities called, because he got so high off illegally purchased narcotics that he fell out of a tree. I just thought he was a unintelligent nutter.

My mother came home to my dad sprawled on the couch, bleeding from the head and assessed that yes, perhaps an ambulance should be called.

Two cops showed up along with the ambulance people, but they just took the “guy fell out of tree” story and went along their way as the paramedics put the neck brace on my dad and maneuvered him out the door. Dad ended up with zero broken bones and a brand new Vicodin prescription.

It should also be noted that at the bottom of that tree stand that my dad had fallen out of, there was a sizable group of rocks half embedded in the ground. My dad managed to land less than a foot from those rocks which most likely would have cracked open his skull. For many days after this, I would curse that fall for not killing him. A few inches would have freed us.

* * *

One thing that kept me a little safer than I could have been was how much I grew to dislike (hate) my father. That my dad was just a piece of shit separate from the substance abuse wasn’t something we ever really talked about. Probably because my mother needed to believe that my dad could be “fixed.” But this also meant that I associated doing things like drinking or drugs with shitty people, and so I didn’t touch anything in my formative years. I knew addiction ran in families and the last thing I wanted was to be anything like him.

So I didn’t do drugs and I didn’t drink. I didn’t have a problem if other people did. It wasn’t even for lack of access. In my teenage years I went to punk shows. I was friends with some of the “druggy” kids (they mostly just smoked weed, really) from my school who lived on my bus route. We would hang out, they would do their drugs in a little shed next to one of their houses, and it was fine. No one pressured me, no one got weird or out of line, and while my mom could probably tell I didn’t smell or act like I’d been “doing drugs,” she really did trust me about it.

Once mom died, I don’t think I would have made it to 18 if I had even an inkling to use a substance to self-medicate. I’m sitting here writing this and I still don’t fully understand how I got through it at all. I can’t say being sober through all of this was better or worse than anything else, but it probably helped me stay alive through these very specific circumstances.

Chapter Eight

Holidays after family dies are a special kind of hell. And not just the holidays immediately following the death. I mean always and forever until you die and maybe cause some other people to have their holidays ruined.

People will think they are helping by inviting you to hang out with their family, blissfully unaware that attending another family’s holiday is only going to make you feel even more alienated. Other people will call themselves “orphans” on family holidays while their parents are very much alive and just on a cruise this year to celebrate their retirement. And maybe the worst of all, you’ll be subjected to people who tell you that you can “choose” who your family are while they’ve never experienced life without several familial safety nets. As if the privilege of having people who care about you and support you is something you can just manifest by wishing it.

It’s gonna suck and my advice to anyone with dead (or disowned) family is to try to find as many other orphans as you can to commiserate. You will need time away from parented people.

* * *

When I was little we went to church, but it trickled to only holidays and then not at all for the few years before Mom died. Mom was Christian, but not like an anti-abortion, tell people they are gonna burn in hell kind of Christian. We were Baptist, but I was never baptized because my mom thought it was something I should consciously consent to, and by the time I was old enough I most certainly did not consent. She never gave up on God, but she didn’t feel good about church by the end.

When I was younger we (my mother and I, never with Dad) would go through the motions of going to our church on Christmas Eve for a candlelight service. Everyone received this cheap little candle with a paper disk around it so the wax wouldn’t drip on your hand, and for the last 10 minutes of a 40 minute service they would turn the lights off and you’d sing with the candles lit. I don’t know why but it looked pretty. (It definitely did not sound pretty. White churches are not known for their parishioner’s musical abilities.)

I had a tradition for a few years of getting up before the sun on Christmas morning, turning on the multi-colored lights on the tree, and reading A Christmas Carol until my parents woke up, more because I enjoyed Dickens than I enjoyed Christmas. Though I also supported the increase of cookie production during the month of December.

And then there was the awesome bonus of my mother pouring a lot of her guilt over our lives into spending any extra money she could on gifts for me. There was no fun extended family for visits or big meals. No real traditions or events. There was a tree and there were presents, and the tree was just to have something to put the presents under.

Without any extended family, big meals, or other traditions we mostly just had a tree and presents, and the tree was just to have something to put the presents under. In fact, the tree was often one of the more stressful parts of the whole Christmas deal, since we had to “as a family” drive to the local tree-selling place back in the woods. Our house was surrounded by trees, but for some reason we had to drive to someone else’s house and pick out a tree, pay for it, and drive it home in the pickup truck. And any activity that involved my dad usually devolved into someone crying.

One year, the tree stayed outside of the house for a few days once we got home, waiting for my dad to decide he was ready to struggle with the tree stand. If you’ve ever attempted to maneuver a tree taller than you are into a tree stand and have it stand up straight, you might understand waiting until you were prepared and had help. It is not an easy job, and it is most certainly not a 1-person job.

I was at the kitchen counter doing homework. It was evening, and my mother wasn’t home. I don’t know if this was because she was not yet home from work, or she was out elsewhere. But I was home alone with my father and this was when he decided to bring in the tree. I was probably 10 or 11 years old, and so my dad’s Vicodin addiction was ramping up.

He did not ask me for help, or indeed even give any warning that he had decided to wrestle a 7-foot tree through our front door that doesn’t open all the way because it hits the stairs. All I heard was some rustling and grunting noises from outside, and then the front door burst open.

The kitchen was around the corner in the back of the house, so I couldn’t see what was happening. Within seconds, before I even had time to hop down from the kitchen stool, there was a thunderous crash. As I rounded the corner into the living room, there was another slam – the front door again.

I heard my dad’s truck start up and roar out of the driveway as I surveyed the scene. There was the tree we had picked out a few nights earlier, sprawled across the living room on its side. It had landed dead center onto the coffee table, which had before a few moments ago a single round top of glass that was now scattered in shards all over the room. The tree was also blocking both the front door and the only route to my room.

The first thing I did was start looking for the cats. They were indoor/outdoor cats, so I made sure they were all outside away from the glass. After that, I just sat back in the kitchen and waited.

This was one of many events where I had a sliver of hope that my mother would finally reach her limit of ridiculous things my dad would do to endanger himself and others and leave him. My mom’s limit was not reached before dropping dead.

* * *

I didn’t have Christmas spirit, but what I did have was a mother who tried to compensate for the daily abuse and fear in our lives by giving me many gifts on every holiday that she could afford. And when she died, I suddenly took up the mantle of wanting to be that person. I didn’t want gifts, I needed to give them. That’s how I thought you showed you cared for and about people.

Over time, this need warped from “people will like me if I can do things for them” into a wider altruistic nature, trying to give people things or money or help wherever I could, and I eventually dropped the “people will like me” part. I would call it a compulsion, but that makes it sound bad. If everyone was like this then no one would need anything. It’s only bad because only some people give and other people take when they don’t need, or don’t give when they should.

I’m right, but let’s not jump down an ethics rabbit hole.

My coping strategy for dealing with the Christmas after Mom died was to get as much cash as I could from my dad in whatever way I could and buy presents for my boyfriend and whoever else. I could read my dad’s moods/levels of intoxication enough to know when he’d be game for giving me money, and I took as much cash out of his wallet as I could without it being noticed. Stealing from drug addicts is pretty easy, and there’s very little guilt when it’s actually your dead mom’s money.

The overwhelming need to feel like I was doing something for other people by getting them things coupled with my desire to be away from my father was a perfect recipe for spending an inordinate amount of time at the mall. Not the local mall where I had worked, but the big mall much further away. It was a long drive with a CD player to a heated, indoor place with lots of food options.

I think my mom liked Christmas for the exact same reason I was suddenly hoarding things at the mall. She wanted other people to feel taken care of because she didn’t have anyone to take care of her. And she was vulnerable to people who showed her any sort of interest or care, much like I was for a long time. The abuse does that.

I drove over to my boyfriends house on Christmas morning with my car filled with whatever I had managed to buy and wrap over the past few weeks. His mom’s mom had recently died, too, and everything was at least a little terrible for everyone. I knew my being there was a downer for everyone, but anxiety about that wasn’t enough to make me want to be home.

* * *

And this is when everything starts to get darker and out of focus for me.

There are clear memories, enough to write down for you, but they are less frequent. This must have been when the shock wore off. Or maybe it’s where the shock kicked in. It could be that events that happened after this point were retroactively damaged by trauma yet to come. Whatever the reason, the start of the next year is where the flashbulb memories are less and the tunnel narrows.

Chapter Nine

Travel Log: Gettysburg

According to the satellite maps available online, Pennsylvania still has some green left. Most of my memories are green and lush with creatures under every rock. Summer evenings where you don’t notice the sun going down until suddenly there are fireflies everywhere and a rising chorus of crickets, cicadas, and katydids. I remember the mosquitoes and spiders, but I remember it being beautiful anyway. I think lot more things are beautiful when you aren’t itchy.

A lot of school was about what was easily accessible. Many class assignments were things like “what kind of leaves can you find” and school trips to different places with trees. Here’s some trees. Here’s some trees with sap you can eat. Here’s some trees with BEES. IT’S BEES. RUN. Here’s a field where people were cold and died trying to murder other people, etc. If enough people died somewhere, they make it a national park like Valley Forge or Fort Necessity (two scenes from two different wars where George Washington was involved in a lot of carnage).

My favorite of these places, from yet another war, is Gettysburg. (Americans are, shockingly, super into war.) If you aren’t up on your United States history, the battle of Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War that ended with 50,000 soldier casualties and the Confederates getting pushed out of PA. Confederate flags weren’t reduced to reenactments and museums in Pennsylvania after that, though. The first week I tried high school, there were pickup trucks with confederate flags in the parking lot. It’s a major symbol of white supremacy and there’s a lot of that around.

Gettysburg is mostly a weird, little college town just west enough to have Sheetz instead of Wawa. It’s got plentiful antique stores and fudge shops (there was at least one antique shop with a fudge counter when I was there) that get a lot of income from tourists coming to learn about some bloody battles and/or ghosts from said bloody battles. The morbid shit we turn into entertainment is bizarre, but you can’t say it isn’t fun to learn about history through stories of ghost hospitals and haunted battlefields.

The first time we took a weekend trip to Gettysburg, I was around 11 years old and my father actually came along. Notable, as I don’t remember us getting into any fights. I remember dinner at one of the places in the town center where the American flag flies in the middle of a round-a-bout while it was raining and going through the museum, I don’t remember any meltdowns. Dad must have had just the right amount of chemicals that weekend. But after that first trip, it was always just me and my mom.

Mom’s dad and mom at Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address Memorial

I wouldn’t tell you I believe in ghosts or that Gettysburg is haunted. But Gettysburg is has a… vibe? (Have I lived in California too long, oh no.). The landscape is like most rural places in southern PA: green fields and forest with the occasional rock formation or hill. But sitting on a rock in Devil’s Den as the sun goes down feels like an experience. It’s as though all the energy has been drained out of the place and the quiet is an extra quiet. Most of the areas around Gettysburg are like this. It’s not spooky, it’s just a loud kind of silence.

One year for my birthday, lucky 13th I think, my mom booked a weekend trip including a “haunted” fancy dinner and walking tour around town. October is peak ghost tourism season; it’s when all the ghost hunters and “historians” release their books, and all the tours based on the ghost stories are in full swing. I was thrilled. I would be thrilled now.

A popular place on these tours is to the Jenny(ie) Wade House which should be called the Ginnie Wade house because her name was Ginnie, but we live in a universe where people named Ginny(ie) will forever be called Jenny because no one listens or, according to my emails, can even read the name Ginny without it being translated to Jenny in their head. Seriously, people will address emails to me as “Jenny” like, who the fuck is Jenny and the email you are sending to literally has my name spelled out in it what are you doing??

Anyway, Ginnie (who was also a seamstress like myself) is the only recorded civilian casualty of the Battle of Gettysburg. She was minding her own business baking bread when the home she was in was shot something like 150 times, one of those bullets piercing through multiple doors in the house before piercing Ginnie’s heart and exiting out through her corset. The house is now an attraction you can visit and look at all the bullet holes. You can also go into the basement where her body was kept and look at a weird dummy under a blanket on a bed, because that’s normal.

All of that was very interesting to people with my name. Everything becomes 100 times more interesting when it’s about someone with your name if it isn’t very common. People named, like, John or Mary probably aren’t enamored as much by their namesakes.

* * *

I’ve known people who lived and work in Gettysburg and would swear on their life that their house is haunted, or at least have one story of what could have been a ghost. Even my house that was not in a known haunted town or battlefield had a dead soldier ghost.

The house was built in the 50’s, and not well. There were step sounds that came from the attic, probably from any sort of animal that could make its way into the unfinished half of the second floor. Our front door would sometimes open and shut on its own (we didn’t bother keeping our doors locked until I was older) but it was obviously a wind/vacuum sort of issue. And there seemed to be a strange, rolling fog that would shift down the street late at night because we lived in Pennsylvania at the bottom of a hill in the woods, of course there’ll be fog sometimes.

But then one day my dad was walking in the woods (because when you live in the woods there’s really not that much else to do) and he came upon what seemed to be a grave marker in the ground. It was definitely old, but not exactly an easy thing to get information on. (Pre-Google times.)

So one afternoon when I was maybe 12, my dad and I were sitting in our living room talking about this grave and how if there was a ghost, it’s probably whoever was buried in the woods. And as we were discussing it, our doorbell rang. My dad went to answer the door and stepped outside to talk to an older gentleman in khaki pants and a polo shirt. After a few minutes, my dad popped back in the house, grabbed his shoes, and with a look of both confusion and amusement said, “I’ll be back in a bit,” and left with this man.

30 or 40 minutes passed and my dad returned, alone. He came inside and began to tell me a tale.

The man who came to the door was looking for the grave. My memory of this is that it had something to do with keeping track of veteran’s graves, but regardless, this old dude just showed up at the exact time my dad and I were talking about this grave to ask if we knew of any graves nearby.

It turns out that the grave belonged to a soldier in the Civil War. He had found out that his wife was either sick or pregnant and deserted to be with her. He was tried for treason and hung in Philadelphia, and then brought out and buried in the woods near my house.

So if there was a ghost, he probably had good reason to be upset.

* * *

The Gettysburg trips were as close as my mom got to specifically encouraging any of my interests. I was in every advanced class in my elementary school, and in both the selective vocal ensemble (as opposed to mandatory chorus) and the selective talent art class. History was one of my lesser interests when I was younger. I was in love with theater and film and singing and creating things.

Mom and I shared a love of musical theater. One of her friends had a daughter a couple of years older than me who participated in their local community theater. We attended their performance of Music Man when I was 11, and we knew that they accepted children at 10 years old. I started getting my hopes up that Mom was going to let me join the theater somehow. But it never happened, no matter how much I belted book numbers from my bedroom.

We were lucky enough to have a sewing machine in the house, so a lot of my creative energies went into that until we got a computer. I was never sent to a camp or any extracurricular classes. I socialized with other kids in school until the homeschooling started. My interests were kept to solo activities I could do in the house.

I don’t think it was because my mom didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just don’t think she could invest the time and money. She was overwhelmed with keeping herself, her daughter, and a drug addict alive, on top of dealing with 26 other children 5 days a week plus who knows how many obnoxious adults most days. She couldn’t drive me to some theater thing 3 times a week on top of whatever it cost while also having time to grade papers and plan lessons and keep an entire household running.

I got the “you can do anything you want” encouragement. A lot of American kids grew up being told some variation of “you can be whatever you want to be.” Once you study history for a bit, you learn how much most of us aren’t given the option of doing much of anything besides being in constant fear of being shot by an angry white dude, sometimes while you’re just trying to bake some bread in your kitchen. We haven’t made much progress since the Civil War.

Chapter Ten

Once the initial shock of Mom’s death wore off, the depression swelled, numbing and dark and appropriate for January. Everything was in greyscale. I was canceling on my tutors more and more, much like my absences from school had begun. Half the time I was physically ill, and the rest of the time I was just too panicked or depressed to care about a math test.

The two warning signs of my depression are not eating and/or sleeping more than 9 hours a day. I was going to sleep around 4 AM and waking up around the time my boyfriend would be getting home from school, maybe eating one meal and then mostly living on Mountain Dew and Skittles. Not that this was much of a change from my diet before mom died, but I was eating less and sleeping more.

I was already isolated by living in the woods and not going to school, but Mom dying alienated me from the world in a whole new way. Everyone assumed my dad was some sort of parent, so no one was really checking up on me. I was alone like I hadn’t known before. And unfortunately there’s something about being vulnerable that predators can smell from a mile away.

* * *

My dad never physically assaulted my mother in front of me. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, as he hit me on more than one occasion, but I never saw him do it to her. Probably because she ran and hid instead of shouting back. I’m pretty sure if you are capable of hitting a child you are probably fine with hitting adults, but luckily it was at least a rarity, and was never the immediate threat when he picked a fight.

That’s a thing that victims do, by the way. We always make note that we know it could be worse, often downplaying our suffering. We know people don’t make it out alive, and so we view our survival as the privilege it is. There’s also something called survivor’s bias where we assume if we experience something, that others will have the same outcome or experience. You have to remember that just because you made it through something, that doesn’t mean everyone can or will. I try to be aware of both knowing how shitty I had it and also knowing how good I had it, which is pretty much the exact experience of having one loving parent and one fucked-up one like I had. You come out with an oddly balanced ego.

The first time I was physically assaulted by someone who wasn’t my dad, I was 9 years old.

I didn’t wear typically feminine clothes and my mother had long since stopped trying to encourage me otherwise. I was a “tomboy.” I played with micro machines and hated wearing dresses. I had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle hat I was particularly fond of that I’m sure I was wearing at the time of this particular incident. As far as I can tell, the only thing that signified I wasn’t a boy was my braid of blonde hair, which was so long I had to be careful I didn’t dunk it in the toilet when I sat down to do my business.

I was staying with a friend and I was outside playing on the sidewalk with him. This was notable because I lived in the woods with no sidewalks or neighbors to play with. This was a rare experience for me.

I was sitting on one of those Roller Racers (I didn’t have a bike or anywhere to ride it so I didn’t know how, and honestly Roller Racers are fun so don’t judge 9-year-old me) when a neighborhood boy, probably 3 years older than me, came up behind me, shoved me to the ground, and jumped on top of me. He hit me in the face. He held me down with his whole body’s weight on me until someone pulled him off.

I weigh 102 pounds in adulthood. I was much smaller at 9 years old. I could not get him off of me despite kicking and hair-pulling. Adults had to be fetched. Afterward, everyone tried to act like it was normal. I would have expected an “oh my God, are you okay, what the fuck?” but I guess people were convinced that acting like boys attacking you in the street isn’t a big deal meant it wouldn’t upset me or something? My dad made an offhand comment congratulating me on trying to fight back and that was about it.

Dear current adults – please teach children that it is, in fact, not fucking normal for anyone to attack innocent people in the street, and please react appropriately when it occurs.

I cannot tell you concretely why this boy jumped me in the street in broad daylight. Did he just like cruising the block, beating girls up for fun? Was it because I was a girl wearing “boy” clothes? Was it because we teach kids that boys being mean to you means they like you and he REALLY liked me? I’ll never know. My only take-away was that boys are expected to randomly assault people in the street.

* * *

I had given up working at the department store, but I would still visit the mall on a regular basis and I was still friendly with David (who had wanted to visit me in the hospital). Being friends with older boys was cool. Being able to stay out late and drive around and play video games was cool. I was desperate for any attention that didn’t make me feel worthless.

My boyfriend Bradley was kind and lovely, but wholly ill-equipped to deal with the tornado of trauma that was swirling around me. I was good at pretending to be functional but I needed a whole lot that he could not (and should not have been expected to) provide. He was in his senior year of high school, preparing for college, doing normal teenage boy stuff. I was watching my life burn inside a dumpster. We spent our evenings and weekends together when possible, but I was a mess.

An adult should have been taking me to therapy and scheduling doctor’s appointments. An adult should have checked up on my school work. An adult should have known were I was. I needed an adult.

* * *

I was 11 years old when I broke out of my “tomboy” phase and started occasionally wearing dresses. This would have been 5th or 6th grade, 5th being when I was first kissing boys (with tongue!). The girl clothes came after the boy kissing. I was always interested in boys. I had been interested in boys so much that I think that’s why I dressed like them for years. But then I realized you could make out with them as well and was like “ooh, yes please.” Puberty is a thing.

This was also the first year I was allowed to get the bus and take it home at our driveway instead of at a babysitter’s house. I was finally old enough that Mom couldn’t make excuses for why I couldn’t go or be home by myself.

On my bus were two boys from the junior high school. They were such jerks that most of the time they were assigned to the front two seats behind the driver. They pushed people, they mocked the kids with disabilities, and were just generally disgusting.

Their punishment was to be assigned the front two seats of the bus. Being in close proximity to the only adult was, I assume, meant to deter their horrid behavior.

It did not.

Instead, the boys turned their punishment into a game to see how much they could grab my 11-year-old ass, and other parts, every day I was forced to walk past them to get off the bus. They would whisper sexual things at me. They would laugh as I hurried past trying to block their hands with my backpack.

It went on for months.

One day I was wearing a sleeveless, soft flannel plaid dress I really liked. I remember it because I kept it for about 10 years because it had adjustable straps and it went from cute on a 12-year-old to revealing but still cute on an 18-year-old. But on this day, I was wearing that dress because it was warm out and I had a jacket so I tied the jacket around my waist in the hopes of blocking hands.

Instead, one of the boys grabbed all the way inside me. I remember getting off the bus and instead of going inside I stood out in the front yard by the line of trees in the front and cried. Not a sobbing cry. Just that uncontrolled water that seeps out of your eyes when you can’t think of anything else to do.

It was too humiliating, too embarrassing. Being known as the girl that this happens to wasn’t something I wanted. So I never said anything to anyone about it. Eventually the boys were put on a different bus route.

* * *

And then one night I got a call from David inviting me to hang out at his place (or what should appropriately be named his mother’s place) one evening to watch anime. I was happy to have somewhere to go. I needed distraction.

Of course, the TV was in his bedroom, and everyone else in his house was gone that night. But that wasn’t a problem for me. I no longer had rules. I could stay up at older friend’s houses and be cool. Boys liked me because I was “different than other girls.” I was cool. I was cool.

I can tell you the exact layout of the room. Where the TV was on top of the dresser. How the twin mattress and box spring on the floor was right next to the door. The thin, tan, patterned sheets. The blue and white light from the TV lighting the room.

The show ended.

And then he was on top of me.

And I said no.

And I said stop.

After it was over, I eventually collected my things and got into my car. The sun was rising unseen behind spritzing rain clouds and the sky gradually shifted to lighter shades of grey, or maybe that was just the depression lens. I remember the sound of the windshield wipers.

I got in my car and cried. Not a sobbing cry. Just that uncontrolled water that seeps out of your eyes when you can’t think of anything else to do. I’m sure I must have put on music. It was a 20 minute drive home, but I couldn’t tell you if it took me 10 minutes or 40. I was shutting down. I don’t remember being concerned about whether my dad was home, or if I would encounter him on the way inside. Luckily he wasn’t exactly concerned about me either.

I got home and into my room upstairs without incident. I sat on my bed. And after a time, I very calmly decided that I had to tell Bradley that I had cheated on him.

And that’s what I did. And we broke up.

I want to be able to definitively tell you why I did this, but I do not know that I can. The memory of being in that bedroom, with the glow from the TV screen, hearing the words “no” and “stop” pass through my lips is very clear, and it was just as clear then. I guess I needed to try and block that out with anything I could think of.

Maybe my sense of control over my life was more important in that moment. My mother was dead and my abusive dad stole money from me for drugs. I needed to be able to take care of myself. I went to a 19-year-old dude’s room alone at night, so how was this not my fault anyway? I told myself that I wanted this to happen and I think that made it okay for me. Maybe the last thing I needed to be was a victim of something else.

In my head, the story of how I hooked up with a guy from my work and broke the heart of my boyfriend of many years became a story of youthful ignorance and grief. I was a confused kid with a dead mom and a junkie father who just didn’t know any better, and at least I had owned up to my mistake and took responsibility. What a believable and relatable story I had written.

When you have to construct stories and perform mental gymnastics to survive day-to-day, it isn’t that you don’t know what the truth is. The truth is there. It’s maybe got a few layers of paint on it or it’s under a pile of laundry you refuse to clean up. Sometimes you forget why the pile of laundry is there or why you painted over that wall. But you eventually remember it’s there. It’s meant to be a temporary fix that you can deal with when you can. Sometimes we are lucky enough to reach a point where we can clean up the mental false walls we’ve constructed. But some messes just sit in there, rotting in the basement and seeping into the foundation. And you are so used to the smell that you don’t notice it anymore. But then you invite someone over and they are like, “Excuse me, but what the fuck is that smell?” Embarrassing, right? So it’s best to clean it up before you have to mentally or literally move house.

Ending the 3-year relationship I had with Bradley demolished the only positive relationship I had, or really the only relationship I had left. There was no more normal.

Chapter Eleven

Ginny wake up, I need ya,” Dad was calling in a fairly calm voice while simultaneously banging repeatedly with a closed fist on the wafer-thin wooden door to my room.

Had I forgotten to cancel a tutor? Did someone else die?

I had blankets over the windows and a few strings of Christmas lights plugged in for light so I didn’t know what time of day it was. Or what day it was. I crawled out of my cocoon of blankets and opened the latch on the door.

“What?” I asked, only half awake, trying to peer downstairs and see if it was night or day.

Dad pushed into my room grinning, holding the cordless phone.

“Yep, I’ve got her right here,” he said cheerily and then covered the receiver with his hand.

I backed up onto the bed and sat down.

“It’s just someone from the bank, they need to verify that you’re you and that you agree to sharing an account with me with this new account,” he said hurriedly, pushing the phone at me.

“Oh. Okay?” I took the phone, glaring at my dad confused.

I had shared a bank account with my mom; I assumed that was what he was talking about. Any access to an account with money in it was good for me, right?

“Hello?” I managed.

The man on the phone gave me a cheerful hello. He then asked me to verify my name and social security number, which I did. He then asked, “And you’re going to share the account with your dad here, yes?”

And I said yes, and he said great and thanked me and told me I could hand the phone back to my dad.

Dad greedily took the phone, turned, and left down the stairs.

Soon after, he started fixing up his truck. New seats, a new paint job, new tires. He decided to close in the patio on the side of the house. New appliances were showing up, a TV, a new washer/dryer. He was also being more generous when giving me cash when I asked for it, and since I had my own shit going on, I took it as good fortune and tried to stay out of the way.

* * *

I really like turtles. And when I like something I immediately start researching and learning all I can about whatever it is. In third grade, was once pulled out of class by a teacher from a higher grade because word around school was that I knew about turtles; this teacher had found a turtle and didn’t know what kind it was, and so went and found me to ask.

There were lots of turtles where I lived. Green water turtles, red-eared sliders, snapping turtles, mud turtles, wood turtles, and of course, box turtles. My positive feelings towards Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle were probably about 80% just because I liked turtles.

(Take a shot every time I say the word turtles, the writing will vastly improve.)

There’s this thing that box turtles do in the summer when it rains. They come out from wherever they are hiding in the woods, and they walk out into the street. The roads where we lived were maybe 70% paved, but narrow and windy with barely any markings or lighting. No one expected pedestrians because there were no sidewalks or traffic lights, so many turtles fell victim to cars unable or unwilling to brake for them.

When a summer rain would get going, my dad would drive me around in his pick-up truck for hours, carefully cruising the country roads hunting for turtles to save. My dad had a collection of cassette tapes to choose from in his truck – The Beatles, The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, Genesis – white Baby Boomer music. I remember Dad liking to play “Riders On The Storm” while it was storming. 8-year-old me thought it was cool. Much older me feels like that is way too on the nose for any decent narrative.

But it was a sweet thing. It was something we could do where my dad didn’t feel the need to mock or belittle my interests. We both cared about animals and we both liked riding in cars. (I prefer train travel, but I’ll take a good passenger seat in a long car ride in a pinch.) There was never a fight about riding around and saving turtles. I never came home in tears. It was maybe the only father-daughter activity we ever engaged in.

If there was a good place to leave the turtle, we might release them in a place just off the road, but more often than not we scooped them up off the road and put them on the floor of the truck at my feet. Sometimes we would find two or three turtles in one trip. We would drive them back home and then release them in our yard, which was surrounded by woods and bordered the local park property. A couple of summers, I kept track of the turtles.

Box turtles have patterns on their shells as distinct a human fingerprints. The colors of the patterns range from light yellow to dark orange-red. And you can tell a turtle’s age by the rings on the plates of their shell, just like rings of a tree. (However, you do not need to cut open a turtle to see the rings. Please do not cut open a turtle. Just thinking about that makes me so sad.) I took polaroid photos of each one, and a few summers the same turtles would return to our yard. One summer we documented 30 box turtles.

(Are you drunk yet?)

As I got older, the turtles started showing up less and less around the same time my dad and I stopped wanting to spend time with each other. The turtles didn’t need us anymore. And sadly, our efforts to save them from being squished in the road were not enough to impact the greater turtle community. [1]

* * *

My first pet was born before I was. She was a skittish black and white cat named Snookie who was already 5 years old when I showed up. I cannot place what prompted me to ask this, but as my mom was putting me to bed one night when I was 8 or 9, I just looked up at her and asked “Mom, what if Snookie dies?” I don’t know if I had been thinking about death or if the cat had been to the vet recently, or if it was just one of those creepy things that kids do where they seemingly at random bomb you with questions about reality. But there was something about the prompt to imagine a world without Snookie that made my mother tear up and I teared up, and we both cried about a cat who was still alive.

Snookie lived to about 16 years old, which is decent for a cat.

I once brought home an elderly cat that was covered in burrs (those sticky pointy things that get on your clothes when you walk in the woods, I think they used the idea to make velcro or some shit) and had no teeth. We had her fixed up and found her an elderly lady who adopted her. It was always acceptable to help strays in my home.

Not to be upstaged in helping the less fortunate, soon afterward, my dad brought home an elderly deaf man. He had happened upon this guy on the road, or in the woods, I’m not sure. He was living nearby in a run-down shack down a dirt road, so over-grown that you wouldn’t believe anyone lived there.

After exchanging some scribbled-on scraps of paper (my dad’s handwriting was worse than mine was in kindergarten, so I’m sure it was a struggle for both of them), Dad learned that his name was Charlie and he often walked along the road and accepted rides.

Charlie had no electricity, no way to communicate with the outside world, and no means of transportation. So my dad took it upon himself to make friends. My dad pronounced his name “chawl-ee” or “cholly,” however you say it with an exaggerated New Jersey accent. It was like a weird nickname my dad gave him, one that Charlie would never know about because he couldn’t hear it. They communicated mostly in hand gestures and head nods and the occasional exaggerated mouthing of words.

Dad would give Charlie rides to places he needed to go and treat him to lunch. In the winter, Dad made sure to go by and check on him and help shovel out a path for him if he needed it. Charlie was resistant to the idea of leaving his home, so there was only so much anyone could do. After many months of rides to various appointments , a caseworker of some kind came to our house with him to give some insight into Charlie’s situation, and eventually he was placed into care somewhere.

It was a good and kind thing. A thing that you hear about and think, “Wow, what a nice man.” I saw my dad going out of his way to help people off of the street, but he would also go out of his way to be cruel to me on a daily basis, a cruelty that escalated every year. Mom would always tell me not to take what he did personally, but kids don’t know how to do that. Most adults wouldn’t know how to do that.

It felt like my father grew to hate me and my mother, but what was happening was a decline into depression and substance abuse, which masked at least one personality disorder and a whole lot of other damage. This also wasn’t the first time Dad had been through the cycle of setting up a family and then destroying it. It wasn’t even the second time. After the third or fourth try at fathering, dad told me I was the reason he got a vasectomy.

* * *

It turned out that my mother had created a will allocating our home (that she bought solely with her money) and most of her savings to me, with instructions for one of her friends to be guardian and overseer of the estate.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t yet had it finalized, signed, and notarized. All of her instructions on what to do and how to make it so I’d be okay were just a useless file sitting on her computer.

So as it was with the funeral, all decisions were diverted to my father without question. Everything was his. I was his responsibility, which meant I was no one’s responsibility. And just as things started appearing, they also started disappearing.

My mom’s ceramic Beatrix Potter figures were gone from out of a hutch. Her very old copy of The Secret Garden that she had kept on her dresser went missing. Her souvenir Loch Ness Monster stuffed animal that wore a little tam o’shanter. Mom had always been an anglophile or rather a… UK-ophile? Great Britain+. It’s one of her traits that imprinted on me greatly, thanks to PBS playing a lot of shows from the BBC during the 80s and 90s.

These symbols of her personality and of my childhood had no meaning to my father, and thus he couldn’t fathom that they would matter to someone. Or maybe he only got rid of things when he was on a certain combination of drugs because he thought they were haunted. It wasn’t as if he needed the money.

Meanwhile, I was busy ignoring reality, unable to play babysitter to my father’s whims.

And then one day I came home and my kitten was gone.

Deedlit had been a birthday present at 6 weeks old in October, so she was only months old. All of our cats were allowed outside, and none had ever gone missing.

“Dad, have you seen Deedlit?” (Yes, the cat was named after an anime elf. I will not explain myself to you, reader!)

“You aren’t around enough and we have enough cats.”

“Dad, what did you do with her?”

“She’s fine, she’s gonna get a new family. She’s fine, drop it.”

“DAD, WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO WITH MY CAT?”

A few more screams and I got him to admit he had taken her back to the local SPCA. I ran to a phone and called to ask them to please not adopt out the long haired black and white girl cat they had gotten earlier in the day. I don’t know what story he told them, and I don’t remember what story I had to tell to get her back, but I came home with her.

I’m not sure how I did not then run to the nearest sharp object and stab my dad to death then and there, but there are countless times in my story that I wonder the same thing. That I never murdered this or any man is truly a testament to my enduring goodness and evolved sense of civility. Or I’m a huge coward.

A few days later, my dad got in a mood again. I don’t know what set him off. Maybe the kitten got under foot. Maybe his drug supply was low. Maybe I said the wrong thing. This time I was holding her and he ripped her out of my arms. I screamed and cried. I tried to hold onto her without her being hurt. I was shoved onto the stairs, he slammed the door, and then she was gone.

This time she wasn’t at the SPCA. Maybe he had really taken her to a nice farm to play with other kitties. I’ll never know.

It was at this point that I gained the ability to detach from things. Nothing was going to stay. Nothing was safe. And I felt that if I tried to continue living there, I’d end up being the next thing to go missing. So without a plan or inkling of what I could do next, I quietly started gathering my things.

One day while dad was out, I went into the garage to see if there was anything I wanted to take with me. I loved that tiny garage because it smelled like gasoline and old cars. Some of my old toys and tattered kites were still hanging up on a high shelf. And then on a bench next to some old rags, I spotted the urn with my mother’s ashes (or rather, the box containing her urn, still sealed with the labels and tape still on it).

I closed up the garage and went inside.

I didn’t ask about it.

She was gone. Her things were gone and my cat was gone and my boyfriend was gone. What good was a piece of pottery filled with ashes?

I never saw the box again, and never found out what happened to Mom’s ashes. I imagine they were scattered somewhere in some opioid-binge in the yard or something. Who the hell knows. We’re all dirt anyway.

I never got to follow up on what that phone call from the bank really was, either. But years later I figured out that my dad had taken out a credit card in my name and racked up over $40,000 in debt.

1 “In 2011, the International Union for Conservation of Nature downgraded the conservation status of the (Eastern Box Turtle) from near threatened to vulnerable, noting that the population has dropped by nearly a third over three generations.” – https://www.pennlive.com/wildaboutpa/2017/06/turtles_of_pennsylvania_maybe.ht

Chapter Twelve

Travel Log: New Jersey

If you live in the eastern half on Pennsylvania and you had access to a car, you most likely spent at least a fraction of your summers at the Jersey Shore.

Mom as a baby on the beach in New Jersey in the 50s.

Mom on the boardwalk in the 70s.

Me on the beach in New Jersey in the 80s.

The water at the Jersey shore is an unappealing brownish-green color, but this was the only ocean I knew and was in awe when much later in life I encountered blue ocean like you see on TV. It’s not even (all) pollution, it’s just naturally kind of a gross color. That’s what Jersey felt like. Kind of gross, and like everyone knew it was gross but they were all pretending it wasn’t.

Being an only child is fine, but summer months are a constant struggle to see friends because otherwise you’re stuck alone. And before lots of video games or internet, it was vital to find kids to play with. Luckily, going down to the shore was something a lot of people did, and sometimes I could even get invited along on someone else’s family trip. One trip, we must have been 10 or 11, and my friend and I spent our vacation on the beach screaming at the Atlantic ocean.

“IS THAT THE BEST YOU CAN DO?”

“YOU CALL THAT A WAVE?”

“COME ON OCEAN, DO BETTER!”

I can’t know what prompted it, but to this day I do find it relieves stress to scream at the ocean. It’s big enough and loud enough that you won’t be disturbing many other people, and the ocean doesn’t care. It knows you’re just letting off steam. I spent a day in early November 2016 on a beach, screaming at the Pacific. The ocean doesn’t mind.

I only saw my mother in her bathing suit in public once or twice in my life due to her body issues.

I don’t even like the beach. It was sunburn and sand in your everything. It was exhausting walks back and forth on the boardwalk. Sure, I was a fan of the cotton candy and saltwater taffy, and rounds of quirky mini-golf. But everything just felt a little dirty, a little dilapidated, a little desperate.

My opinions are not meant to relay a factual account of the state of New Jersey or its vacation spots if this particular account tends towards the negative. Not only am I just generally not a fan of sand sticking to me or being in the sun for extended periods of time, my associations with the entire state are based very heavily on the reason I’m familiar with it.

My grandmother was from New Jersey. Born in PA, but lived in Jersey since she was a baby. She had a middle school education and her first child with her first husband at 18, ending up with four sons, my dad being the youngest.

My dad’s mom holding me, presumably using a lot of restraint to not eat me, as I assume most monsters live on a steady diet of babies.

It’s hard for me to describe my grandmother without the use of hyperbolic, dehumanizing terms like “evil” and “monster” and “repressed hate-goblin.” While she may not have literally been those things, she was a mean old lady raised on American white supremacy who dealt with her own abuse by abusing others. She did not like me, because I “talked back.” A lot of terrible things have been done to women because they “talked back.” I’m sure she had been told not to talk back her entire life, and when she did, she was punished for it. No one likes a woman who “talks back.” That’s something you’re supposed to beat out of us at a very early age.

Grandma lived in a little suburban neighborhood of tiny ranch homes in central New Jersey. She had her living room ceiling painted with white and pink glittery popcorn paint (I have vivid memories of many ceilings from my pre-internet childhood. We stared at walls and ceilings a lot.), and had a vicious cat who would bite the hell out of you if you went near her because she had been declawed and had personal boundary issues. The cat was severely unlikable, but it wasn’t the cat’s fault. You’d be pissed off, too, if someone cut off your fingertips.

By the way, don’t fucking declaw your cats. What the fuck.

I did not like Grandma. I never had. But she was an early option for babysitting when my mother needed to be rid of me for extended periods of time to deal with whatever fucking nonsense my dad was causing early in their marriage. So sometimes for a week or more I was stuck with my grandmother in her awful house, with her awful bubble gum pink decor and her weird color-changing fiber optic flower lamp and her awful cat. The only positive was that she lived in a neighborhood with sidewalks and I was allowed to roller blade around a couple blocks.

Grandma on her own wasn’t actually that hard to deal with. You could just nod and ask her to show you her flowers in the back yard and she’d stop whatever old, racist thing she was on about and tell you about marigolds or some shit. But when she and my father were together, they would team up on my mom or me or both.

A typical dinner with Grandma would go like this:

My father would do something or say something to my mother. I would notice my dad was trying to push buttons. He would make a shitty comment about how much she was eating or how her diet was going. My mother would go quiet as my dad would get louder, trying to get a reaction from her. I would speak up and tell him to stop.

Well, what I probably said was “shut up.”

“Shut up” was a problem. Tormenting a woman in front of her family wasn’t a problem, but my “language” and “tone” absolutely were. So my grandmother would start in on my mom.

“You can’t let her get away with talking to her father like that. You’re why she’s like this, you don’t discipline her.”

Eventually I was sent away from the table. I spent a lot of time in my room (or whatever room was available) crying. The crying was never because I was sad. It was frustration. It was that powerless, futile sob you do because there’s nowhere else for the energy to go. The kind of crying that turns to kicking holes in walls when you’re big enough.

Me in my back yard with dad’s mom’s second husband.

Grandmom’s first husband and father to her four sons had died in the 70s, and her second husband died ten years later. I was around four years old when the second one died, and I don’t remember anyone even talking about him much. That was another funeral that I wasn’t included in. And the only thing I know about my dad’s dad was that he was an abusive drunk.

I have even less care to cultivate sympathy for my grandmother than I do my father. There are millions of people who endure abuse and don’t turn around and do it to other people. It doesn’t mean they couldn’t have learned better. It doesn’t mean that they had no capacity to do good. But their victims don’t have to like them or forgive them or say nice things about them when they die. Don’t be an asshole, or people might not like you and say mean shit about you when you’re gone. Precautionary tale, that.

Chapter Thirteen

And so with all of the gained wisdom and knowledge of a traumatized seventeen year old girl, I started dating my rapist.

It is at this point that reading this story might feel a bit like watching a bad horror movie, and you want to yell at the screen and tell the girl running up the stairs to go out the front door instead. I promise you that in the retelling in my mind, there is a full MST3K lineup mocking all of my ridiculous mistakes. A lot of things seem obvious to people who aren’t traumatized 17-year-old girls.

I’m not even sure exactly how this happened. I remember breaking up with Bradley. I remember sitting on my bed the morning after the rape happened, making that decision. But between that and me being with David, there’s a big blank space.

I remember him telling me the rape didn’t happen. I don’t know if this was over the phone or in person. I don’t remember agreeing to anything. I just remember him saying I wasn’t really saying no and that obviously I wanted it. And since that fit right along with the story I had made up for myself to cope, I had every reason to go along with it. But there was also another incentive. David offered to find me somewhere to live.

So, maybe it didn’t happen how I said it did? And why would someone who forced themselves on me be willing to help me? The mental gymnastics of survival are exhausting. I just wanted to get out from under my father’s terror, and the grass looked greener on the other side of the street with the rapist.

This is how I eventually came to a bit of peace about my mother’s choices. My rage and frustration with her inability to leave my father and protect me from him has lessened over the years, as I was tripped up time and again by the abuses around me.

I know she felt guilty every day about the situation we were in. I hope she had friends that told her it wasn’t her fault. I hope she knew how much she was loved. I hope she had secret lovers. I hope she didn’t actually die, but was beamed back to her home planet for some emergency and one day she’ll show up like “Hey, what’s up?” and I’ll be like “Fucking hell, mom, where the fuck have you been?” And she’ll be like “Oh wow, I thought I was gone for, like, an hour. Darn you space/time travel! Also, please stop using that sort of language.” And then it’ll all work out and we can go back to the alien planet that we are from and live in peace.

I did the best with what I could, and had my rapist help me find a place to live.

I packed up what I could, said goodbye to my cats, and left. David found me a one bedroom in a converted farmhouse that was still kind of a farmhouse because there was a goat that lived out back with the washing machine, and it was surrounded by small fields of cows. The building was livable, though it had mostly peeling paint, some exposed insulation, and drafty windows that were warped with age. The bathroom ceiling once collapsed from shutting the door too hard.

I never met the landlord; they just took my name and a check every month for $400 and that was that. It was only a 20-minute drive from my dad’s house, and I still had to go back for my tutors to finish high school. But this was a space that only I had the key to, and that felt like safety.

* * *

I was the tallest kid in my class at 8 years old (I’m only 5’1” as an adult so I pretty much peaked), started wearing a training bra at 10, and got my period while I was still in elementary school. I went from dressing in boy clothes and being friends with boys to immediately wanting to kiss the boys at what seemed a much earlier age than all the girls around me. My mom didn’t think allowing me go over to a boy friend’s house at 11 years old when their parents wouldn’t be home was an issue. How was she to know we’d spend about 20 minutes looking at his Star Wars toys and the rest of the 3 hours making out in the woods behind his house rolling around on dead leaves?

Boys always kind of liked me. Even when I wasn’t “cool,” since I didn’t adhere to social hierarchy in junior high, boys were still interested. Bradley and I started dating when I was 14 years old. He was quiet, kind of anxious, not very tall, and only talked to me because I started flirting with him on the bus home from 8th grade. It took us 6 months to get to the sex part, and although he was older, I was the one making the moves first.

The luxury of having a boyfriend that lived down the street (which really meant multiple streets, some woods, and no sidewalks or street lamps) was that I was able to sneak out and see him in the summer months. When you live in the woods, you don’t often have people you can visit without needing a parent with a car to drive you, so it was exciting on multiple levels.

I already had a history of sleeping in a tent in the backyard during the summer months. Our backyard was huge and my parents’ bedroom faced the front yard. This left me the perfect escape plan where I was already outside the house before the lights were out and could simply wait until my parents were asleep, sneak around the perimeter of the yard, and be right on the road.

When the first week of summer vacation rolled around and I had gotten out the tent from the garage and announced I was going to sleep outside that night “for fun,” my mother was paying attention. She wasn’t oblivious and knew that me sleeping outside when I had a boyfriend who lived nearby was very different than previous summers. So that night around midnight or so, she quietly padded across the grass to the tent and pulled a “just checking in.”

She was relieved to find her only daughter sleeping peacefully in her sleeping bag. I blinked open and gave a “huh?” as she replied with a quick, smiling apology and went back into the house. Mom wasn’t someone who enjoyed losing sleep or staying up late, so it was obviously a deliberate attempt to catch me doing exactly what I was planning on doing.

But I was crafty enough to know not to leave on the first night. I had a friend over later in the week and we slept outside as well. After a few nights of tent sleeping, I was free to sneak out whenever I wanted without suspicion to go make out with my boyfriend on a blanket in the woods somewhere. I didn’t even like sleeping outside. I just really liked hooking up with my boyfriend.

* * *

Affording the luxury of my own place to live meant having a job again. I didn’t want to go back to the department store and decided to make my way up in the world and get a job at the video store in the same mall. This was for two reasons. The first was that I knew about “the anime,” and this made me very valuable to a small down local mall in the 90’s. The second was that the video game store wasn’t hiring.

The manager was a typical type-A boss who was only fun when he would talk to me about guys he liked, and sometimes musicals. The assistant manager, Ryan, was a rather decent looking dude in his late 20’s or early 30’s who was very friendly, and a bit of a flirt. With me.

And we’re back to watching that horror movie and screaming at the screen for me to get out of there.

YOU ARE A CHILD.

HE IS AN ADULT.

AND ALSO YOUR BOSS?!

WHAT THE FUCK, RUN!

I was currently dating my rapist so it’s not like I was doing great in the decision department, and trauma is blood in the water as sharks are to bad men.

But wait, it gets better.

Ryan had a 3-year-old daughter.

We’re taught to believe that men with families are inherently good. A single dad with custody of his kid? That’s a state-approved man right there. So instead of seeing a blatant red flag, I saw a man who was being friendlier than others because he knew exactly where the boundaries were, and I trusted he knew not to go beyond them. If you are able to follow me with that line of logic, congratulations, you were also brought up in a patriarchy.

I liked kids and couldn’t say no to extra cash, so I started on-call baby-sitting for him. Shauna, his daughter, loved me. Kids always loved me. Like, clinging to the leg and begging for more bedtime stories kind of stuff. And my need to care for other people as a coping mechanism only made me even more receptive.

It would usually be late at night, sometimes until one or two in the morning. The first few times he came home, paid me in cash, and I went home. Then after the third or fourth late night session, he came home and he didn’t offer to pay me right away.

Shauna was asleep on the couch, and Ryan just walked past her and kept talking to me while walking into his bedroom and turning on the TV instead of reaching for his wallet.

I couldn’t tell you what was on the TV. It was just moving colors. He suggested a massage. I know he was touching my shoulders and neck, but I don’t think anything happened beyond that. My memories don’t feel complete but I’m pretty sure I made it home okay that night.

Oh, whew, just a friendly massage. That’s okay. A little weird, but okay. I got paid and I’m home now so everything is fine. This is all above board and completely reasonable. Definitely nothing to tell anyone about.

It escalated. Ryan used his daughter to get me to do all sorts of things. He needed help on a trip to pick something up for her. He needed company to visit his daughter’s mother. He needed an emergency sitter, oh no wait, his plans were suddenly canceled. Thank goodness I was on-call for him, what a good “friend” I was.

Soon after that, he started to be critical of how I spent my time when I wasn’t around him. I was dressing too provocatively. I was wasting my time with friends if they weren’t girls. I was so much “better” than everyone else, but he was the only person who could appreciate it.

All of this while still working for him at the video store, while spending the rest of my time with my rapist and his friends, while trying to keep up with tutors and maintain a “normal” facade. I went into autopilot, like how you can drive home and not remember it, except for whole weeks. I had to be okay because there wasn’t another option. I spent time with friends. I watched movies. I ate food. I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke. I had a job. This meant I was okay. This meant I was an adult. This meant I was going to survive.

I never felt bad about my body or my sexuality. That’s a whole chunk of self-esteem that most people fight their whole lives to acquire. You would think being raped would have set me back, made me close off and quell that part of myself. But instead it just killed the love I had for the rest of me. My worth wasn’t in my personality, my intelligence, my kindness, my wit – my body was the only thing that was ever going to matter to anyone. I was only as valuable as the men around me appraised me to be.

I had to look good, but not too good.

Be different, but not too different.

Don’t be like “other girls.”

Don’t complain.

Don’t tell.

The only thing I had gained from my mother’s death was the ability to escape my dad. I felt like if I spoke up, if I admitted what I had done or was doing, that I wouldn’t have that freedom anymore. That something worse would happen. That something else would be taken away. There was always something else that could be taken away.

Chapter Fourteen

And then there was Matt. Matt was a friend of David (the rapist I was dating, remember?)’s brother. They were in this group of three or four guys, and they were just kind of always around. We played video games together when I was around their house, we went to movies together, and did various normal teenage/young adult things aside from drinking or doing drugs. Matt was tall, the tallest of the group, with dark hair and a narrowing stare. The rest of them sort of followed his lead.

Matt would go out of his way to sit next to me in the car or get paired up with me playing games. He flirted, sometimes in full sight of David. But David never said anything. David didn’t really care all that much for me, sexually, or really any other way. He was much more interested in his all-night raids in whatever video game he was playing. I mentioned to him that Matt was clingy around me, mostly out of fear that I’d be seen as “asking for it” (she said TO HER RAPIST) if something happened. David brushed it off, telling me I should take it as a compliment.

A week later we were outside in the middle of the night in some fields, playing a laser tag game or some nonsense. I had ducked behind the tree line by the road, and Matt found his way to where I was. He immediately threw himself to the ground next to me and grabbed my hand. He didn’t say anything, he just looked out into the dark, his eyes darting for either targets or witnesses. I froze and stared straight ahead, waiting for him to do something. He rubbed and squeezed my hand for a minute and then ran off towards a couple blinking red lights.

* * *

I was praised for my looks as a child. Not by my dad, of course, but by other adults around me and no one more than my mother. I was perfect. The kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being she had ever known in her life. But pointedly, I was beautiful. I was beautiful and this was considered “wasteful” because I didn’t have the feminine dial cranked to 11.

I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair. My mom let me wear “boys” clothes, but cutting my hair was off limits. She cut her hair shorter and shorter every year, with it being as short as a pixie cut by the time I was 10. I was told that she “had” to keep her hair short because she didn’t have time for it due to working and parenting, and so I had to keep my hair. This of course made absolutely no sense to me, nor should it have. It was crap. I convinced my mom of shorter and shorter haircuts until eventually I got my dad to take me to get my hair cut before my mom got home one day when I was 15, finally living out my tomboy fantasy.

My first proper pixie cut, fresh for a school photo.

And even though I my mom didn’t push back very hard on my discomfort with dresses and skirts, I could sense her disappointment. She thought I looked like the protagonist of a Francis Hodgson Burnett novel and wished I’d dress like one. But also, I think she wished that she could have had long hair and pretty dresses, and blamed me and her job when really my dad was super into short hair on women. I suspect she cut her hair due to the positive reactions she got from him.

The year my room was moved from downstairs to the finished half of the second floor of the house (the only other room on the second floor was the unfinished attic), I came home from school one day to find my mother had installed mauve pink carpeting. She knew that I was expressly not into pink. She knew my favorite color was green. Her argument was that she wanted it to match the wallpaper which had these tiny flowers on it, and I made a very strong counter point which was that there were clearly other colors in the wallpaper, including green. But it was already installed, so I had to play with my ninja turtles and micro machines on a mauve pink carpet.

I would have my justice just a couple years later, when my allergies and asthma were so bad that the doctor recommended ripping out the carpeting in my room to cut down on dust. Mom loved me and she thought I was amazing, but I think she also kind of wanted a doll and kind of wanted a friend because she was lonely. We did have a lot of tea parties, the two of us.

My mom wanted a little girl, but never prepared me for anything beyond that. And I don’t just mean her naivete in thinking I wasn’t making out with boys in 5th grade. I also never did a load of laundry or cleaned my room more than a few times before she died. Along with attempting to compensate for living with my father by buying me presents, she did every single chore in the house partly because I was sick most of the time and too much dust could make me sick for days, and partly because she cared for people by doing things for them. Too many things, sometimes.

Mom was so worried about how shit everything was for me that she didn’t prepare me for most any of the shit I would experience once she was gone.

* * *

I was working at the mall one afternoon when Matt, David’s brother, and one more of them showed up at my store. They were “bored” and wanted me to come with them. I explained that I was working for another couple hours but Matt insisted they would wait for me. I told them not to, explained I was busy. I was not in the mood to put on a performance of being fun and cool, and David wasn’t around that night to be alpha of their idiotic pack.

“Nah, we’ll wait.” Matt turned and left. David’s brother gave me a shrug and followed along with his other friend to a table in the food court where they could see the entrance to my store. I was confused and mostly just annoyed. I called David to see if I could reach him at work to complain about them but he wasn’t answering.

I tried to act busy and hoped they would get bored and go home. Some of them may have gotten bored, but they would not leave. Ryan wasn’t my manager that day and it wasn’t super busy so I managed to get permission to leave 30 minutes early without any questions about why. I was hoping that since Matt and the group knew what time I said I was getting out, maybe if I slipped out at just the right time they wouldn’t notice.

There was no back door I could use, so of course they spotted me trying to power-walk towards the exit.

“Giiiinny, hey!” Matt called and bounded up behind me.

I kept walking but let my body language relax a bit. “Oh hey. Sorry, I forgot you guys were waiting. I had an emergency come up, I have to run.”

“Aww, come on, you can just tell us you don’t like us.”

I glanced back at the other two who were just trodding along behind, clearly not brave enough to interject.

“Seriously, I got a call from my dad. I have to go.” I reached to push open the glass double doors that opened to the parking and got my keys out.

“Come on, wait a minute.” Matt reached out but I was jogging by then and jumped into the Rav4.

I locked my doors, started the car and looked over to see them running over to another car in the parking lot two rows over. I started to pull out and I saw them closing their doors. They were following me.

* * *

Self-esteem isn’t something I like to talk about much, as it’s kind of like a rich person giving financial advice.

Growing up, I saw myself represented in most every cartoon and line of toys you could name. I never wished I looked like someone else, not even famous actresses. No one ever mocked me for what I looked like. I was given a pass from ever feeling ugly.

Yes, there’s the normal insecurities. Sure, you worry that boys might not like you or that you won’t get invited to the cool parties. But not having to work through years of learned self-hate once you figure out what’s going on in the world is an immense privilege.

And I wasn’t just a thin, white girl. I was naturally blonde with blue eyes. This was treated as winning some sort of genetic lottery. Praise often had specific mentions of my hair and eye color. Wanting to dye my hair, just like wanting to cut it, was a “waste.” My physical attributes were often referred to like some sort of talent I had or capital I had acquired.

I have a letter from a great-aunt congratulating my mother on my red hair that turned blonde soon after.

The white supremacy, master race mythology that brought us such horrors as Operation Lebensborn flows from and permeates the culture of the United States like we’re the hellmouth of racism, and it is fucking terrifying when you really see it. Kids that look like me are fetishized on top of all the other white privileges that come along with it, and it’s not even subtle.

All of that gets wrapped up in gender and sexuality. If you have a natural “talent” for something, it’s a “waste” if you don’t do something with it. So, if you are good at being fetishized and desired because of your looks, that’s where your value is. To not be something that men wanted was another squandering of usefulness.

* * *

My first thought was that I didn’t want to drive to my apartment. I would be there alone, and that didn’t sound safe. If they were going to follow me, I decided going to my dad’s was the best option since they didn’t know where I would be going. So I sped down the back way home, the same way I’d raced home less than a year before from the same mall parking lot.

Why were his friends all going along with this? Was this their idea of a prank? I was almost angrier at the other men/boys in the car, most of all the one driving, than I was at Matt’s creepy ass. I just wanted to be left alone.

I sped as fast as I could down the winding lanes, trying to lose them on the turns. I bolted through the last stop sign, bouncing down the hills. I hoped if I could just pull into my driveway fast enough, maybe they wouldn’t see me. I could drive this road much faster than they could because I knew where I was going. They weren’t from the woods.

I couldn’t see them in my rear-view before I made the turn into the driveway. There was no way for me to park without them seeing the car, so I could only hope they’d speed by too fast to see it if they were behind me. Dad’s truck was parked next to the garage and I just pulled up as close to the house as I could, leapt out of the car, slammed and locked the car door, and bolted into the house.

I ran to the bathroom to look out to the front of the house to see if I could see them drive by. I didn’t at first, and for a second I had hope that they lost me before getting this far. But after 15 seconds or so, their car came down the street, stopped a few car lengths past the driveway, and slowly backed up.

I was panicked. I couldn’t understand what was happening. This wasn’t normal. Was this normal? Was I overreacting? I came back out to the living room and my dad came out from whatever hole he had been sitting in, his dull eyes opened comically wide with tiny pupils.

“What’s going on?”

“Some guy is being a jerk and following me, just ignore them and they’ll go away.”

“What ‘some guy?’”

“No, just stay out of it and let me figure this out.”

I went over to the phone and had just finished dialing David as the doorbell rang.

This time, David picked up.

“Your brother and his idiot friends chased me home from work.”

“What?”

“Dad, don’t answer the door! Just leave it!”

“I’m just gonna go talk to him.” My dad stepped outside.

“I’m at my house. My dad’s. They followed me here.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know! And now Matt is on my porch! Call your brother and tell him to fuck off!”

“Okay.”

David hung up to, I assume to tell his brother to fuck off.

Dad had stepped out into the driveway to talk to David.

I took my asthma inhaler out from my bag and took a drag as dad came back inside.

“Well, I think he just really likes you, Ginny,” Dad said, grinning.

“Well, good for him.”

“Why don’t you just go talk to him?”

“No. He’s an asshole and fuck that.”

“Well he doesn’t have any way to get home so he has to come in and use the phone.”

“What? No, he fucking doesn’t. His asshole friends can come get him.”

“Apparently they dropped him off.”

At this point I just screamed for a few seconds.

“Now, Ginny…” Dad was being peak dad. He delighted in being the calmest person in the room. “This is my house and I can let the boy in to use the phone. Don’t be rude.” The condescension dripped from his mouth.

I had just been chased to my dead mother’s home down the route I had taken on the night she died by a creepy dude nearly twice my size and two other men, and my dad was gonna let the creepy dude in MY house? There was a fuse and it had already been lit.

“Fuck you, this isn’t your fucking house!” I screamed while feeling that aching urge to start kicking shit.

“Watch your fucking mouth and get out of my house then!”

“THIS WAS NEVER YOURS. NONE OF THIS WAS EVER YOURS.” I was gesturing around wildly, still clutching my inhaler. “YOU STOLE IT FROM HER AND YOU STOLE IT FROM ME AND FUCK YOU.”

I stormed out the front door and made a rush for my car Matt was waiting outside; he ran around the back of the car and came up on my right side as I rage-fumbled with the car keys.

“Ginny, wait.”

“Seriously, leave me alone.” I had my keys out.

Matt grabbed my shoulder pushed me up against the car, trapping me between his body and the driver side door.

“Just give me a second, listen.” He pressed up against me and started to reach a hand toward me and wiped a tear from my face like he thought we were in some skeevy rom-com. “You’re just really special and I want to spend time with you.”

I shoved him, hard, and he backed off enough that I could open my car door. He probably thought my dad would care if he pushed it further, which was a wrong but lucky assumption for me. I sped away through the woods as fast as I dared, back to my apartment in a different set of woods.

By the time I got home, the sun had set. I made my way inside the dark, musty apartment, still hot and blurry-eyed from 20 different emotions, and was greeted by a blinking red light on the answering machine. I put down my things and hit play.

“Don’t bother coming back here because you don’t have teachers here anymore because this isn’t your house. You don’t live here anymore, so stay out.”

After I had left, Dad gave Matt a ride home. Then he called one of my tutors and told them I didn’t live there anymore. This was reported back to the school and my entire education plan was irreversibly thrown out because my dad told them I had moved outside the school district.

Me and dad.

Epilogue

I don’t remember my 18th birthday. There are whole weeks at a time from after my mom’s death until about a year later that just aren’t there. These symptoms continued to come up at other times later in my life following traumatic events. The extent of what happened to me is unknown, and I’m okay with that. There’s enough I already remember that I wish I could get rid of.

What we remember of our own life is already pretty selective. What we remember about other people is selective, coupled with an already small base of actual knowledge mixed in with withheld truths, misremembers, points of view, and context. But even just these pieces I’ve put together make a pretty obvious story when seen from a safe distance.

I learned that my rapist was sexually abused as a child. I also caught him hiding porn that he would secretly watch with his guy friend, so I’m certain he had a lot of his own shit going on that he hadn’t figured out yet. His story is the story of a lot of men in this country who were fed a steady diet of repression and idealized abuse. I broke up with him early the next year, and only right after that did I come out of my memory lapses for a bit.

Around that same time, I started calling out of work sick a lot (half the time I was sick, the other half I was panicked about having to work with my assistant manager), which my manager was super not into. Eventually I showed up one day and could just tell he didn’t want to hear about how I’d been sick (mostly because I’d already been yelled at on the phone) so I just blurted out that I quit so he wouldn’t yell at me anymore. My assistant manager was moved to another store, and gave up on me soon after, most likely due to distance.

Dad died a couple years later. He died the way he lived – high as fuck on opiates. I was with him when he got the call from his doctors confirming his cancer diagnosis. I tried to be the “better” person and help him out. I drove him to appointments and treatments. But cancer wasn’t eating into any of the parts of him that caused him to be an abusive piece of shit, and I had to stop. I was in Philadelphia by then, at community college getting my GED via college credits, and I stopped making the drive.

He died in our house, under the care of a nurse and on a morphine drip. Our dog and the nurse’s dog were there, and the story I was told was that both of the dogs were in the room with him and they started suddenly and frantically clawing at the patio door. The nurse opened the door, and they dashed outside. Minutes later my dad was dead. After things were sorted, the dogs slunk back into the house and both jumped up on a couch in the room he died in, and hid their faces in the cushions.

My interpretation of this was that an actual demon had been conjured to reap my father down to hell and it was so frightening that the dogs ran away from it. The hyperbole helped to put some sort of fitting closure to that part of his story and mine. I know now he was also a victim turned attacker, as many end up. It doesn’t make me like him any more, but I understand what caused him to be what he was.

Mom on a horse, me on a horse.

Dads aren’t supposed to steal from you for drug money while you are in the hospital after your mom dies. Friends aren’t supposed to rape you when you go to hang out at their house. Authority figures aren’t supposed to lure children in their employ into their homes with their own children so they can groom them for sexual assault. Moms die sometimes, but the rest of this stuff shouldn’t have happened. Communities aren’t supposed to let any of this happen.

Well, I say “supposed to.” I mean supposed to in a reasonable, healthy society. We don’t live in one of those. We live in a society of shame and abuse held together with ticky-tacky on a foundation of slavery. We’re not supposed to talk about it. We’re told not to compare notes. Because if we start sharing our experiences, it makes them real. It gives context to other people’s chaos and it helps us navigate out from under those who need us cowed and broken and doing their dirty work.

It wasn’t even 10 years ago that I was sitting in a bathtub in the middle of the afternoon, shivering and sweating through opioid withdrawals. My doctor had started prescribing me high doses of opioids to combat debilitating migraines. I inherited my dad’s tolerance levels and soon this barely adult-sized lady was on morphine pills every few hours. The migraines turned out to be caused by the stress of yet another bad relationship and an exploited situation, and the fog of the abuse made it hard to see that I was leaning on the (legally prescribed) drugs. I never went on to try to stay on opioids or acquire them illegally, but that’s just the luck of my situation and is in no way a judgment on my moral character or intelligence.

It’s hard to fault anyone for leaning on substances, or even fault those providing them, when artificial joy is the only joy around. If you can’t have health and safety, at least you can numb the panic. Our communities are sick. Our country refuses to provide access to bare necessities and instead gives us expensive and dangerous band-aids. My asthma inhalers were always more expensive than any amount of opiate I’ve ever been prescribed.

There were parts of me that always recognized the sham we live in here. I stopped saying the pledge of allegiance in 5th grade because I didn’t understand why anyone should pledge allegiance to a country. Why would you be loyal to a country? It just felt wrong. I wasn’t trying to protest or make a statement; I was very quiet about it. I would stand and put my hand to my heart but I wouldn’t say anything. I feel like any explanation beyond that would be colored by my current views, but the instinct was there.

The same instinct that told me to reject wearing dresses when I didn’t want to, and to befriend every bullied kid in grade school, is telling me to share this with you now. All of these things that happened that we are told not to talk about – they happen everywhere, in every community, in nearly every home. There are parts of this story and so much worse on every street in America.

It is nearly impossible to know what’s happening while you are inside of these situations because they are so normalized and hidden at the same time. Abuse feels like love, too much feels like enough, shame feels like control. It’s easy to get lost or lose others before you find a way out, and in the all-consuming dark it can be scary and even dangerous to speak out for help. But it’s bordering on obvious once you emerge and look back at where you came from to see things for what they are.

If you make it out of the woods, tell your story. Light signal fires. Draw maps. Leave care packages along the way. The only way out is through but we can make it easier for those who are still finding their way.

My woods.

Acknowledgments

Thank yous:

- Krista, for reading this thing and telling me it didn’t suck. I wouldn’t have finished this without you.

- Everyone who has supported my work and kept me and my cats alive this long.

- My cats, for being true friends.

* * *

Cover art by WelshPixie

* * *

Proofread by Kelsey Vaughn.

* * *

Note from the author: You are worthy of support. You are worthy of love. You are worthy of safety. Anyone who tells you otherwise can get fucked. <3

About the Author

Ginny McQueenis the author of this book and also is writing this right now but you're supposed to have a bio written in the third person so here you go. She lives despite residing in Los Angeles with the help of her two cats and some nice people on the internet. Her glasses are just to hide how tired she is. She’d like to write some more stuff if you’d let her.