How to Accidentally Break up a Family

1983 . me

I never knew you could eat just one Oreo. I thought that once you opened the pack, you had to commit to the whole thing. I didn’t know yet about throwing up; she taught me about that at Dan’l Boone Inn when I was in the 10th grade. But my first lesson in food was to secretly observe the in-house behavior surrounding milk’s favorite cookie.

Waxing gibbous bellies on the couch. Audible Shame.

I took my notes.

I wasn’t allowed that kind of food unless it was a holiday. Then I was encouraged to eat all of it.

We do not waste food.

I got a lot of attention on holidays and that made me feel special.

Holidays were confusing.

The final phase of each food lesson was to run with him the next day after work.

The running is how we both processed his shame.

Stadium steps at the college, sprint drills, laps, runs downtown, runs through campus, runs past my friends playing capture the flag.

I spent so much of my adolescence running something off; mine or theirs.

Because the job assigned to me at birth was to play both their Problem and their Solution.

…I’m always wrong.

Problem.

…I am the only one with the power to end this as the appointed apologizer.

Solution.

I was never apologized to, so I had to teach myself. I talked to myself in the mirror a lot. Practiced on my Cabbage Patch Kid. Mimicked movies.

Trying to find balance or safety in a home led by addicts who don’t know their addiction is challenging for a child.

I spent so much time cleaning up the eggshells I crushed trying to be good.

And I always felt homesick at home.

My pedigree gave me no choice but to play sports, and while I never liked them, I found it was my only outlet for strength and aggression. I got praised for the pain I inflicted on the field. A yellow card in a soccer game… a secret elbow in the rib of an opponent… that time the college canceled co-ed camps after I punched a boy — all great moments of pride for him. He beamed when he called me tough out there. He loved knowing his daughter could fight.

But my job at home required weakness and submission.

The rules were hard to memorize.

I always felt different; weird, as I was unbearably mocked at home. I’d overhear them gossip about me in their bed at night, in the bleachers during my softball games, at house parties.

Whenever I wore a bathing suit.

Anyone else whose life began with sexual assault likely shares my propensity for coloring outside the lines. It’s a lot of mime-screaming into vacuums and I’m sure that looks different as hell out there. I mean, shit, we were never given the chance for normal. We feel a lot, all of the time. We feel what we felt during the trauma, we feel what we’re feeling about it now, we feel what you’re feeling about us feeling it. And if we’re not given the space to feel and heal, then, yeah, things can get weird.

Being a kid was such hard work; I couldn’t wait to be a grownup. When I got there, I could take baths instead of showers — with fresh water instead of her leftovers.

I could be an expert on everything. I could make up rules and change them whenever I wanted. I could sleep as late as I wanted, even on school days. I could drink as much beer and bourbon as I wanted, eat as much candy at Halloween as I wanted.

I could even steal it from my kid while she was sleeping and lie to her when she asked me about it.

My periods were tracked so they’d know when I had ‘turned’. I ruined so many vacations. If I showed my teenage angst or just wanted to know where my Baby Ruth was (it was king-sized!), they’d snicker and he’d say,

‘She’s turned!’

‘She’s on her period again’, she’d say with rolled eyes.

And he’d crinkle his nose with disgust the same way he did when he smelled something gross.

The same way he will do when he refuses to touch my belly while I’m pregnant with my first child.

My body was wrong; never looked right in the clothes she bought me. She’d put me in her clothes and then I’d be wrong at school for being the 9-year-old in a tunic and stirrup pants when all the other girls were in Umbros and Sambas.

Even the colors I liked were wrong. In the 6th grade, I learned to hide my love for the color Purple. We do not like jewel tones. We like any shade of green (except emerald, that’s a jewel one), any color that a leaf can be, an ocean can be, a horse can be, a shell can be.

And we accept red because that’s a sports one.

She’d wanted to repaint my bedroom and asked what my favorite color was. When I came home to a whitewashed bedroom, I realized my response had not been the correct one.

The correct response to any question was the one pre-conceived by the inquirer. And the question, ‘What do you want?’ is just rhetorical conversational decorum.

I changed my favorite color to green.

Over time I stopped trying to be understood and just showed up as whatever caused the least problems. It was the most economical way to make everyone happy, really. All it took was becoming a human husk. A daughter-bot in obeying beige.

When I became a parent, I abandoned my role as a good mother to be a perfect daughter more times than I’d like to admit. I left every call of duty feeling drained from all the forced restraint and scripted smiling. I exited every encounter feeling worse than when I entered it. My bones hurt; I’d get headaches.

My body was an encyclopedia of their inflictions and I was being burned from the inside.

My body was doing its job of telling me that I was not safe.

But it worked; the fights stopped.

I was never comfortable as a child because I never knew who I was supposed to be, and I was never comfortable as an adult because I figured it out.

When the orders to stay at home were announced in the spring of 2020, it became clear that there were differing views on what it meant to stay safe. I felt judged by them for how my family was handling things, and I’m sure they felt the same by me. I’m sure they felt that being told how to behave by their daughter was not only inappropriate, but absurd. And quickly my fear and worry for their safety morphed into frustration.

I mostly swallowed my concerns; I knew better.

Conflict was handled only one way. We all go straight to anger, then ignore each other while stewing with vengeful rage until the silence becomes pragmatically inconvenient. Then we scream at each other until I, The Problem, put on my Solution pants and do the apology thing.

But this time the stakes were too high. This wasn’t just that my feelings were hurt again, or that they said something inappropriate to my son again, or went on vacation instead of feeding our cat who then went missing, or that she stopped potty-training my daughter to protect her couch.

These stakes were the life of the people who gave me life.

And since tough-love was the only love the family practiced, I knew my move.

By loving them the way they loved me, this would work.

I knew it would make them angry and I did it anyway.

I sent a text; it was curt.

I said I couldn’t pretend any longer, we would not be speaking until they began to take this seriously, that I loved them, this was with love, and that this message was my final word on the matter

unless something changes.

“…what the heck are you talking about!?”

I didn’t reply; it’s all there.

I put a block on my Instagram stories. No cheating.

I turned off my phone and plated dinner.

Days…

Weeks…

I waited for a response instead of her reaction.

I waited for them to care to know more.

What I got instead was 
Four Months 
of silence to inform me I’d been fired from my job.

E v e r y t h i n g clicked for me within those four months.

I felt an immediate wave of relief with every day that they stayed away.

They had been showing me who they are my entire life and I finally believed it.

Like Otis from The Andy Griffith Show putting himself behind bars every night because he kept doing the thing he knew was wrong, I had been willingly locking myself up in a cage every time I had to be around them.

And now I had to figure out who was inside this skin I was wearing.

If you find out your foundation is an illusion, you question everything — not just colors and cookies.

All the clothes in my closet belonged to a stranger. Now just stitched-together shapes only there to support the notion that I was holding onto someone’s version of Me.

All of a sudden the voices in my head telling me I wasn’t good enough stopped talking.

I realized those voices were never mine.

I found the space to heal every pain I had numbed from all the running.

I started to sleep through the night for the first time in my life.

My adult body never got over my baby body waking up to loud parties and being placed either inside the party or in front of the tv instead of being kissed and tucked back in.

I stopped wearing makeup everyday. The voice telling me I was prettier with it, on her bed that night after Lilith Fair, vanished. (To be fair, I asked.)

I learned a lot about enmeshment and coming out of a codependent relationship.

I educated myself on narcissistic abuse.

I realized my body was not wrong and never was.

I looked in the mirror every morning and thanked my body for taking me this far. I apologized for not being kinder to her, and forgave myself for never being taught how. I held my younger self for all those times she was scared and needed a hug.

I told her she is safe now.

I don’t even know if I’m allergic to penicillin and codeine, I just keep telling it to the doctors when they ask because that seems like a risky one to test.

There’s a jellyfish in the Mediterranean that can re-birth itself. Instead of continuing to fight when it feels unsafe, it will deteriorate and then anchor itself to the floor of the sea to grow into something new.

THAT.

We were unfollowed on social media.

They unsubscribed from my website.

And the silence.

It all made sense, really. Like the Oreos that came in when they were needed and convenient, then forced to disappear when they became too much and uncomfortable, I had been taught my entire life how the things we love are replaceable…

• When one dog dies, we grab another. We even name it the same.

• When they moved, she’d thrown away all my childhood home videos. I’d have gladly taken them instead of the lemonade pitcher, chipped dip bowl and leaking box of hangers she’d demanded I take off her hands.

• I had to bribe them with gluten-free casseroles and DVR for them to come over and watch my babies.

• A request to take the kids around the holidays meant we were put on standby in case a party invitation showed up.

• His father chose to keep the uncle-in-law who raped me as a baby in the family instead of me.

The love I knew was fickle.

Their silence allowed my family at home to grow stronger, and my children shared things with me they had never shared before. They never felt safe or valued or truly loved by these people. They too had felt conditional; replaceable. And I had to come to terms with the fact that I had been putting my kids through the feelings I was running away from.

I asked my children what they wanted.

They did not wish to continue the relationship if it was optional.

I agreed.

Four months of silence later, I got a text to check my email. There was a red heart as the subject.

The lifelong assumption that their routine and comfort was more important than me and my children congealed into fatty fact in that email.

“…Our “personal comfort and routine” has nothing to do with you.”

The relationship to which she was referring in that email was unrecognizable.

The indication that I was to blame, and the assumption that I was still malleable, was a bold choice for an icebreaker.

That red heart was a liar; I felt no love. There was no question about my well-being, or the safety and health of my children.

That email came from a shadow.

And that email was a gift.

I was defiant on refusing a conversation until I felt things were fair. I deserved that after everything I had refused to defy all of my life. So I wrote my words instead of speaking them. Everything I spoke always got lost in translation. Like a distortion pedal removing any bit of love and all of my intent.

I spent a lot of time on these words.

I continued to ask that they give us space and take time to read my words and understand me.

But no matter how eloquently I wove my alphabet into sentences… they just didn’t.

Shrink-wrapping everything as a ‘misunderstanding’ was reductive.

Leaving a voicemail to say ‘we need to end this so we can get back to liking one another’ was a truth I couldn’t believe was being admitted.

Any ‘I’m sorrys’ littering their pages felt like hush money. And placing them before a ‘but’ was a cheat code I was no longer permitting.

Even the typos felt discourteous; the reactive manner in which their sentences were taped together mocked the tenderness that went into mine.

The domineering tone of it all became farcical.

“Regarding your ultimatum to us, I would remind you to look back over your life and see when that ever worked out for you in the past.”

I did not respond.

I was still waiting for them to understand.

Receiving notifications of being followed again on social media felt…awkward.

Online profiles changing to include the term ‘grandmother’ — for the very first time — felt… odd.

My lack of engaging on their timeline was weaponized and twisted into a ‘grudge’. The word ‘empathy’ was being strewn about abominably.

The idea that empathy applies only to one side, while demanding that the other quit their feelings in order to give them what they want is… well, unempathetic.

The term therapy was applied like a Band-Aid we both had to put on together.

I had been through therapy; I suggested they start their own and meet me where I was.

Sometimes after an angry message, they’d show up unannounced, drop off presents, ring the doorbell, then drive away.

Other times they’d linger; walk around the property or congregate in the driveway like they still owned something there.

We asked that they stop.

Whenever there was a birthday, or when the leaves started to turn, they’d resurface.
A calendar reminder of what love meant.

The holidays were no longer confusing.

It became clear that there was never a relationship; only a series of transactions in between liking one another.

My kids felt uncomfortable; I communicated this regularly. The sudden resurgence of texts was particularly troubling and we continued to ask for it to stop.

They were blocked when it didn’t.

Whenever their words showed kindness, they were poorly hidden; like thirsty weeds in the cracks of their anger.

And if I didn’t take the bait, something else would follow.

“…I now know that I am not who you want me to be, but you’re not who I want you to be either.”

From a mother to her daughter, that unprompted sentence appeared in my inbox.

Red heart lied on that one too.

I did not respond.

Seven non gift-giving months provided us with more healing silence and distance from them. I turned 40, got cancer, got rid of cancer, we said goodbye to our family pets and my husband’s last grandparent.

And my little family continued to grow stronger within that pain.

But soon the leaves changed and the calendar reminded them to love, so a little box addressed by the office receptionist appeared.

I typed a letter explaining how, without a relationship, gifts are a currency in which we are unwilling to participate.

And I spelled out again that my children wished them to stop.

“… we will continue to send [gifts] to [the kids] . Despite your request to the contrary …”

I did not respond.

“…as you grow , you will learn that achieving the moral high ground is not something you claim…

it is something that you earn”

I did not respond.

“… I have had about enough of [your] hypocrisy . You cut off communication because of some boneheaded ultimatum and then get made [sic] at us because of no communication … You are only feeding them the misinformation to fuel your narrative … What kind of parent would deprive their kids of their grandparents only to feed their own punitive desires … The no communication for months is entirely on [you]. We will see [those kids] down the road when they are old enough to form their own thoughts and opinions and they will understand that we love them and always have . When that happens , I feel sorry for [you] because of the explanations you will have to put forth . Whenever you two come up with enough backbone to actually talk with us we can sort this out . Until then Merry Christmas .”

I did not respond.

“…Children learn from their parents [sic] actions…”

I did not respond, 
but I have learned.

Emails tonally morphed into what felt like a proof of purchase; itemizing the things they have done to win something. And soon it all took a peculiar swerve into a one-sided fictitious custody battle over kids they wouldn’t recognize, and whose well-being had never been inquired about -

with a threat of finding my children to give them money at the age of 18 ‘when they are able to make decisions for themselves’.

I am proud to be a parent who knows that my children have always been old enough to form their own thoughts and opinions, and make decisions for themselves.

I did not respond.

I stayed silent while they continued to fight with their version of me.

In an effort to win a battle whose ground I never stepped foot on, 
they lost what I thought was the most important thing in the world to them.

All I had to do was stay still and they were more than willing to show me all the reasons why I continue to not choose them.

I stopped using mother, mom, father, dad. The terms of endearment given to them by my children were annulled.

Our mouths just stopped forming their shapes.

Sometimes while his typos were still fresh we’d watch him ignorantly pass us by in the small town we still share.

Overtime they became ghosts.

The leaves started to turn once again and a text came through.

An invitation to run with him.

I did not respond.

That job never fit me right. The hours were grueling, the compensation was only good when I worked holidays, the uniform never fit and the bosses were never interested in my input.

But I sure did try to make it work for 39 years.

Being a daughter shouldn’t have to be such hard work. 
It shouldn’t even be a job.

The leaves will continue to change, mistruths and small-town smear campaigns will continue to bemuse, but all of it lands and decays the same way. Whether beautiful or rotten, new beginnings stem from all things that fall.

And I have never felt the need to fight anyone for my truth.

It is mine and perfectly safe where it is.

Maybe it’s the crooked lawyer blood that runs through my veins, but I still saved everything thrown at me. Collecting dust somewhere, it merely serves as a reminder as to why I stayed still.

I used to walk through life confused and uncomfortable, frustrated and desperate to be understood. I thought I needed those things from the people who gave me life.

I spent 39 years trotting in a circle on a stunted leash hoping to find it at the next turn.

And if that family hadn’t left, if I hadn’t been given the gift of anchoring myself to grow on my own, I never would have accidentally learned what love is, what happiness feels like,

and what a family is.