Laura Bogart
We lived on a quiet residential street in a town on the outskirts of Boston, in a two story white house with black shutters and a maple tree in the backyard. The back yard was good sized and fenced all the way around so that property lines were clear and the dogs were protected. The front yard, always mowed and green, was neatly divided by a flagstone walkway with a driveway on the side. The neighborhood was not true upper class as there were a number of two family homes directly across the street and in the blocks on either side of us but it was comfortable. No one struggled or collected food stamps, most mothers stayed at home, all the cars in the driveways were well cared for and reasonably new. We had skates (both kinds, ice and rollers), bicycles, music lessons, a color television and went on regular vacations. We were, from the outside looking in, a perfectly normal, intact family - two parents, three kids, a couple of dogs, public schooling and church every Sunday - unremarkable, ordinary, run of the mill, the very picture of middle America. It wasn't a difficult illusion to maintain, at least not in the early years.
I was in elementary school when it started to go wrong. Little things, mostly, my mother's pink Ford convertible parked a little crookedly in the driveway, finding her nodded off over her knitting when I got home from school. She took to being sickly one or two mornings a week - migraines and some mysterious "woman trouble" my daddy assured us - now and again meals were under or overcooked. She was more than usually bad tempered, sometimes flat out nasty. She began to be forgetful, leaving half washed dishes on the kitchen counters or not noticing the overflowing laundry basket in the downstairs bathroom until the smell of mold was so strong that it made your eyes water. Milk turned, ants would occasionally be crawling in the sink, once she neglected to turn the iron off and the back door curtains caught fire. My daddy spent more and more evenings and weekends at work and empty gold Miller beer cans started turning up in the trash, the cabinets, the linen closet, even the piano bench. Late night fights were common - often punctuated by the sounds of breaking glass or the sharp impacts of solid objects connecting with solid walls - and then slamming doors, crying, the low hum of a stand off, silent but spiteful footsteps on the stairs, wailing and cursing. It took several more years before things solidified and clarified themselves since no one ever acknowledged the problem in actual words - that would've been telling - but slowly we began to comprehend that the old lady drank like a damn fish and the old man wasn't going to do a damn thing about it. We were on our own.
When I was older and had learned some of the cold facts about the realities and dynamics of addiction - it's a disease not a bad decision, for example - I might've found a little empathy and a little compassion but for the one inescapable truth about my family. Truth to tell, I hadn't much cared for my mother for as long as I could remember, drunk or sober. When not drinking, she was a cold, relentlessly critical, impossible to please and joyless woman who showed no love to anyone, least of all her family. She cared desperately about appearances but made no secret of her contempt for her failure of a husband or her resentment of the burdens of her children. When she drank, she was a disgusting, pathetic and dangerous lush, hiding behind the walls of that typical middle American home. Either way, she used her indiscriminate venom and self pity like a second skin and by the time I was finishing grade school, the mild dislike I'd felt had turned to shame and hate. I wanted out, with as much distance as possible between us. And I wanted it to be permanent. My daddy might choose to stay and enable her, my brothers might choose to defend her and keep the liquor cabinet well stocked - as much for their own use as her's so it turned out - but I had had enough of violence and abuse and our own peculiar family values. For me, the illusion had been exposed, the walls had turned transparent. Family had always been a far and distant thing and losing it - as I fully expected I would if I were to take a stand - would be more a relief than a sacrifice.
Later on I was to wonder how many other secrets might be hidden behind all the neighboring middle class walls in our ordinary little part of town - how many other children were growing up cold, how many happy marriages were illusion - how many families were living in a hole and pretending it was bedrock. Here so many years later, I still wonder.
To achieve true peace of mind, so many of my good friends like to tell me, you must forgive. Anger and hate will eat holes in your soul, will turn you bitter and get in the way of your own inner happiness.
Maybe so. But I suspect the combination of time, distance and scar tissue will do the same thing with less compromise. My childhood rage is mostly past tense - I still write about it to remind myself that I survived,
to dodge the occasional flashback - but mostly it's like hauling ashes, a kind of maintenance to keep the old woodstove from clogging up.
Skates, bicycles and music lessons notwithstanding - for some wrongs - forgiveness is just not in my nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment