What, where, when, and who

Still working to figure it all out

About a month after my first child was born, my brother David got out of prison in Colorado for the last time. When he’d gone in that final time, for a parole violation related to a sexual assault charge, I was still living in Seattle and had been since just after I’d graduated from college.

My dad was furious when I told them I was moving to the West Coast after I finished school. “How could you do that to your mother?”, he demanded, while my mom looked at him incredulously. Mom was clearly fine. She told me to go and have adventures. But if, and/or when, I decided to settle down and give her some grandkids, maybe think about being within driving distance?

So, ever dutiful, that’s what I did. After seven years in Seattle, I got engaged and moved within driving distance of the house I grew up in. The house my parents have owned in Northwest D.C. since 1973. Never imagining that just when the kids we planned on having arrived, when I was in desperate need of my parents’ undivided attention and tender care, that the most dangerous person in my world would move back into their upstairs bedroom because he had nowhere else to go.

I had thought the birth itself had split me wide open but the convergence of new motherhood and David’s reappearance ruptured everything.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

It’s common, developmentally-appropriate even, for teenagers to look around themselves and start seeing the cracks in everything. The stories around which their family, community, and even their country are organized don’t quite add up. Things are darker or more complicated than anyone will admit. Every day and everywhere, people are saying one thing and then doing another.

These recognitions can range from unsettling to heartbreaking, but ultimately, confronting inconsistencies and hypocrisies in others (and yourself) is part of growing up. A teenager, as painful as it may be at times, can do that work. A kindergartner can’t, which is how old I was when my brother Paul started to spiral and then dropped out of high school. No one seemed to notice me in the midst of it all, stuck on the couch, dinner plate-eyes clocking their every yell, condemnation, and barbed volley hitting home, desperately wondering, What is going on?!?

No one ever explained it to me. Not then. Not ever. They were always too busy with bigger fires than mine.

I spent the next 25 years always thinking, always watchful, as if making some sense of it all would keep me safe. I got really smart along the way. Disassociated, periodically reckless, and anxious as hell, but smart, intellectually speaking, about what was happening.

It wasn’t until everything ruptured, though, that I was thrust back into my body and finally began to discover where it was happening. Here, certainly— in this family, this house, between these people— but more importantly here, in this body. That’s where the anger was, the grief, the resistance, and, finally, the complete inability to play my part. What felt like my primary family job— to not make things any harder than they already were with my excessive needs, or imperfection, or big, messy feelings— no longer fit inside my body. It was too full of milk that leaked everywhere, too exhausted from lack of sleep, too angry about being neglected for so long by everyone (including me), and way too desperate for help.

There’s no tidy closure to this bit of the story. It was just a mess— me, my marriage, my relationship with my parents— for a long time. Slowly, I had to figure out how to add the where to the what. To stay inside my body. To assert my needs, set boundaries, and be uncompromising. To defend my right to my life with clarity and conviction. All while simultaneously learning to be responsible for, protective of, and attentive to another human. Eventually, two other humans. I had no idea how to do any of it, no model to follow. Just an instinct that I had to be different or none of us were going to survive each other.

At work the other day, I got salty and sour. Do you know that feeling, when everything feels wrong and everyone is just determined to get on your last nerve? When your skin feels hot and tight, the inside of your head is a clamor, and all you want to do is punch something? No? Just me?

I spent the last hour of my day and the entire walk home spinning in righteous indignation, feeling put upon and unjustly exploited. Tight. Hot. Stabby. And the feeling was still sitting on me as I walked up the hill to the office the next morning.

Then all of a sudden, it occurred to me. Not what was happening, or where the feelings about it were sitting in my body, but when they were coming from. I know this feeling, I realized. It’s the same resentment I felt growing up, that sat in my guts like hot rocks, just stewing and popping endlessly. I had to be the good, dutiful one while my brothers ran around creating chaos because they couldn’t seem to help themselves. Because their lives were so much harder than mine would ever be. Who was I to complain? Simmer, bubble, POP!

I felt it again when Otto was born and all I wanted was just once (just once!) to not have to need less because my brother needed more. Simmer, bubble, POP!

And now I was feeling it because of a chronic inequity around coverage at my job. Simmer, bubble, POP!

All the when’s and who’s were colliding inside of the where (me), my nervous system was amped up to 11, and, I realized, my emotional response to what was actually happening now was way out of proportion.

Sometimes, I think pulling apart all of the when’s, where’s, and who’s before I do something in the now I’ll regret is the vast majority of my integrity work. Decades of therapy and it’s still this untangling, this repetitive emotional work to get out of my own way.

On a day-to-day basis my biggest integrity challenges don’t come in the form of deep ethical conundrums over human rights, racism, politics, or climate change. I’m not generally debating how to stand up to injustice or not be complicit in acts of violence. I’m just trying to figure out how not to be an asshole.

Finally, this story gets tidier. Not inside me; it’s still messy as hell in there. But I worked my way around to remembering that one co-worker of mine isn’t one of my brothers and that now is not then. I remembered that now I’m safe and well-resourced. I remembered who I want to be in the world now and how I want to show up.

It may not be closure in the way I hoped for when I was young, when I imagined there was some future for me where I would always feel seen and loved and appreciated, where nothing ever felt unfair or uneven or inexplicable. But it’s enough closure for today.

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