The post I didn't want to write

I don’t know how to begin this. I’ve written about my family many times on the blog, sensing that there was a knot there, constricting me somehow, and I needed to loosen it. They’ve snuck into so many areas, into stories which are not at all biographical, and yet…some unexpressed emotion from my life with them works its way into my fiction. I suppose the same is true, to an extent, for all creators. Everything you are thinking about, or trying very hard NOT to think about, works its way into your work.

Medialess day was curiously noneventful. I was so busy with Madam and the house and the laundry that I never really sat down and meditated, as had been my intent. But throughout the day, I was very conscious of missing something. My books, my blogs, my email. A little sabotaging voice kept telling me dolefully that I couldn’t do it, after it, I would absolutely have to pick up a book, or turn on the television. At times that voice had such authority, it felt almost like an objective fact. Of course I would stop, of course I would let myself down. I always do.

Well, not this time. I think I am most proud that I managed to stick it out, in spite of the voice and the constant temptation. I am proud that I took an ordinary day and gave it meaning, created my own project, and took myself seriously enough to listen to whatever impulse had led me to declare Monday a medialess day in the first place.

But I still wondered where the grand revelation was. You know, the reward for having finished something so difficult. Yes, I am aware that perhaps enlightenment takes slightly longer than one day, and that perhaps a big part of my problem with such matters has always been my impatience.

Tuesday morning found me actually working on my morning pages in the morning, for a change. Usually I wait until Madam is napping in the afternoon before I give myself wholeheartedly to the pages. But she was busy walking around and around the room. (Yes, we have walking, people. Pray for me.)

As I scribbled away, I found myself writing, “Stop hiding. What worked for you as a child doesn’t make sense anymore.” That arrested me. I knew I’ve been hiding; I’ve been talking more and more about how I keep quiet, and then feel like I’ve betrayed myself. But what was interesting to me was the idea that this attitude had worked for me as a child. That seemed to contradict my idea about my childhood.

I pause here for a moment to mention a completely maddening feeling that has lurked around me for a few weeks now, something almost like deju vu—the precise combination of coziness, security, vague melancholy, and straining that categorized the way I used to feel in the fall when I was younger—9, 10, 11, 12 and after. I’ve been poking at the feeling, asking it to explain itself. But it only persisted, and I decided that it must just be my first fall with a toddler, in a new city that feels paradoxically like home.

But it all started to make sense in my morning pages, as I began viewing a different version of the home life I always remember. I remembered other things, too. I’ve written about Punky Middle Sister here before, written about how much of an influence she has been on me and my desires for a certain kind of free spirited, creative, artistic life. I also mentioned how strongly my parents disagreed with her choices.

Well, I started to remember the beatings. They weren’t constant, but they happened often enough. My sister would do or say something, shout in their faces, try to make them SEE something or the other, and my parents, mute in their strangling rage, would lash out in the way they felt made her stop. They hit her. Hard. With a belt, with pots, with fists. I would sit in the next room, sometimes, with my hands over my ears to drown out her screams. It never worked. I would rock back and forth to the rhythm of my question, “Why couldn’t she just BE QUIET? Why did she have to provoke them?” For you see, I blamed her for bringing it on herself. I suppose it was easier to do that than to see how wrong my parents were, because I adored them. How could my father, the man I admired more than any other, the most important person in my life, be the same person who threw things at my sister, who banged her head into the dining room, who flung a knife at her? How could my mother, elegant and funny, be the same one who became a fury at my sister’s disobedience, who took a frying pan and bashed it into my sister’s head with all of her strength?

I would creep over to her when it was done, huddled in a corner, and offer my mute sympathy, trying to wrap her in my small, inadequate arms. She would push me away, angry, hissing that the reason that my parents loved me more was that they didn’t really know me, because I pretended to be a good girl, pretended to agree with them, pretended I wasn’t my sister’s doppelganger.

The thing is, she was right. I was terrified of them when they got like that, and I didn’t want to face my sister’s fate. So I linked it all up in my head—not that my parents were wrong, but that this is what it meant to be an artist, a creative. It meant being literally beaten into submission until you stopped. And the way to prove you were the real deal was to take it—to keep shouting your truth in spite of the fists and the blood.

I couldn’t do that. I was a coward. I couldn’t save my sister (although I tried, but not often enough). I couldn’t measure up the way she did. She was the one who sacrificed everything for her authenticity. I couldn’t do that, therefore it meant I wasn’t the right kind of person. I accepted everything my sister said about me, in hate, as my due. I would never succeed, because I was a weak kneed coward. I would never be good enough. She was being punished because she was strong enough to take it, to be herself.

I was not strong.

So I tried to live the middle life, please everyone. I kept my most essential self in my head and lived out of the placid little place that my parents approved of for me. I just wanted to make them happy, true, but I also wanted to be safe from them.

A rush of compassion surprised me, for my sister, of course, but also for that little girl of 8, 9, 10, 11 and on, who thought that she would keep herself safe by keeping her dreams totally in her head. Who wanted to be just like her big sister, even as her sister pushed her away for not being good enough. And even for my parents, who were only acting out the way they had been raised, and who were startled by my sister’s strangeness, which seemed to encapsulate this country, where they didn’t matter at all. Where they had no control.

So. I see now, so clearly, that my issues with manifesting things, with deserving things (because my sister told me again and again that I did not deserve my parents’ love because I was a fake), with being an artist, come from this stifled period in my life. Because I couldn’t see then that my parents were wrong. By accepting their beatings as a fair response to my sister’s provocations and choices, we both conflated being ourselves with an almost intolerable danger. Physical danger.

It was easier to tie all of that together, then to think of my parents as abusers. And they were. And yet I still love them, we all do. Even my sister, although she still struggles so much with it, with wanting their approval and with wanting herself as well.

I didn’t want to write this. I didn’t want to know this. I’ve never suppressed that period in my life, but I suppose I took on the official family version of it—that my sister somehow deserved it for being so difficult. This is the first time I’ve really thought, there is no justification for it. She is talented, and smart, and when she needed their support and their applause, they not only failed her, they tried to beat those traits out of her. Yes, she was rebellious, a smart mouth, disobedient. But there is no excuse.

I guess I’ve always focused on the effect on her, because she is my sister and because I love her so much and felt so sorry for her when it was happening. Sorry, so damned sorry I couldn’t stop it. It feels selfish to admit that it had an effect on me as well, to see that, to hear it, to have my sister turn against me because of it.

But it is also honest. God, I have so much trouble writing that—that when my sister was beaten, somehow, it hurt me, scarred me too. It seems like claiming something I have no right to have, something I don’t even want. I am cringing as I write this, but it’s true.

An important knot has unraveled. I don’t know what to do with the pieces of it left in my hands, though. So I put them out here, outside of me, until I can have them make sense.