—
On the way back to my rental car, I catch a glimpse of the house across the street from mine. The names come back to me clear as day, but here I’ll call them Fred and Barbara. And one last memory returns. It’s not an unfamiliar memory, but it occurs to me that this memory was the one and only time the veneer of our beautiful house was shattered. When its pretty exterior could not hold what was inside.
I don’t remember where the fight began, only that at one point, my mother pulled me across the orange shag carpet by my hair.
“I hate you. Stop crying,” she said when she let go. I tried to appear stronger. Instead of letting my face melt into helplessness, I pulled it into a tight frown.
“Oh, now you’re mad at me?”
“No, I was just trying to make my face less sad,” I protested, but she didn’t hear me because she was already shrieking over me: “HOW DARE YOU LOOK AT ME THAT WAY?”
Then something was pounding. The doorbell rang, once, twice. We both stopped, stunned, and the silence was somehow louder than all of our hollering. Neither of us could look at the other. Both of us just stared at the front door, as if we were shocked that it existed. It had always seemed that whenever we engaged in this dance, there was no door. There was no outside world. Our home was our entire universe. I was all my mother had. My mother was everything I knew. But now the illusion was broken, and we didn’t know what came next. She slowly unraveled herself and tiptoed to the door. She looked through the peephole. “I can hear you in there!” a voice yelled. “Open up, or I’ll call the cops!”
She opened the door, and I stood behind her, trembling. Our neighbor Barbara stood there with her gray hair piled on top of her head. She and her husband, Fred, were a couple of friendly retirees with no children. Sometimes Fred struck up conversations with my dad about their roses or their cars, and once, we went over for dinner. But Barbara looked very different today.
“I hear what you’re doing to that child,” Barbara said. “I sit in my home across from you and I have to listen to you screaming at her, day after day…and I just…I can’t do it anymore. I won’t.” Barbara straightened and announced: “I’m going to call the cops on you, because you are torturing her.”
There was a moment of shocked silence, but only a moment. “You’re spying on us?” my mother quickly retorted, expertly twisting Barbara’s barbs back at her. “What are you doing, sneaking up to our door to eavesdrop on us? Go ahead! Call the cops. We’ll tell them that you’re trespassing. We have the right to our privacy.”
“I don’t have to spy,” Barbara scoffed. “I can hear you screaming from my living room. But it’s true, when I come closer, I can hear her begging. I can hear her crying and saying, ‘Please.’ My God, she has to beg. A child. How could you?” Barbara looked at me with sadness and kindness and an indignant jut to her chin. She thought she was my defender. She was wrong.
I pushed past my mother to Barbara. “Please don’t do that,” I said. “Thank you so much for caring and for coming here trying to help me. But I don’t want the police to take me. I want to live here, and I love my mommy and daddy. She sometimes yells at me, that’s true. But she just is helping me so I know better next time. I can be an awful child, you just don’t see it.”
Barbara’s eyes were full of pity. “It’s not okay that this is happening to you, sweetheart. I’m sorry, but I have to do something.”
My panic response kicked in. I knew what I had to do. “Please, Barbara, please,” I said. My mother stepped back. She knew I had it from there.
I started to cry, gently at first, and then so hard that I was hiccuping. I could not live without them. I was genuinely terrified, but I was also good at conveying my terror with the necessary sense of drama. Barbara was right. I did beg all the time. I’d gotten good at it.
I collapsed to the floor and crawled toward Barbara. I clasped my hands in prayer and pawed at her ankles in her shoes.
“It’s okay, sweetie. Please get up,” Barbara said, gently. Her face was pained. She looked at me on the floor, then at my mother, then back again. She recognized she was out of her depth.
“Are you going to call the police still?”
She hesitated.
“I don’t want to hear you doing this to her anymore,” Barbara said to my mother. “Or I will. I won’t this time. But do you see what you’re doing? This is wrong.” I couldn’t see her face because I was still on the floor, my shoulders shuddering. But her voice was quiet, overeager; she wanted this to sink in. Poor Barbara. “You’re damaging her. She’s going to be damaged for life.”
My mother didn’t say anything. The only sound was me sniffling. There was a long pause before Barbara walked away. I watched her sandals retreat past our opulent jasmine and bougainvillea before my mother shut the door.
My mother waited for half a minute, long enough for Barbara to be gone, then cussed her out under her breath. “A busybody, that’s who she is. Getting into other people’s business. Who is she to judge other people?”
When my father came home that evening, my mother told him a neutered version of the story. She said that Barbara came over to complain about how loud my mom’s yelling was.
“Can you believe? The house alarm was set off when we were on vacation, and it went on for half a day before Barbara heard it and finally called someone! But then she says she can hear me screaming at this one.” My mother narrowed her eyes at me. “This girl is so much trouble that she forces me to scream at her so loud that the neighbors can hear. That’s how bad she is.”
My dad shook his head and shoved another mouthful of rice into his face. “Why do you have to be like that?” he asked me. “Can’t you just be good to your mother?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I promise I’ll be better.”
* * *
—
Judith Herman, the woman who coined the term complex PTSD, wrote: “The abused child…must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear. To preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them. She will go to any lengths to construct an explanation for her fate that absolves her parents of all blame and responsibility…. The abuse is either walled off from conscious awareness and memory…or minimized, rationalized, and excused, so that whatever did happen was not really abuse.”[1]