My stepbrothers hadn’t known I’d lived in San Francisco?
I’d lived in the Bay Area for five years after college. Just a short drive from their home. I’d visited their home while they were at school. For years, I’d had those monthly dinners with my father. He’d helped me move four times, taking the same twenty boxes, bookshelf, desk, and mattress from tiny apartment to tiny apartment. Where had he told his children he’d gone those days? Had he told them, too, that he was meeting up with “a friend”? How had they not known what college I went to? How had they not known anything about me?
On the train ride home, I made a note of it to Joey—that I had been so close and yet so far away.
“It’s too bad for them,” he said. “They really would’ve benefited from having a great sister like you in their lives.” Sadness and fury bit into each other like two warring serpents in my stomach.
“Don’t say that,” I managed, and I swallowed everything back down and opened up the crossword app on my phone.
It took a couple of days for it to hit me: an unbearable understanding that changed everything. This time, I am the secret.
I am the same as my long-lost half sister, her existence so cobwebby that nobody in my family can even remember her name. I am my grandparents’ jail time and my mother’s birth parents. I am my mother’s opaque childhood, her missing siblings. I am the great-uncle who cross-dressed, whom my aunts used to peek at beneath the floorboards to catch a glimpse of him putting on lipstick. I am the great-aunt who maybe had a female lover, the one nobody likes to talk about.
I am the trauma you bury away. I am the lie you hold under your tongue, the thing you bury, vanish, erase, the thing you can almost always pretend is forgotten as long as you don’t touch it. My mother goes to her tennis club with her new husband and plays in the local tournaments. My father goes hiking with his two sons and his wife. On Facebook, in private profiles I have to stalk to access, they smile widely in the photos with their new families, my mother flashes a big diamond ring and a little dog, my father posts vacation pictures, smiling with his sons. Their lives appear whole. But only if you forget I exist.
I am blood and sin. I am the sum total of my parents’ regrets. I am their greatest shame.
* * *
—
After his trip to New York and once he was back in California, my father texted me a picture of the framed family photo. But now it looked different. I looked photoshopped in, a dark anomaly. I was looking directly into the camera, my eyes a challenge: I will not pretend like nothing happened—like I can be killed off and resurrected without consequence. My eyes held everything that had happened.
The thing you left doesn’t forget.
* * *
—
Four months later, I got my diagnosis. And now that my past was spilling over, exploding, a volcano spewing hot toxic waste all over my present life, it was all I could think about.
I sent my father an email with the subject line Finally Got an Official Diagnosis. In the body of the email, I attached a link to the Wikipedia page for complex PTSD.
At the time, the Wikipedia page read, “Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD; also known as complex trauma disorder) is a psychological disorder that can develop in response to prolonged, repeated experience of interpersonal trauma in a context in which the individual has little or no chance of escape.”
And then, a paragraph down: “C-PTSD is a learned set of responses, and a failure to complete numerous important developmental tasks. It is environmentally, not genetically, caused. Unlike most of the diagnoses it is confused with, it is neither inborn nor characterological, not DNA based, it is a disorder caused by lack of nurture.”
A lack of nurture.
I didn’t write a hello in the body of the email. I didn’t include a sign-off. All I included in the vast expanse of white space was that link. What I didn’t write, but what was implied, what I hoped to convey: You ruined my life. You ruined my life. You ruined my life.
He didn’t answer. He’d stopped calling months ago, now that I’d helped resolve his relationships with his family. I waited and I waited. My phone stayed silent.
CHAPTER 33
I always thought that estrangement was an on-off switch. But that’s not so, says Kristina Scharp, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. She’s one of the very few academics who study estrangement. “I think that’s one of the myths of estrangement, that estrangement is a complete cutoff, or it’s final,” she said in an NPR interview. “Really, estrangement is more of a continuum, where you can either be more or less estranged, and actually people often go through multiple times of trying to create distance before they’re able to maintain a level of distance that’s right for them.”[1]
I came to Scharp’s work by way of my friend Catherine Saint Louis. Catherine is a brilliant reporter and editor. She takes up space in a room, and not just because she is six feet tall. She is forceful—in her offerings of food, her own story, her opinions, and her kindness. We first connected on Twitter, and though we met up in a bright, bougie coffee shop in downtown Brooklyn to talk about freelancing, we quickly learned that our new friendship would center on our experiences with estrangement. Catherine has reported a lot on the topic, done tons of research on estranged families. Her work is inspired by her estrangement from her own father. And what she wanted to impress upon me was that even though there is a tremendous stigma around estrangement, it is fairly common.
“Really?” I asked her at the time. “But I never hear about this from anyone except for a couple of close friends and you.”
“I have spoken to four dozen people who say the exact same thing as you,” she said, smiling. “That’s why we need to talk about this in public.”
Catherine told me about her own difficult relationship with her Haitian immigrant father—a man who wanted the best for her, who wanted her to do well in school and in her career, but also terrorized and demeaned her. Deciding to stop speaking to him, she told me, felt like deciding to stop touching a hot stove. Every time she got near him, she was burnt—and so at a certain point, she had to protect her skin.