Mom and Dad

My father errs in telling my mother he does not want her to join him on a trip to visit his sister Judy, seven hours away. He refuses to explain why beyond saying it may be the last time he ever does. No one in this is even seventy or sick, so the statement does not prove exculpatory.

My mother has no one else but me who will listen. My older brother is in his own world. My younger brother never mastered a bedside manner despite soon becoming a doctor.

I am the compassionate one, the so-called daughter she never had.

She has friends, but I inherited her disinclination to open up to them for fear they will remember and judge her as insufficient or too much.

In a long conversation, she tells me details of my upbringing I did not know, have any cause to know, or recall only hazily.

These are secrets, and I won't reveal the particulars outside therapy or telling Amber--who says it is bold of my mother to confess everything to the offspring notorious for writing every thought that flits through his precious little head.

From this clot of knots, I set to unravel why I am the way I am. I would prefer to find no thread meandering from a childhood trauma to a present pathology. Am I so trite as to trace anxious attachment to parents who should not have married, if they should have met at all? It impugns my character if my cleverest traits are coping mechanisms.

I am too much of a writer to ignore this. There is a name I still cringe to hear, someone who hurt my father in a way I have never probed. I spent my teen years as a "serial monogamist" (as a favored ex put it) because I had such a desire to be a good boyfriend—not that I could have honestly enumerated what that was—and have love. I stayed in situations that poisoned me because I was terrified to leave, not because I would be alone as much as hurt the other person.

Can all this be tied to parents whose feelings toward one another were not loving, ones who might have been better off separate? It's too pat, but cliches are tired for a good reason: they are too often accurate.

I half-joke to Amber about what I could be if I did not still spend psychic resources processing, and this conversation gives me much more to sort through for relevance.

I am surprised my mother is aware of why she did some things that struck me as unhealthy when I was younger—or even now, as she bought a new kitten to spite my father for leaving her home for this trip. I don't know why this should startle me. For whatever flaws I may find in my parents—and I admit I was never inclined toward hagiography—they are no dummies.

I imagine the boon therapy would have done us, individually but especially as a family. The hypothetical is too like a nettle. I cannot grip it long enough to indulge the world where we might have made this brave, healing step. Therapy is for crazy people, and we are not crazy. This, at least, is what I believed through my childhood. There isn't a world where my parents would have suggested it, let alone made it happen. As such, nothing was hashed out beyond jokes and boxes of topics We Do Not Discuss.

I remember hearing yelling so often that I learned to move silently through the living room. I recall being told how convenient I was when I would immediately get out a book while waiting in long lines. I desperately wanted my parents to think I was good because Dan was a hellion, so much so that I prided myself on a lack of teenage rebellion, which is a natural state all children should go through. The antecedents are primordial, secrets my mother may not consciously recall but which nested in us all.

I am doing the work in therapy to figure myself out, maybe because of the inherent middle-child goody-two-shoes of it all. I don't know how many others in this play (is it a tragedy or a farce, to quote Harry Price?) believe something is wrong. If they don't recognize or acknowledge a problem in themselves, they can't do the painful work of dealing with it. (It is painful. I would love never to speak to a therapist again, to no longer have triggers, to trust I acted in my best interests, and not to sate a neurotic script authored in my infancy.)

I remember enough conflict in my youth that the broad strokes of my mother's confession did not surprise me, but the specifics and examples did.

My mother was not an innocent party, though she is the aggrieved one explaining herself to me now. I can't expect that my father would do so in this way. Not to me, yes (though I am the designated Sympathetic Child), but perhaps to anyone. She is a reactionary one. She flails when shoved out of the way, figuratively speaking, then keeps reacting when she is met with insult rather than an apology and a hug.

Therapy added to those hugs would go a long way. I don't know how to get those for them. I am aware that being their confessor is unhealthy. I need boundaries, but I feel I can endure a purging that could make them worse otherwise. Maybe I cannot.

I am woozy after we hang up, as my analytical mind dives in to make a meal of this information, as though I can put together why I am like this and how I can be better. Not so much to excuse who I am--I am charming and like myself--but why I have done the things I have and what I might now do differently. I cannot drive myself to exhaustion, hoping for the boy I was and who he would have been with my prescribed therapy and hugs.

It was not a secure childhood, emotionally. I had much but did not always have what I needed. My mother kept me ignorant of our leaner years financially, for which I am grateful and amused. I can't precisely parse what it is to not be loved, but I understood how it felt not to be wanted. I do not recall my parents ever abridging me--and I was naturally a precocious, weird kid--though they tried to rein in my brothers more for different reasons. I was mainly happy, but I would also, inexplicably, start bawling midway through a party. I believe it was an awareness that this festive connection was finite, but I couldn't swear to it. It was something of a buzzkill. There were times an adult might have stepped in and helped redirect me, even when I could not have expressed I was off-course.

Forty minutes on the phone with one's mother doesn't bear a total reevaluation of the first fifteen years of life. However, it slots a few more puzzle pieces I did not acknowledge were missing.

last watched: Only Murders in the Building
reading: I Am Starting to Worry about This Black Box of Doom