Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis(33)
I never saw that man again. Before he left, someone did ask him where he was from. “Well, I’ve lived here in Hamilton for most of my life. But I was born down in eastern Kentucky, Owsley County.” At the time, I didn’t know enough about Kentucky geography to tell the man that he had been born no more than twenty miles from my grandparents’ childhood home.
Chapter 8
By the time I finished eighth grade, Mom had been sober for at least a year, and she’d been dating Matt for two or three years. I was doing well in school, and Mamaw had taken a couple vacations—one trip to California to visit Uncle Jimmy and another to Las Vegas with her friend Kathy. Lindsay had married soon after Papaw’s death. I loved her husband, Kevin, and still do, for a simple reason: He never mistreated her. That’s all I ever wanted in a mate for my sister. Just under a year after their wedding, Lindsay gave birth to her son, Kameron. She was a mom, and a damn good one at that. I was proud of her, and I adored my new nephew. Aunt Wee also had two small children, which gave me three little kids to dote on. I saw all of this as a sign of family renewal. The summer before high school was thus a hopeful one.
That same summer, however, Mom announced that I’d be moving in with Matt in his Dayton home. I liked Matt, and by then Mom had lived in Dayton with him for a little while. But Dayton was a forty-five-minute drive from Mamaw’s, and Mom made it clear that she wanted me to attend school in Dayton. I liked my life in Middletown—I wanted to attend the high school, I loved my friends, and although it was a bit unconventional, I enjoyed splitting time between Mom’s and Mamaw’s houses during the week and hanging out with Dad on the weekends. Importantly, I could always go to Mamaw’s house if I needed to, and that made all the difference. I remembered life when I didn’t have that safety valve, and I didn’t want to go back to those days. Moreover, any move would be without Lindsay and Kameron. So when Mom made her announcement about moving in with Matt, I belted out, “Absolutely not,” and stormed away.
Mom drew from this conversation that I had anger problems and scheduled a time for me to meet with her therapist. I didn’t know she had a therapist or the money to afford one, but I agreed to meet with this lady. Our first meeting took place the following week in a musty old office near Dayton, Ohio, where a nondescript middle-aged woman, Mom, and I tried to understand why I was so angry. I recognized that human beings aren’t very good at judging themselves: I may have been wrong that I was no angrier (in fact, considerably less so) than most of the people in my life. Maybe Mom was right and I did have some anger problems. I tried to keep an open mind. If nothing else, I thought, this woman might give Mom and me an opportunity to get everything in the open.
But that first session felt like an ambush. Immediately, the woman began asking why I would scream at my mother and storm off, why I didn’t recognize that she was my mother and that I had to live with her by law. The therapist chronicled “outbursts” that I’d allegedly had, some going back to a time I couldn’t remember—the time I threw a tantrum in a department store as a five-year-old, my fight with another child in school (the school bully, whom I didn’t want to punch but did so at Mamaw’s encouragement), the times I’d run from home to my grandparents’ house because of Mom’s “discipline.” Clearly this woman had developed an impression of me based solely on what Mom had told her. If I didn’t have an anger problem before, I did now.
“Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?” I asked. At fourteen, I knew at least a little about professional ethics. “Aren’t you supposed to ask me what I think about things and not just criticize me?” I launched into an hour-long summary of my life to that point. I didn’t tell the whole story, since I knew I had to choose my words carefully: During Mom’s domestic violence case a couple of years earlier, Lindsay and I had let slip some unsavory details about Mom’s parenting, and because it counted as a new revelation of abuse, the family counselor was required to report it to child services. So I didn’t miss the irony of lying to a therapist (to protect Mom) lest I ignite another intervention by the county children’s services. I explained the situation well enough: After an hour, she said simply, “Perhaps we should meet alone.”
I saw this woman as an obstacle to overcome—an obstacle placed by Mom—not as someone who might help. I explained only half of my feelings: that I had no interest in putting a forty-five-minute barrier between me and everyone I had ever depended on so I could replant myself with a man I knew would be sent packing. The therapist obviously understood. What I didn’t tell her is that for the first time in my life, I felt trapped. There was no Papaw, and Mamaw—a longtime smoker with the emphysema to prove it—seemed too frail and exhausted to care for a fourteen-year-old boy. My aunt and uncle had two young kids. Lindsay was newly married and had a child of her own. I had nowhere to go. I’d seen chaos and fighting, violence, drugs, and a great deal of instability. But I’d never felt like I had no way out. When the therapist asked me what I’d do, I replied that I would probably go live with my dad. She said that this sounded like a good idea. When I walked out of her office, I thanked her for her time and knew that I’d never see her again.
Mom had a massive blind spot in the way that she perceived the world. That she would ask me to move with her to Dayton, that she seemed genuinely surprised by my resistance, and that she would subject me to such a one-sided introduction to a therapist meant that Mom didn’t understand something about the way that Lindsay and I ticked. Lindsay once told me, “Mom just doesn’t get it.” I initially disagreed with her: “Of course she gets it; it’s just the way she is, something she can’t change.” After the incident with the therapist, I knew that Lindsay was right.