Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(23)

    “We can talk about the Xanax later. Was your grandmother really a Nazi?”

“No, not really, but she was in Germany during the war, so she was complicit. Like Ivanka.”

“Okay, back to your father.”

“Right. After that, my father and I couldn’t be in the same room for a long period of time without screaming at each other. All I wanted to do was get out of the house and stay out of the house, and all my father seemed to want to do was force me to sit at home and punish me.”

“What was he punishing you for?”

“Everything and nothing. He just hated me. Well, I mean, I know he didn’t hate me, but that’s what it felt like.”

“And what did that feel like?” Dan leaned forward, his forearms on his knees, hands clasped.

“I just told you, Miracle-Ear. Like he hated me.” I didn’t call Dan “Miracle-Ear,” but I thought about it.

“But what did that feel like?”

Dan did this a lot. Asked me a question I had already answered.

He wanted me to understand that the outward feeling was not the only feeling. He pushed me to identify what was underneath that feeling, which was anger, and then sadness, and then rejection. I felt alone. That I couldn’t rely on anyone but myself. Helpless.

Now, I know that my stubbornness was patrilineal—that it came directly from the person who had withdrawn his affection. If he still loved me, he wasn’t about to tell me, and I surely wasn’t going to ask him to love me. Two obstinate assholes reeling in pain. Things could have been so much easier if we had just had the ability to reach out to each other.

    “Our signals were always crossed,” I told Dan. “None of us had the tools.”

“That’s why you’re here,” he told me. “To get the tools.”

“I definitely remember loving my father before Chet died, and not loving him after, so there’s that,” I added.

“Well, you probably loved him still, but you were hurt, and it sounds like you turned that hurt into anger, because, as I said, anger is motion, and it allows you to avoid sitting with your feelings. In a sense, you felt that your father had broken up with you too. That must have been really scary for a little girl.”

Getting broken up with twice by the age of nine. I had never looked at it that way.

“Yeah, that’s a lot of male rejection before I even got my period.”

Two guys in the span of one year, and I hadn’t even started dating. I had on no occasion thought about my experiences within this kind of framework, or thought about how my father must have felt losing his firstborn son. Of course he was wrecked. Who wouldn’t be? Why would he have any inkling about how to handle losing a child? No one has any idea what to do with that news.

“That must have been when I realized I needed to grow myself up. To become a fixer.”

“Probably,” Dan agreed. “No one helped you with your pain, you were too young to deal with it on your own, and it sounds like when everyone around you disengaged, your pain turned into anger, which turned into motion, and from everything you’re telling me, you haven’t stopped moving since.”

    “Yeah, that sounds about right. I just needed him, and he had this terrible habit of showing up only at times when I didn’t want him to. Like at school, I just didn’t want him representing me.”

“Why not?”

“Because he was loud and mostly disheveled. His outfits were the casual equivalent of what I wore to temple on Friday nights. I just believed I was better at advocating for myself. Plus, my mom was sweet and quiet and I wanted more people to see her, to see that I had a mother that was like other mothers—one who showed up.”

“How did that feel?”

“Lonely.”

Most days in elementary school, I could easily walk to school and back by myself, but the winter weather required transportation by car, and since my parents didn’t want to deal with that, they farmed me out to our neighbor. In exchange for a ride to school on winter mornings, my parents offered up my math-tutoring services to their second grader, Samson. Even though I was in the fourth grade at the time, I shouldn’t have been tutoring anyone in any subject—least of all math. After a few weeks, it became apparent that Samson was smarter than I was, and that’s when he and I got philosophical and just started playing Super Mario Bros.

I remember walking home from Samson’s house one afternoon around five P.M. and being asked by my father, in one of his bouts of selective parenting, where I’d been.

    “The zoo,” I told him, and walked into the kitchen to see if my mom had cooked anything.

“Did you have a field trip?” my mom asked sweetly, standing with her back to me, over the stove.

“No, I just went on my own,” I told her. As if a nine-year-old had the wherewithal to take a day trip to the zoo, solo.

My father went back to reading the newspaper and my mother asked me if I was hungry. I was always hungry, so I took a bowl of whatever she was making and walked upstairs to my room, where I could at least be consistent with the company I was keeping.

I wanted someone to look after me—someone who would ask where I’d been. I wanted a mother who wanted other kids’ parents’ phone numbers. I wanted parents who didn’t bounce checks. I wanted to be picked up from Hebrew school on time—or at all—in a car with four doors that opened and closed.