Unwifeable(22)

“I just can’t fucking take it!” my father would yell throughout my life. “I just can’t fucking take it!”

Sometimes, I think about the speech that Al gave my father as he lay dying on the hill and the aftereffects of the war on my childhood. I would hide under the covers as a kid, rocking myself, praying, “Please let me be, please let me be, please let me be,” as my dad would erupt in one of his erratic house-shaking furies.

My dad gave me a master class in how to alienate people—and how to reel them back in. He didn’t just have “no filter.” He had no filter, no sight, and no inhibitions, all these having been ripped out with a surgical hacksaw.

From birth, I absorbed how the world reacted to him and how he lashed out in return.

“There was always a scene,” I tell my therapist. “I always defended him. Life always went on.”

“Childhood by fire,” she observes. “Why don’t you tell me about your mother. Did she meet your dad after or before he was shot?”

“After,” I say, somewhat bitter over the therapist’s predictability. That’s the first thing people always want to know.

Then I go on.

“Actually, you know,” I tell her, “my dad did a lot of the caretaking when I was young. Because my mom was mentally indisposed.”

“Mentally indisposed?” the therapist asks. “How?”

“Obsessive-compulsive disorder,” I say. “And depression.”

Diagnosed in her young adult life, my mom’s OCD manifested in her scrubbing her hands with dish soap for ten minutes at a time under the sink faucet, afraid to touch things because she might get infected.

It is no small miracle that my mom nursed me until I was two and a half years old, considering there were a few awful times when she was worried her dirty baby might be too contaminated, and she could not hold me at all.

Sometimes she warned my older sister and me that she needed to be left alone so she could “go crazy” at the kitchen sink. My mom would then make a loud noise, guttural, like a monster, growling, “SCHHHHHHHHH,” as she washed her hands, scrubbing them furiously until they were pink and raw and clean.

“What was the noise she made?” the therapist asks.

“I don’t want to repeat it,” I say. “That’s nobody’s business.”

My mother’s particular brand of OCD expressed itself in extremes. So either all of the underwear in the house was ironed and folded or nothing had been cleaned for weeks.

My blind dad took care of my obsessive-compulsive mom, and my older sister took care of me. When we fought, we were sent to the back of the house, where my mom told us to “work it out.”

My sister did exactly that, kicking me in the crotch and punching me in the stomach until I was good and sorry.

When my mom took me to a psychiatrist as a child, I did a mental dead man’s float in the shrink’s shabby beige office. I knew loyalty and secret keeping. And I feared that if I acknowledged just one drop of the pain and fear and anger I felt, my whole world would come collapsing down.

“I tried to protect my family,” I tell her, “because somebody had to protect somebody in my family, but a lot of times I failed. Especially my father.”

“How so?” she asks.

“Let’s see . . .” I begin.

There was the time my dad was swinging me around in the expanses of our living room as I cried out in glee, and he cut it too close—it all happened so fast. My head smashed into the U-shaped corner of the sharp archway, which just barely missed my right eye, and the blood came pouring out. Later, in the emergency room, stitches being sewn near my eyebrow, my father hysterical and upset, I told him I was sorry, it was my fault, I didn’t warn him fast enough.

“But it wasn’t your fault,” the therapist says.

“It didn’t feel that way as a kid,” I say.

I would do anything to prevent my dad from getting upset. Because with one false move, I could sense it coming: An anger explosion would come raining down on everyone. A string of curse words, yelling, throwing, mewling, sometimes a fist through the wall, culminating with one final come-to-Jesus howling-at-the-moon proclamation, his catchphrase if you will: “GODDAMMIT, I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT!”

It wasn’t until years later, during a stray neuroscience course, when I was toying with becoming a teacher, that I learned that what I’d always thought was his “personality” was partially a function of damage done to the prefrontal lobe when he was shot. I read the story—as anyone who has ever taken a neuroscience class has—about Phineas Gage, the railroad foreman who suffered an iron bar through the skull. The man’s personality completely transformed after the injury, with him becoming “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity . . . impatient of restraint or advice when it conflict[ed] with his desires . . . obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of operation which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned . . .”

You get the idea. Welcome to my childhood.

My mom, on the other hand, offered her own case study in brain science.

Because of her OCD, she often became preoccupied with whether things were “infected” with shit. So giving baths was pretty much out. Because we had tympanostomy tubes in our ears as kids, we weren’t supposed to get them wet, so my dad used a wooden board that he would take turns laying my sister and me on in the bathtub to shampoo our hair.