I am compelled to begin with a disclaimer. I refuse to write on the surface of things and the story I tell here is intense. I am a decade removed from the life I talk about ahead, which lends itself to forgetting detail. You’ll have to excuse me, I was a kid. I am obligated to write it as I experienced it, and the natural consequence is that others that have had their hands on it may not be portrayed in the most flattering light. I don’t deal in gentle things, but I know gentleness from its absence. I forward an apology to the aforementioned, even as the major characters have long been aware of my intent with my writing. I owe a particularly strong apology to Papa, for not getting over myself and giving this the same fervor and time that I do to everything else so you could read some of it before you left. The rare grace you gave me before your time came grants me extra courage to continue anyway.
I hope today finds you well, but I also hope it finds you honest. I’m breaking a chain of generational abuse by doing so myself. Some may consider my tone rather graceless, if not scathing, but there is nothing soft about what I had to endure as a child and I don’t obligate myself to make it comfortable. The first gift I was given in life was the ability to recognize harmful behavior from the adults I should have been able to trust. The second was the instinct I had to successfully remove myself from it and forge an identity that runs under its own power, and is fueled entirely by will. I’ve chosen to use them both.
That was the original opening to this, but I already feel pushed to make an addendum.
“Be attentive to the repercussions that might cause for your future. The story you tell is from your perspective, and not deemed the whole truth,” is the response I received after sending my dad a heads up that this post, which I have been struggling with since February, was going to be made. I made it clear months ago that this was imminent.
Dear reader, I’ll leave the interpretation of that response up to you, but I must first point out that I have lived the repercussions already. That’s what this is about.
Content warning: These passages contain themes of abuse, suicide, domestic violence, and other subjects that could be uncomfortable for some. Reader discretion is highly encouraged.
~
There was an accident when I was an infant. I was taken to the hospital with symptoms of shaken baby syndrome, and consequential cranial hemorrhaging, after I had been left at home with my dad for a day. As evidenced by this writing, I made a miraculous recovery. Prognosis for brain injury in infants is generally very poor, and if survived, often results in a person going through life unable to reach appropriate developmental milestones, and requiring assistance in basic care for the rest of their lives.
I was removed from my parents custody and placed under legal guardianship with my maternal grandparents. My mom and dad lived on adjacent land so there was never much physical distance, and they remained a part of my life. I remember my mom using this event as cannon-fodder against my dad in their countless, high-octane fights throughout my childhood. I obviously had no memory of it to harbor any feelings about it myself, and I have to recognize the weight of the distrust and anguish my mom would have endured in the event of such harm coming to her child. From all accounts I ever heard though, it was just an accident. Not the result of malice, just negligence. I’d also consider it a precursor.
Come with me now to picture day, first grade. I remember my deep blue velvet dress. It’s still my favorite color. I get off the school bus at my parents house and walk up to a locked front door. I go around the house to find the side door is also locked. There isn’t a car in the driveway, but after my mom’s collision with a dump truck with my grandma and I in the car (which I credit for my inability to sleep in a moving vehicle now), it was usual for my dad to drive the only family car to work. At this point on the timeline I had reasonable free-choice of if I was dropped off there or at Grandma and Papa’s but… did I mess up this time? Am I in trouble? I panic, despite their house being in my direct line-of-sight. I run across the road and try to climb through the barbed-wire fence that borders their property. My dress becomes snagged, and my legs are scraped through my tights as I begin to cry uncontrollably. This might be my first memory of a helplessness and entrapment that would become a central theme of the years to come.
I free myself from the fence, and run through the tall golden grass with my backpack swinging, across the cow pastures at the corner of McPhillips and Black Chapel Road, to the house of those who always came to my rescue. I burst through the front door sobbing, quickly consoled by my grandparents who, if I remember it correctly, might have laughed at how big of a distance six-year-old me perceived that 1/2 mile or less of unobstructed Indiana open field. I never felt unsafe when I was there. Not when I ran outside in rural darkness and heard the shrilly barks of coyotes nearby, and not when I was brought there when my parents were on another tirade and I needed to get away. They consoled me in the sunroom where I looked over that field through north-facing windows- the same windows where I would narrate the movements of the cows through Papa’s binoculars in a Steve Irwin accent, where I would look past the barbed wire at my parents house that was not truly home.
The house that my last memory of was as it was being hollowed out by fire.
~
My grandpa, Jerry, was always known as Papa to me, even into adulthood, and from this point on I’ll refer to him as such. He passed away rather abruptly in May of 2023, on the day we had planned for me to visit his house for the first time after a long pause in communication. I was the honored officiant of his services and his folded casket flag sits on display in my van. With all of the difficult text to follow, understand that this is the most painful and fresh part of the story as I’ve lived it so far. He historically hadn’t been that supportive, much less interested, in my obsessive pursuits on the bike or really anything else I did that wasn’t chasing money, but the day before his stroke he had saved the link to my GPS unit to his desktop to follow me on a multi-day ride. It was like tragic poetry to discover that only after we could no longer talk about it. I don’t know if he could understand me, but when I got to his house after he was already in a coma and on hospice, I made sure to let him know “I made it.”
Our relationship had been severely strained, and I had imposed no-contact in 2018 after I had finally grown tired of his consistent down-talk of most every choice I made as a young-adult. He was from a different time, obviously, used to being in command of things and would reiterate often how “people only visited when they needed something.” He was an incredibly intelligent man, but if I may mirror his critical judgement here- was others’ approach only in times of need a cause? Or was it an effect, a consequence of ye who would cast out sharp criticism before fully listening to someone’s story. You might already be able to tell who I take after the most. I learned so much from him, including to never take advice from someone who could not hear others out (or someone whose life you didn’t want to emulate).
At the visitation for my grandfather on my dad’s side, Papa and I spoke for the first time since that break. There was no tension then, just the warmth I remember from when we weren’t on opposite teams. I don’t know if he gave as much thought to our falling out as I did. I was the one who was “too sensitive,” after all. (And thank goodness for that.) We made plans for dinner in the coming weeks, and caught up in a Cracker Barrel as was tradition. Before I got in the van to make the drive home to St. Louis, I told him- “The reason I have not visited is because I have felt like I couldn’t,” and softly yet sternly explained that I needed him to trust me to take care of myself, that I knew me better than anyone else ever could. It was a bold assertion toward someone with an iron spine and general dominance like he had, but he didn’t argue with me. Hundreds of imaginary disputes I had with him in my head during our period of silence, borne out of innumerable memories of not being given enough space to speak, were in that one moment dispelled. I prefer to think that he began to respect the rigidity I exuded that could have only come from one place. That was the last time I ever talked to him in person.
Dear reader, I took the step to salvage a relationship that was deeply troubled yet still valuable in a style I had never had exemplified to me, one that follows a format of “this is the problem I have, and this is what I need from you to fix it.” I was intimidated by Papa. He was notorious for speaking over you, always knowing better than you, fairly tactful with others but never with those he had power over. Not communicating with him for a couple of years was me tripping that outlet when I had finally been overloaded with the condescension. He never called. We may never have spoken again had I not been so bold as to tell him exactly why I had stepped away, with a precision that didn’t leave room for volatility. I would have accepted any outcome so long as I made that move forward; any further argument would have resulted in recurrence because I would not entertain another senseless dispute. Instead I was rewarded with a sense of levelling at long last. I found peace at his passing only because I took that risk. We had emailed back and forth in the months between and we exchanged the “I love you,” that I had heard every night before bed at his house in elementary school, and never once remember hearing from my parents. He told me once that his determination that I belonged with them was a mistake. I have to agree.
I began to live with them full-time in fifth grade while visiting my grandparents farm on weekends at my choosing, but it wasn’t a smooth transition. My parents kept moving, before and after. I was uprooted so often in elementary school that I became withdrawn socially, shutting down almost entirely by the time I was about 14. We’re all aware that kids are fairly no-holds-barred with their commentary, and I became known as the girl that always moved. There one month, gone the next. Friends were so temporary, it didn’t make much sense to me to find them. Being plucked from familiarity and habit so frequently wired me to anticipate it, and even now I look for the activities and spaces where people aren’t present. Everywhere, I find holes in my social adjustment. Customary “polite” phrases and language were things I hardly paid attention to before even two to three years ago, and now I still question their legitimacy. I became a person that has frequently answered “how are you?” transparently, realizing how a response that isn’t robotic can lead to discomfort in others and I wonder, honestly, whose problem that really is. Keeping my head down, minding my business, sometimes totally engrossed in my own internal world because circumstances programmed me to turn inward is still frequently misread as rudeness.
Between second and sixth grade I had been to five different schools, a couple of them multiple times. My mom never seemed settled anywhere we lived, and neither was I. In seventh grade we finally moved into the house where they still live as of the time of this writing, but even with roots established, the ground I walked on cracked. Over the years my mom became more dependent on my dad as her vision deteriorated from an incurable, uncorrectable genetic eye disorder that she and all but one of her four siblings also have. (It is unknown if I inherited the mutation and/or if I’ll be subject to this degeneration in time.) By this point, she could no longer drive, and was officially considered legally blind and thus disabled. This dealt a blow to her mental health, but that wasn’t the only factor. Let’s walk back again for a moment, to when I first clearly remember my world being… wrong.
We were in a two-bedroom duplex and I shared a room with my younger sister. My brother, the youngest, stayed in my parents room. That was the year when I can clearly recall the condition of our living space becoming more cluttered, and it was the setting I most vividly remember my mom’s desperate screaming of my dad’s name as the warning before items were thrown, furniture overturned, holes punched in the drywall. I couldn’t tell you what the fights were about. Not once. It didn’t matter. I still hear it because I was both deeply afraid and profoundly furious. The violence was never toward me (although I do remember my dad grabbing my siblings by fistfuls of their hair) but I was overloaded enough that one afternoon I removed the screen from the bedroom window and climbed outside, clocking in my head how long it would take to walk to my grandparents’ house- this time eight miles away. My parents walked in and discovered my alternative exit and I was chastised for it. No apparent concern, no question as to why I felt I needed to get out. I was just a disobedient child. How irrational. How inconvenient.
It was that same apartment where my mom was struck with a coffee mug during another of these disputes, and my dad was taken away in handcuffs. Subconsciously, there was somehow no relief for me when he was gone. He never had been the person I was most afraid of.
Arrive at seventh grade. We had moved to the house where we would remain for the rest of my school career, and where the depths of my parents deep torment, and my perverse response to their authority, would give fault lines new names. Mrs. Beals, my teacher for four of nine class periods, was solid granite during the school day. She fostered my strengths as a student writer and offset the busted confidence that resulted from an unsafe and unstable life at home. She might even be to credit for effort from me academically at all. We were pen-pals for years afterward. I fell deeply enough into a fog eventually that I never returned her last letter, and she passed away after double-writing me to check in. I still regret that.
The year after that, the seismometer was gauging constant waves. I was automatically enrolled in advanced-placement English and literature classes as a result of above-average scores on relevant testing from the year prior. I had a meeting with the counselor about this, because I knew this meant I would have to focus more, actually work, and not float myself along haphazardly. It meant I had to commit myself, at home. A home where I was anticipating a screaming match and another broken television every time I walked through the door from the bus. I couldn’t. I would fail. I suffered that entire year and it wasn’t until the interruptions of my classes for meetings with social service counselors that the teachers I had for those two periods seemed to get some context on things and lightened my load at the very end of the year.
This, dear reader, is when I started giving it absolute hell, yet not in the constructive sense, and it is notoriously the most difficult part for me to write concisely about because I am still so vehemently angry at how much the world, and my parents, seemed to be placing all responsibility for me on me without meaningful or consistent intervention. I have to sit in that discomfort and relive it to tell the story, because in my fighting back against injustices in my home, I was blamed. By my parents, by my peers, by the social service figures that were in and out of the picture for the entirety of my high school life by my own doing. My reactions were more heavily reprimanded than their source. I was the whistleblow and by default expected to be above it all. I’ll do little here to conceal my frustration about that. My perspective from 16 to 28 has not changed, and not because I haven’t matured psychologically, but because I was right. And for the sake of innumerable other minors with abusive caregivers that can’t advocate for themselves in a system that gives them no rights, one that does nothing before physical violence comes against you, I feel universally required to be loud about it. My mom told me to “just wait,” until I was older, with a burned-in bitterness that has prevented any real relationship development between us since. I understand now. I understand how not to be. How not to treat those I care about. How I did and do not have a hand in my own mistreatment, but I have both hands on the ghoul it tried to create and I’m breaking its arms so it can’t reach anyone past me.
Freshman year. I’m my mother’s first teenager. It was around this point where rather than trying to remove myself from the radius of my parents fights, I started stepping into them. I recognized my mother’s pattern of making snide, pointless, passive-aggressive jabs at my dad, not excluding statements like “well I don’t put our kids in the hospital,” serving only to inflame their relationship with virtually no room for resolution. I became conditioned to predict her aggressions. I knew what her loud, audible sighs meant. I knew that the narrowing of her stare would be followed with hateful dialogue. I knew that when the case workers and family counselors would visit, she’d switch off her antagonism and present a sweet facade of wanting to be supportive and to resolve tensions. It was intentional.
And when those figures left, I could expect the silent treatment and every breath I took to be monitored. She knew I was the one who brought them there. With every quip, every punishment she dealt for countering her reactivity, she was making an active decision to deny my siblings and I a healthy home, and I took that personally. I started reading her behavior and adjusting mine so finely that I wired myself to no longer cry when we argued, because that was her cue to double-down. I still rarely cry in front of other people, and handle emotional events with an uncomfortble level of stoicism.
Every day I dreaded both getting on the bus to go to school, and to come home. Class and social functions meant regular meetings with envy. I observed the stresses of many of them being trivial and their fun rooted in the mundane. I couldn’t understand it; everything was serious to me, all of the time. Pep rallies, after-school extracuriculars and functions where parents showed up and showed genuine, sometimes competitive pride for their kids was something I could not get anywhere near. I was always watching what I wanted so badly- freedom, opportunity, warmth, safety- from behind glass walls. Ever-aware that it existed, but never able to touch it. When I did worm my way into running track and playing soccer very briefly, my incredibly fragile confidence was blown by the unrelenting comparison to everyone around me and the accelerated jealousy-borne treatment I received from my mom when my dad would simply pick me up from practice. I didn’t finish a season in either sport. She always stopped just shy of force- her narcicisstic strategies left it open to me to quit things out of sheer brokenness so she could still say it was my choice. The lack of support (at best) and outright sabotage (at worst) haunted me in the throws of bike racing as an adult, and I still feel the thickness of that envy for those chasing athletic pursuits with a village around them, or at the very least, are able to stress more about their performance and not the milestones they completely missed by acts of aggression by a parent. This has steered me toward the niche of “self-supported” racing in recent years and riding ultra-distance, where I don’t pay any mind to who isn’t around to cheer. Where both friend and foe are too far away to have any influence.
I turned my displaced energy toward drawing, a time-pass she had no power over. My senior year I spent half of the school day in the art room, under the mentorship of a teacher, Mr. Shiner, that I initially thought I needed to avoid. I heard his dry humor from the halls before I ever entered that room, and I was too fragile for it. I misjudged us both. I don’t remember what the struggle that particular day was, but I had explained an issue at home to him one afternoon and saw the empathetic frustration wash over his face too. He and Marcus, the only individual from social services that I ever trusted, helped me hold on to the part of me that knew that everything I was forced to face was not a reflection of me, and they kept pushing my strengths regardless of my resistance. Meanwhile, my mom made sure to never give me real praise for my talents. The closest I ever got to that was giving her one of my best pieces to her for her birthday anyway, partly as a peace treaty for the flower pot I gave my grandma for Mother’s Day in kindergarten instead of her. She never let go of that. I was five.
In the house, my mother’s dysfunction also took on a physical form. The corners of every room began to collect stuff, and eventually trash. Piles of clothes and paper and boxes and food wrappers and even keepsakes were shoved into piles that walking paths were forged through to keep it somehow passable. There wasn’t a surface on the furniture that was free of debris. The kitchen sink was always piled to the top with soiled dishes and the garbage cans would be consistently overflowing. Pets lived outside year round because they “didn’t belong in the house,” (and frankly they’d have eaten something toxic) until thay’d be taken elsewhere while I was at school and I’d be lied to about it, distraught that they were missing. Eventually the carpet was ripped up in every room and nothing replaced it. It was cancer in the living room, and heart failure in mine. Meals mere more often than not fend-for-yourself. It was this that got most of the attention from social services, but somehow the fault for the condition of the house was still partly directed back to the person blowing the whistle on it. Because “I wasn’t perfect either.” Professionals, ignoring power dynamics ina home where the adults are notoriously unreasonable and unstable. If I had such a problem with it, it was on me to fix it.
I tried. My mom even bribed me with money to clean the whole house. Even one room was an all-day undertaking and it was all or nothing with her. I would burn out quickly. If she was in a giving mood, she’d reward me anyway. If not, she got some free improvement at my expense. I don’t know if she could even see how bad it was at that point or not, but I know she wasn’t willing to face it herself regardless. She definitely couldn’t accept how severe of an implication the environment had on the rest of us. I also don’t think she understood the implications of threatening my brother with “being taken away by CPS,’ when his unmanaged anxiety made him intentionally miss the bus, or getting us excited for weekend trips, the only reprieve from the constant tremors at home, to eventually sabotaging them intentionally by picking a fight the day before. To this day, dear reader, dealing with disappointment is my Achilles heel because of that.
Pause for another disclaimer. Please understand- I do not condemn my mother for the severity of her declining psyche and the depth of her depression. She made two seperate suicide attempts and I watched her be taken away in the ambulance both times. I do not place blame on her for the events in her own past and genetic factors that resulted in the intense internal fights she did and still does live with. I have always understood that she was an objectively ill individual that needed more help than she was getting from a severely broken mental health system, and that the behavior from Papa that put me at odds with him was 10-fold when she was growing up. I’ve spent a lot of time having the same venting sessions about him on loop with her, to the point that I realize that was the only real way we ever related to one another. I’m not going to do that anymore.
I do, however, hold her accountable for her repetitive and unchecked projection of those struggles on her own children and failing to forward even the most basic acts of care toward me while I was still in the house. I fault her for be unwilling to listen. I blame her for the resentment she allowed to build and spinning lies to make herself appear less culpable. I’ve perceived a habit amongst much of my maternal family (I hardly know my parternal side) to exhibit accelerated emotional reactions before any objective thought at all, something I’ve taken to heart and walked backward with. Both of my parents were responsible for observing my desperate campaign for a home where they weren’t working against my security, and choosing to blame me instead. The powerless scapegoat was a primitive route to deflection. It was automatic. Looking their destructive habits in the eye would have meant disrupting the entire house, and required a level of self-awareness nobody found important. My dad and I have been able to deconstruct much of this around bonfires in the yard since then, which is why you don’t see as much flack given here. I don’t know if my mom is capable of recognizing how far her faults have reached, but she’s shown me she isn’t willing to rebuild anything to code. I’ve planted my feet firmly in the space that exists between condemnation and submission. I have carried the consequences of her actions for long enough.
One of the most vivid dialogues I remember from the time when my mom and I were at the height of our clashes was when the one family counselor my mom actually seemed to like said to me “Genna, we can’t just ride in on a white horse and save you.” A mental health professional, coming into a very clearly dysfunctional home and implying the daughter that is old enough to interpret the problem but has no legal autonomy that she shouldn’t expect rescue is so severely flawed. A system I turned to for help, in that moment, out of desperation because I was suffering, told me I was asking for too much. It says “deal with it.” It says “you’re a part of this whether you like it or not.”
No, I’m not. I never was. If that isn’t the message you were trying to convey, it’s a shame that someone in the role you had didn’t possess enough tact to find other words. And if this ever gets around to you, I hope you’ve changed that rhetoric. I hope you haven’t dismantled the hope of other kids by continuing that cynicism because you don’t deserve a position that exists to serve if you have. Even if you can’t remove someone from their plight, that quote doubled the weight of mine. The brokenness of that statement is why I feel so responsible to advocate for the descendents of abusive family systems because their words and experiences are quashed before the age of eighteen. And afterward, from what I have experienced, it’s worse, because overnight much of society expects you to shove it away and move on.
I turned eighteen in February of 2013. In January, I had gone to both of my high school counselors with an overwhelming anxiety that when I became of legal age, my parents were going to throw me out. “It will probably blow over,” they said. Dismissed again.
In March I was kicked out, before I had even reached graduation, and moved in temporarily with a boyfriend I had only had for a few months. There was nothing the school could do for me then. I barely passed my classes, and didn’t attend my gradutation ceremony because there was nothing I could be proud of, and I wasn’t giving my parents one more opportunity to not show up.
We start asking kids what they want to be when they grow up in the single digits, but we talk over their cries for help. I have seen society as a whole exhibit a disturbing level of contempt for children. So many expectations for their behavior, and even without outright abuse as was my case, those expectations are sometimes divvied out by parents that are less-than-capable of modeling the behaviors they are demanding. There’s an unspoken theme of “you should be better than we are,” with the only roadmap being one of dead ends. Because I was not being beaten or presenting any signs or dialogue of physical abuse, I had to live in that electrically charged, unstable environment until I had rights. I tried removing myself once and was sent to a youth shelter for one night. I was brought back home and the projection from my parents again was instantaneous. The air I breathed was always thick with discourse that I was the problem, and never with concern for the experience I was having. In uncontained frustration, I threw my glasses on the ground and broke them, only exasterbating their perception of my delinquence. I remember, distinctly, the responses from others who knew what was happening inside my house, and still presenting so much pressure to just be grateful it wasn’t worse, and that it would all be over once I hit the magic number. I grieve for the kids that fall into that belief. I got incredibly lucky to have gotten away from that history without being emotionally explosive as I had modelled to me. I steered myself away from that only by internalizing how bad it felt and turning toward anything and everything that looked different- not because I was saved. Despite that success, there will always exist deficits and barriers for me both psychologically and opportunistically. I still walk on eggshells, carrying an unrelieveable tension in my mind and body, because over half of my life so far was spent in the blast radius of nuclear people. I assume most that know me think poorly of me unless directly stated otherwise. I still present enough as a childlike but not childish person that questions about parents come up regularly in my life. There is no simple, easy, or brief response to be given and so I feel equally pushed to overexplain and change the subject at the same time, because the world doesn’t like someone speaking ill of their parents but I refuse to be dishonest. I live with a chronic self-blame and fear of asking for help because doing so historically meant being told how inadequate or irresponsible I was for needing it to begin with. More recently, asking for help has been countered with “what’s in it for me?” And so I am now classified as hyper-independent. It’s not sustainable. Navigating young adult life without family support or example is something I’ve only been able to find contentment in by rejecting everyone else’s voice and making sacrifices many would find unreasonable for the sake of giving myself the chance to foster adolescent G’s dreams, late. Only in the last couple of years have I finally found some quiet, some still air where I can look inward, backward, forward, and truthfully unfold it in more detail because I want to, and not simply to endure.
To this day my mom never calls unless it’s to deliver bad news, only interested in any connection when she wants someone to comiserate with. I’ve given her grace for as long as I’ve been willing, but too much acceptance gets me right back in that dark loop that I am not willing to walk anymore. Sometimes forgiveness means dismissing reality, and letting it go because she’s my mother is the opening line in a memoir for someone far more complacent than I am. I believe my initial removal from my parents home and resulting bond with my grandparents served to block much of the development of one with her. The personality traits I share with the man that dealt her heavy blows compounded that fracture. I have done the best I can to respect her injuries, but I have known for a while now not to fight where there is no longer space for me. I was not welcome as my mother’s eldest daughter; I understand myself more as some sort of shadow sister.
~
I wonder almost daily what potential I could have fulfilled if I had gotten a better start, if I hadn’t needed to defend myself against my caregivers and got to instead spend that energy on what pursuits I wanted for my own life. I don’t know if those would have been different that what I have now- I’m consistently entertaining the idea that the lack of guidance and only having examples of who not to be set me up for the unpredictable yet wildly rich path I am on now. I’ve had the privilege of parking my van in the liveliest places, asking for little more than a place to just be, in peace. My little house has been the best place for me because I don’t want much more- I only wish for jovial figures that pass across night windows, in the forms of people that have real hope for my arrival home. I deserve that.
In the years since, I have learned to allow people to be different than those I have known. I have taught myself to feel things and asking myself “is that the person I want to be today,” and responding accordingly. I understand how to tell uncomfortable truths, and letting the response I receive be all that I need to know about someone. I’ve insisted on listening to others’ stories of abuse and not looked for their role in it, because doing so serves to alleviate responsibility from the abuser. I’ve learned not to beg others to care, yet still honor why I have felt the need to. I stand like concrete beside myself and no matter who or what interrupts my path forward, I don’t yield. That’s how I am okay. And if you, dear reader, are the survivor of abuse of any breed, say it to yourself at least one more time. It isn’t your fault.
I will the machine. 