All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  I am half embarrassed but, oddly, also proud sharing this anecdote now. I want to see this aspect of my parents’ war trauma as not all bad. On the one hand, I am certain that this hoarding relationship to food contributed to some complex issues and the inherited “Don’t finish it!” anxiety my sister and I both have. On the other hand, as a grown woman removed from the privileged community in which I was raised, I am grateful for the lessons in humility that I might have otherwise missed. After all, my irrational fear of there “not being enough” comes from a real fear my parents once felt, a fear based in experiences. And while this fear is the source of some of my dysfunction, I don’t want to forget my gratitude that there is enough, and that it isn’t something to take for granted.

  Some studies have shown that there is a prevalence of eating disorders in the offspring of concentration camp survivors, and I am intrigued by these studies. In one 2004 study in the European Eating Disorders Review, out of eleven adult offspring of concentration camp survivors who were interviewed in the admittedly narrow study, ten had eating disorders, and they reported eating disorders in twelve of their seventeen siblings. While that’s admittedly a very small study group, I am both alarmed and soothed by that astounding ratio if it can be extrapolated to the broader population. I wonder why more studies have not been conducted on this subject, and whether any behavior can be attributed to nature or nurture. Is disordered eating in my siblings and me a result of my parents’ behavior around food, is it a result of societal pressures, or could it have to do with epigenetics, a fairly new, controversial, and inconclusive area of study? I find that I want some sort of scientific explanation for why I struggle against my damaging relationship with food.

  * * *

  Per epigenetic researchers, it is theoretically possible that my father’s starvation literally stays in his body and is imprinted on my genes, according to their studies of offspring of concentration camp victims and survivors of the Dutch Hunger Winter. If that turns out to be the case, it would mean I am set up to be susceptible to these issues by a toxic mix of history, physiology, and psychology, but to my mind, it also means there is a physical explanation for some of my problems. My sister and I both struggled with eating disorders in our teenage years and into young adulthood, and have a conflicted relationship with food to this day. As a teen, my sister restricts her food, counting fat grams in everything that passes her lips. I binge and purge, food soothing my anxiety momentarily, then filling me with guilt, causing me to vomit it up for absolution. When I am in my twenties, I can’t bear for people to see me eat. I don’t feel I deserve to eat and believe people will judge me if they see me eating. I buy a yogurt on the way to class because I haven’t eaten lunch and I am running late. As I open it, I see people I know approaching, and I panic, dumping the uneaten container, completely full, in the garbage. The yogurt sits there, taunting me from afar as my stomach growls during class.

  Now I can eat in front of people, but it is still with a sense of shame. I imagine that people think I don’t deserve to eat anything. Only when I am alone do I feel relaxed when I eat. I no longer purge, but I cannot have large quantities of food in my house when I am alone. An open bag of chips, for example, causes intense anxiety. I spend hours with therapists trying to figure out the source of this anxiety. There is a voice inside of me that tells me that a bag of chips—or any opened package of food in my cupboard or fridge—needs to be eaten immediately because it might be gone later. In an irrational paradox, it’s a mirror emotion to my three-year-old sister’s “Don’t finish it,” something along the lines of “Finish it now” so I don’t have to live with the building anxiety about finishing it. Is there any proof that my food issues exist solely because of our parents’ war trauma? No. There are millions of girls with eating disorders whose parents do not have war trauma, especially in the wealthy suburbs of Los Angeles, where I made extra cash swimming as a background extra on episodes of Baywatch as a teen and watched famous supermodels and actresses walk around the grocery store. But I know the charge around food in our household has something to do with my relationship to eating and self-worth, and I know that charge is strongly influenced by my parents’ experiences during the war.

  * * *

  In the end, I am left with more questions than answers as I go down the rabbit hole of epigenetics, psychological studies, and the evergreen debate about nature vs. nurture, but I do seize upon a few lines in an article about a 2015 Biological Psychology study on Holocaust survivors’ children that demonstrates “an association of preconception parental trauma with epigenetic alterations that is evident in both exposed parent and offspring, providing potential insight into how severe psychophysiological trauma can have intergenerational effects.” The journal’s editor, John Krystal, states, “Holocaust survivors had 10 percent higher methylation than the control parents, while the Holocaust offspring had 7.7 percent lower methylation than the control offspring. The observation that the changes in parent and child are in opposing directions suggests that children of traumatized parents are not simply born with a PTSD-like biology. They may inherit traits that promote resilience as well as vulnerability.” I hold on to this last possibility, as I do to another epigenetic study I hear about on the radio, in which grandchildren of starvation victims actually have more resilient genes in some areas. Maybe trauma is like a vaccine, and the bodies of the future generations can learn to protect themselves.

  17

  HOME

  Pacific Palisades, California, 1978

  As a little girl, I share a bedroom with my sister. When we grow older, my parents build an addition onto the house, a new living room. I am told I can move into the old living room, which will be converted into a bedroom. I am excited to have my own room, a bedroom with a stone fireplace and a sliding glass door to the garden. “We’ll go shopping for furniture and make it yours,” my mother says. In the meantime, a metal industrial desk, a castoff my father brought home from work, is placed in the room. Temporarily, my brother’s old toddler bed, a bed built by my father, is dragged into the room. It has both a headboard and a footboard and is a few inches too short for my body, so I have to sleep on my side with my knees bent to fit in it. My room is a temporary room, but it turns out to be permanently temporary. I should have known. This is how it is for so many things with my parents. After I complain for several years about the bed and the fact that I still don’t have a closet for my clothes, my father glues foam cushions to the top of a huge wooden crate that a massive laser had been shipped in, turning the bottom of it into a closet and the top into a bed. An old blanket is hung in front of the windows to keep out the light until curtains can be made. At some point my parents are given an old couch by some friends, so they move the couch into my room—temporarily, of course. There are two things I absorb spending my adolescent years in that room. One is that we will always live with repurposed discards in my family. The other is the perpetual unsettled feeling of transience and transition, a hovering sense of impermanence in the place I call home. I yearn to land, but I don’t know how.

  I believe that if a person doesn’t trust in the permanence of home, then they live in permanent transition. I believe that my parents live in perpetual readiness to leave and never fully settle into a place because that’s what they learned from war. And I believe that I learned to live that way too.

  * * *

  Pacific Palisades, California, 2000

  In 2000, because my father has the opportunity to continue his research at the University of Missouri, my parents move to a rural community just outside of Columbia, and they sell the Pacific Palisades home.

  When my parents sell my childhood home, I am absolutely devastated. I count it among the greatest heartbreaks of my life. My mother, on the other hand, is delighted. She has spent thirty years in L.A., a city she never liked in a country to which she feels no sense of membership. I beg them to reconsider, tell them if they can just hold on, maybe I can figure out how to buy the house
. I’m in my late twenties, but I regress completely, sobbing and having a full-blown meltdown. “It’s just a house,” my mother says in response to my tears, because for her, that’s what it is. Her home will always be in Holland, with her brothers and sisters, on their farms. For me, this home, perched on a pinnacle above the city and the sea, is all I have. My grief stems from the fact that I know my immediate family will scatter to different corners of the country once the house is sold, and that will be the end of home for me. We will never come back to this town, this house, this cupped palm that I curled up in for twenty-seven years of my life whenever I needed it. As the boxes are packed and the trips to the Salvation Army with loads of our collective lives become more frequent, I become increasingly despondent, until two nights before they move, my mother stands in the kitchen yelling in response to my tears, “You have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get over it!” and I tell her she doesn’t understand a thing about not having a single place in the world where you belong completely, and I go outside and throw up in the roses and lay heavy in my melodrama on the driveway, staring up at the stars.

  But that is a lie. Of course she understands. It’s what makes her carry the memory of things falling from the windows before her home was sealed off from her forever. In a way, I think understanding my hysterical, childlike grief is what makes her so cold about it. There seems to be a bitter kinship in it for her to watch me get the same blow she has gotten in life. It makes her less alone if I feel homeless too. So her impassive “It’s just a house” is disingenuous and she knows it. If anyone would know the significance of my loss, it would be her, but she keeps her face stony and tells me to pull myself up by my bootstraps, that life is about adapting to change. I mean, it’s easier to be a nomad when you have a tribe to travel with you, right? I am the last person to sleep in the house after my parents’ U-Haul drives away. With only a desk lamp and a blanket, I sleep in the hollowed-out skeleton of my former home, until in the twilight a cab pulls up to take me to the airport, where I will fly to Europe with a backpack. In later years, when I move to the Netherlands, I mention in passing to an elderly neighbor how crowded the city is with tourists that day. “What are you complaining about?” he says. “You’re a tourist here too. Look at you. Here for a few months and you think you belong.” “I’m not a tourist!” I say, stung. “I’ve been coming here my whole life. I speak the language. I have dual citizenship.” He sniffs. “Oh-ho. Dual citizenship. Even worse!”

  * * *

  Since my parents’ home was sold, I have had an unhealthy obsession with real estate. I search real estate listings every day. I search them for the places I’ve lived and the places I’ve never lived and the places I imagine living. I spend several hours a week looking at photographs and reading descriptions, imagining planting gardens or restoring fireplaces or baking cookies or escorting a friend to the guest bedroom in home after home. I know you can buy a house for $100 in Detroit, $5,000 in Baltimore, $20,000 in Youngstown, $100,000 in Spokane, $1,000,000 in San Francisco. I know where you can buy an old abbey or castle (with moat and turrets) in France, a cottage in the hills of Liguria in Italy, or an apartment on the “Bulgarian Riviera.” I have emailed real estate agents from the fields of Maine, from the banks of lakes in Massachusetts, and from the Oregon woods. I go to auctions of foreclosed properties. I compulsively calculate and recalculate mortgage payments and building costs for various home plans I find online. I look at tiny homes on wheels, modern modular homes, old barns, straw bale homes, shipping container homes, pedestal homes for building in floodplains. I learn that there is a loophole in building codes and order a stack of books about underground homes. I send away for brochures on cabin kits and the kit for a saltbox house “that a couple can build in approximately fifteen weekends.” “Build yourself a solid future!” the website says.

  When I pass abandoned houses, I often stop and walk around them, pulling vines from cracked and rotting windows to peer in at the decaying guts of the structure, imagining myself making a home there. While on a drive in upstate New York, where I live for half a year, I see the massive abandoned brick buildings of a crumbling psychiatric hospital, its ward for the criminally insane surrounded by loops of razor wire. I tell the guy I am dating to pull off the highway to have a closer look. “Let’s go. This place is creeping me out,” he says as I high-step through the tall grass and under “No Trespassing” signs hanging on chains around the buildings. “This would make an amazing condominium complex!” I answer. I sometimes make appointments to tour homes and squint my eyes as I envision the potential. I look at the broker with my hands on my hips and a pensive look on my face. “Now, tell me, Janet, is this a load-bearing wall? It would be really great to put French doors out to the garden here. Where exactly is the property line? How far down does my land go? All the way to those woods?” I have never actually owned a single piece of real estate.

  I do know how ridiculous this is. I know it stems from something more than a casual interest in real estate. Home is not just the place we refer to when we say “It will be nice to sleep in my own bed again.” When I talk about home, when I say that losing my home was a real trauma to me, I don’t really mean the physical home. I mean home in the sense of citizenship, in every sense of that word. Home as a community. Home as a family. Home as identity. I think the psychological concept of home was the biggest loss for both my parents in the war, so they didn’t have it to give me.

  * * *

  Pacific Palisades, California, 2011

  I stand in front of a ten-foot concrete wall. Behind the wall is my former home. Behind the wall is my tree. I can see the tree’s branches peeking above the wall. I have driven here while in Los Angeles for a reunion. The tree is the only thing left that reminds me that this compound was once my house. I know every ridge on that tree’s bark, the knot gnarled in the middle of its gray trunk. It’s the same tree worn smooth from years of being sat on and hung from by my very own knees. The house is once again for sale, and in the photos on the Multiple Listing Service, the grass is gone, and the tree is now surrounded by a neat square of white pebbles and an uplight to illuminate its branches. It is now merely a tree for looking at. “Views forever from Downtown to the ocean,” the listing says. Always there was that. Did I take the forever-views for granted? The current owners have added a bedroom. “Perched on a 17,300 sq ft lot, this 5 bedroom home is a private sanctuary,” the listing continues. It makes no reference to the way that children emerged from the hills into each other’s backyards in the home’s younger days in this neighborhood, whether we knew each other or not. It makes no reference to the way we’d stand on the front lawn, chatting with the neighbors, dog and neighbor dog wrestling at our feet. The house was not a private sanctuary then at all. Now the neighbors would need rappelling equipment to make it inside.

  My home has traded up. It is not for my kind anymore. The freshly planted palm trees communicate this. I would not know how to live in the cavernous spaces created when the current owners knocked down walls, how to actually converse in the stark white “conversation areas.” I want the creaky wooden breakfast table. I want the purple chair and the old wooden radio. I want the green player piano with one broken key. But that home has vanished, those relics vanished in yard sales. Months later, I see that the house has sold. My father bought the house in 1965 for $60,000. It sold on July 21, 2011, for $3.5 million. It is now valued at $4.7 million, according to the internet. I think about the people I imagined might have bought it, successful actors or producers, people who paid $3.5 million to show off their giant backyard Buddha and conversation areas to important people. They will eventually sell it, because for them it’s just a house.

  * * *

  Rocheport, Missouri, 1998

  In Missouri, the neighbors have guns and mow acres of lawn on riding mowers, and the sound of cicadas is like a permanent tinnitus. My parents buy a massive ranch-style house in the countryside on a dirt road where the air conditioner has
to be on all summer and the heater on all winter. It’s just a house. My mother calls me every time the tornado sirens wail. She never heard tornado sirens in California. “It reminds me of the air raid sirens when I was a kid,” she tells me, voice shaking, as she sits in the basement under the stairs with the dog. As always, my father spends most of his hours at work in a nondescript brick building on the university campus, and my mother makes the best of it. She rescues a litter of possum babies from a roadkill mother and keeps the one with a physical deformity in its front legs that can’t be released back to the wild, holding it on her lap like a cat in the evenings as they watch television. Always rescuing and trying to stitch up life’s wounds. She makes baby blankets for strangers she meets in internet groups. She joins a quilting group and makes some friends, but Missouri is not home. This is not home to her children either, and she knows it. We are halfway across the country and can’t visit often. When we do, it’s like being in a strange land, and we look forward to getting back to California. I feel for my mother, who is simply swept along in my father’s choices. And then my brother has a baby, and for the first time ever in my parents’ relationship, she insists on having things her way. She is moving back to California with or without him, she says. She is going to be a grandmother. So eventually, my father, whose research project never is fully funded by the university despite his initial optimism, agrees to return to California with my mother.

  * * *

  Woodland, California, 2005

  My brother lives in Davis, California, but my parents settle in a town called Woodland near Sacramento. It’s a generic suburban neighborhood with very little to do. They move there instead of to Davis because my father will not compromise on downsizing. He brings seventy years’ worth of things that were dragged from Los Angeles to Missouri and back to California, and he fills all four of the house’s bedrooms, a two-car garage, a storage shed in the backyard, and three rented storage units with his things, things he never looks at or uses. The same rusted iron drill press. The same broken lawn chairs. The same carpet remnants and institutional desks and broken coffeemakers. All of the same things that lived in our garage when my siblings and I were growing up live in the garage in my parents’ home in Woodland. But the collection keeps growing. Four coffeemakers become five become six. It is here, as I visit my parents and see that they are drowning in things, that I really feel the tragedy of their unresolved war traumas. All of these things my father neither uses nor needs have prevented them from living in Davis, a nicer community closer to their grandchildren, a place where my mother could walk to the store and make friends more easily. People don’t visit them often. For many years now, their living room has consisted of an awkward formation of an old couch I gave them when I moved and some wooden banker’s chairs, which makes hosting company uncomfortable. They are always planning to get a better couch, but it never happens. The few times I have suggested helping them to organize and sort through the mess, create a more permanent décor in their home, my father flies into a panic, forbidding me to touch his things. My mother gives up. And this is part of her war trauma too. Never be the bad guy. Never go against the grain. So they are two people stuck in a four-bedroom, three-bathroom house filled with things and not people. “There’s no place to put anything away, is the trouble,” says my father when I say that it’s hard for us to come stay there because there are boxes and clutter everywhere. “You need to get rid of a lot of this stuff,” I say. “No,” says my father. “We need a bigger house.”