by Bobi Conn
By the time my daughter was one and I was a single mother again, I moved my small family into an old, dark rental house that I could hardly afford. I had graduated from my master’s program seven months pregnant. When Rose was six months old, I started teaching at the same university, as an adjunct professor, but didn’t realize I would only have two classes in the spring, not three. I moved us into that dark house thinking I would have a third more income than I ended up with. But I took on extra work, and after getting the kids in bed, I would start again on whatever project I had scrounged for, working until midnight or one in the morning.
The house looked like I felt. An old fireplace dropped soot and god knows what else when the wind blew outside. A huge roach crawled into the living room once, prompting Orion to name our home the Roach House and prompting me to pay for an exterminator for the first time in my life. The light switches were not switches at all, but old-fashioned buttons you pressed to turn the lights on or off. There were no overhead lights in the living room or kitchen, ensuring that shadows flew through the spaces I most enjoyed—those rooms where my children and I communed together.
The house was heated by an old, stand-alone heater that glowed red, a few thin metal rods sitting in front of the elements, and there was nothing to protect a child’s fingers or face from touching any of it. Rose was learning to walk and almost fell into it one day—how she never touched it I do not know, other than my constant watching and carrying her and maybe a guardian angel or two. Orion caught her from falling into it one day and then wrote a few paragraphs about it at school, and I worried that someone would see it as a reason to take my baby from me.
That’s what happens when your house is unsafe and you can’t afford anything better—you’re called unfit, and nobody asks how you got to this place. That’s why someone who used to be poor will, if they have it, lend money to a poor person to pay a bill—they know the stakes. That’s why I eventually paid a friend’s utility bill with a credit card. A broken water pipe in the yard had put the power bill too far out of reach for her. If just one of her kids had mentioned the lights being off, she could have lost all her children.
Spring came quickly, though, and my bedroom filled with roly-poly bugs that surrounded the head of my mattress and died there. The washer and dryer were in the basement, which was perpetually flooded. I had to put my daughter in a baby backpack and carry the laundry out the kitchen door, down the wooden stairs to the yard, and down the concrete steps into the basement, then make my way across some old wooden pallets someone had placed on the floor to keep feet dry on laundry day. A single, bare lightbulb illuminated the basement, and rickety shelves lined the sides, filled with dust and other forgotten things.
I worried over the baby touching the paint that flaked around the low windowsills—it probably had lead in it. Someone had come to fix a short in the wiring one day and looked at the ceiling in the third bedroom. Don’t put the baby in here—that ceiling probably has asbestos, and you don’t want the dust falling onto her. I put my computer in there instead, and when someone gave me a crib, I put the crib in my bedroom. I wouldn’t realize until she started sleeping through the night that I hadn’t slept through an entire night for three years, but you don’t always see those things while they are happening.
Orion played soccer—I wanted him to do something active, and I knew that running would be good for him. It might even build his self-esteem, provide some measure of protection. I went to his practices and games, which were often in Richmond—around fifteen miles away—so that meant sometimes I drove up there twice a day. It didn’t really matter where they were. Everywhere I went, I felt like I was coming apart. Every thing felt hard—driving to a soccer game, comforting the children, cooking meals, preparing for my classes. Opening the mail was torture—if I didn’t recognize the sender but it looked like it could be a bill, I left it unopened, knowing I had no way to pay anything but the basics. I didn’t know who else might be sending me bills, but I believed it was a very real possibility that there was always something else I owed, some other debt I couldn’t manage. I just opened what it took to keep the lights and water on and a roof overhead—if you don’t have those things, someone very likely will take your baby away from you.
Nearly all the time, I felt like my insides were on fire, and there was no relief.
I had moved to Lexington toward the end of my pregnancy, and when I came back to Berea with Rose and Orion, I thought my old friends would want to spend time together, hang out like we had always done. But many of them were getting married and settling into careers and not yet having babies. I tried to be friends with some of the other women living nearby—a couple of them were also single mothers—but it seemed as if they never really liked me. The support I had felt when Orion was a toddler disappeared, and the group of friends who welcomed him to every event and doted on him no longer wanted to see me so much. The people I had come to regard as my chosen family, with my usual stubborn and fierce devotion, were all but gone.
I walked around those days with my mind occupied by anger and fear, relieved only in the moments when my children reminded me of their sweetness. One day, as my mind ground away, asking Why are things like this, I had a new thought: every terrible relationship I ever had, had one thing in common—me. Well shit, I thought. I considered my last ex-boyfriend and how he didn’t even try to convince me he loved me. It was I who did that. I thought of all the boyfriends and the couple of husbands over the previous fifteen years and suddenly understood that while they didn’t look like my father, or talk like him, or try to scam the system like he did, they all felt like him, to me. I knew then that I couldn’t trust myself to love a man, that something inside me drew me to the kind of men who wouldn’t really love me but whose love I would desperately try to earn.
After that unpleasant realization, I wrestled for a while with the guilt I felt for making the same bad choice over and over—always in new packaging, because I tried so damn hard, but I couldn’t escape the jailer within who kept me locked in a cage. I realized that no matter what else I accomplished, my cage wasn’t so different from my mother’s.
But I kept struggling with those feelings. I kept asking myself why and how, and as frustrated as I was with myself, I knew there had to be something better. I had seen beauty and felt joy. I was determined to claim some of it—if not for me, then for my children, who surely couldn’t go through this, too. One day, a new thought hit me: although my life had not been my fault, I had reached the point at which I wanted my life to be wholly mine and not a constant reaction to the trauma I had known. There was no knight in shining armor coming to rescue me, to protect me from my father or any other man. I knew I had every right to be angry about the things I had experienced, but I also had to find a way to undo the damage that had been done, so I would never again choose the things that were bad for me. So I could stop being haunted by nightmares that belonged in the past.
I went to a financial counselor soon after that, knowing I had to figure out how to manage money if I was going to survive. It was a free service in Richmond, offered by the same people who ran the free bus. The financial counselor seemed much too normal to understand me, but she set me up with a spreadsheet, and we walked through all my bills, the due dates, and my spending. It turned out that I had no idea what I was spending—it usually seemed like there was no money at all, and then enough, and then none again. I wasn’t buying anything extravagant, but it was the first time I thought about knowing when to spend. At the end of our session, the financial counselor suggested I find a one-bedroom apartment or someone’s basement to live in. Give the bedroom to your son. You can sleep in the living room with your daughter.
I politely thanked her and thought, No way in hell. I decided to buy a house instead—I was paying $375 in rent, so I was certain I could find a mortgage I could afford. The mortgage officer at the first bank I went to told me about a government-subsidized mortgage program—she said she would be doing me
a disservice not to tell me. Looking back, I know she was under some pressure to get me into a mortgage with the bank but chose to send me to that program instead. And I know that it was a dream to imagine I could buy a house at that point. There was no reason for me to succeed, on paper.
But around five months later, I bought a house that was nicer than anywhere I had ever lived, and though we hardly had any furniture, it felt like a palace. Just before we moved in, I started a new job—one day an old friend from my first job forwarded me an email and wondered whether I was interested. She was being asked to apply but had moved to another state. I applied and suddenly was making a middle-class income for the first time in my life. I lost the little bit of food stamps I was getting, and the kids’ medical cards, and asked myself, Can I really do this?
There were so many things I knew were still broken inside me. Orion filled the Jacuzzi tub with bubbles, and I yelled at him. I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep the house clean, and it will turn into a nasty place with soap scum and dirty bathrooms, and I will fail my children, and they will feel like white trash, just like I did. I cussed at my two-year-old daughter today. I hate myself for it. I’m just exhausted by how much she needs, how much she demands. At the end of the day, I feel like a cigarette is the only comfort I have.
I had romanticized self-awareness when I read Be Here Now by Ram Dass and smoked lots of weed and took all the LSD I could get my hands on. Back then, the idea of being self-aware was so romantic, so wrapped up in the feelings of magic and excitement I experienced with all those altered states. The goodness I felt and saw during my chemical escapes made me think I was really getting somewhere in my growth as a person. And maybe I did—I’m not sure what my outlook for survival would have been if I had not found some relief from my inner hell, some temporary respite. But by the time I grew up—really grew up—I realized I had just barely survived childhood and young adulthood. The only reason I survived motherhood was because I was so stubborn, I poured every bit of myself into it, unwilling to fail my children in the ways I had been failed.
But looking at myself as a thirty-year-old, knowing how much I had squandered, how little I had accomplished, was its own fresh hell. I gained a lot of empathy for the people around me who didn’t seem at all interested in thinking about their lives and the choices they made. Taking an honest look at myself and what I had become was the most painful thing I ever experienced. I couldn’t wait for my parents to love me, or for my granny to come back from her deathbed and remind me that I was lovable. The world I wanted would not pull me into it, not with me so accustomed to the hell I had come to think of as normal. I wanted something beautiful and magical to swoop down and save me, to show that it recognized how special I was, how worth saving. I was not excited or inspired when I discovered I had to be the one to save me.
After years of conscious work, I eventually realized my life had become different, that I had become different. Not perfect, of course. I still get upset when the kids leave things in our front yard, but I don’t tell them it makes us look trashy and I’m afraid the neighbors will see me for what I really am. I don’t let them eat on the couch, but I don’t yell as I used to when I felt like every mess, every broken thing, every dollar wasted, was going to drag me back into childhood, where I would forever be helpless and afraid and poor and dirty. I tell them I love them and why I love them, and I listen to their made-up songs or the music they discovered and want me to hear. I go to their plays and concerts and games—I still don’t feel at ease, but I don’t always feel like something is clawing at my insides now, as I sit among so many people who might be enemies. To my surprise, I mean it when I smile and applaud.
In graduate school, I had written a story about my father and how he had sent me to my granny’s house to call her a whore. I didn’t think it would ever amount to much—there are so many people who want to write, and so many who have better stories or better luck. But it felt important, for some reason. The story had come as a surprise to me as I was earning a master’s degree in English—I wanted to write poetry, but I didn’t think I could fit all my words into a poem. After grad school, I kept working on my story and revising it, adding what needed to be said, finding God in the details along the way. I wrote it and rewrote it over the years to come, each time seeing more clearly that I had become the storyteller, that it was my story and that I had to tell it. With each revision, I understood that although many people had quieted me, even whipped me into silence, I still had words they could not take away from me. And while my words were in part the defiance and anger I had always been too afraid to voice, they were more than that, too.
As I wrote, I discovered words for what I felt in the forest, the sweet stillness that endures from countless hours in that holy place. I discovered that the words of the King James Bible that were sometimes used to frighten me still contain their own mystery and magic, and I can see what might have comforted and ignited my granny’s inimitable heart. I beheld my granny and the poetry of her life, a life lived in quiet strength and selflessness—the life of a mountain woman whose power suffuses the kingdom within. I saw that every word I had to speak was the honoring of my history, the history of everyone I had ever loved, and the landscapes in which I had sought refuge, time and time again: first, the streams and forests of Kentucky, and then, every book I could get my hands on. And even when my story isn’t pretty, or I wasn’t, the living itself is. After all is said and done, I can’t help but see the beauty we belong to.
I wrote from the time I was in middle school, even though my classmates ridiculed my imitation of the Odyssey. As an adult, I wrote and sent my work to professors and literary agents, asking over and over for their approval and affirmation, to be let into their world. Perhaps I just wanted someone to listen to all the words I had finally found the courage to bring to the light of day.
As I wrote, I understood myself as a character, as a person in a grand and vast story that endures far beyond me. I wrote and saw myself in a context beyond my family or place or time. I wrote my story again and again, until I came to love the little girl who survived it. I wrote to free her, to vindicate her, to give her justice. Writing was my best rebellion, my silent outcry, my ravaged testament to how much a person can love a world that does not suffer her. Writing my story became my duty, too—a duty to the grown and still-young children who stumble in the darkness, knowing there is something good but not believing that goodness is for them.
I wrote myself and found myself. I wrote nearly all the words I had swallowed for decades, passion transmuted.
CHAPTER 39
Out of Line
I grew up thinking there was something wrong with my family and especially with me. But I realize that, for the most part, the adults around me then felt like I feel now—childhood slips away without warning, and we find ourselves pretending to be grown, pretending we want to be part of this world with jobs and bills, but numbing ourselves with television or another glass of wine. We have our own children and see ourselves in them—we relive our teen years (the best years of your life), or we play out our unresolved conflicts while our own parents become grandparents and suddenly aren’t so awful anymore.
For so many years—has it been decades?—I’ve felt misunderstood, and every time I thought someone truly saw me for who I was, for the good girl still inside me, I lapped up their attention like my father’s dog devoured beans and dirt alike. I tried so hard to avoid dating or becoming my father. I didn’t date anyone who did hard drugs (at least after my first marriage ended). I congratulated myself that no man ever hit me (the bruises on my neck were more than ten years ago now, and that was only once), though I never stopped being afraid of it, never stopped wondering whether it would happen if I dared say too much, if I let my face betray my true feelings. In the end, though, there was never a good set of rules to follow to protect myself.
My first husband and a later boyfriend were talented musicians, so I vowed not to date any guitar players. A
fter my second husband and the guitarist boyfriend, I swore I wouldn’t date a man who was a Cancer. After that, it was no guys who worked at bars. Then, no Capricorns. But the kind of men who will hurt women—especially women who have been deprived of love—are everywhere, and they look like everyone. In some ways, it’s disappointing to know that bad men aren’t just the ones who look like my father—raised in a holler, shooting guns, and making moonshine or dropping out of high school. For the longest time, that made it much more difficult to figure out who was safe.
It’s more complicated, too, knowing that people who call themselves feminists and social-rights activists might turn their backs on the ones who need them: Women who are desperate to be loved, so they sleep with too many men. Men who are snorting pills or shooting up heroin or some mysterious opiate concoction, because being alive hurts so much, it is worth it to risk overdose and disease and losing everything you have, everyone who loves you, to escape the hell inside you, even for just a few hours. Poor people without the wherewithal to stop smoking or stop burning their trash by the creek, who would rather die in a coal mine than get free health care. How do you love people who look like this, who live like this? People like me, like my father, my brother, and my mother.
My brother—he is the one who was with me through it all, who saw and heard and felt everything alongside me. Did he not feel like me, too? What does he feel now, if he lets himself feel anything? I don’t know, because we were never close again after he left prison and the halfway house. I wonder why he is somewhere else, not beside me as I write a new life for myself, not rejoicing in the freedom we gain from leaving behind the sins of our father.
I was so envious of him growing up. Everything seemed better for him, and I assumed it was because he was more lovable than I was. He had a cherubic face, and even though his baby teeth rotted at the same time mine did, he still had a beautiful, easy smile. It seemed like everyone wanted to take care of him—except our father, of course—and even I was willing to take a whipping to protect him from the pain our father subjected us to. Later, I was willing to wear the shoes I knew my classmates might mock, so I could protect my brother from the torment our peers subjected us to.