This isn’t new. I grew up witnessing my parents’ imperfections so actively—they fought almost every single day when I was in my teens—that I internalized this fear that I’d become like my father. Like my father, because I identified him as the aggressor, the one in the wrong. And then, as I matured and started to understand the nuances of their relationship a little better, I started to become afraid that I’d turn out like my mother. So I ran in the other direction, railing against every personality trait that I identified as hers. As a result, I probably took on a little bit of each.
I wonder what would have happened had they just divorced. The thing about staying together for the kids is that you’re forcing said kids to witness and internalize your shitty marriage. After hundreds, probably thousands of fights, my mother would come crying to me. “What do I do?” And I would tell her, “Leave him, you’re not happy, leave him.” Imagine saying that at twelve years old. Imagine having to barge into one of their fights to tell them that I could hear them from across the yard—that the neighbors could hear everything they were screaming at each other. And then seeing those neighbors the next day, their pitying eyes inevitably falling on me.
She never left, of course. And decades into their marriage, they’re both still complaining about the same things that bothered them about each other when they were just married. Nothing has changed. They still treat us the same—with the same impossibly high standards, expecting that we put up with the dysfunction because of “familial duty.” Because we owe them for raising us. For dressing us, feeding us, schooling us. If only that’s all it took to raise a child—the expedient completion of the basic necessities. If only.
None of my siblings are married or have children yet. We focus on our careers. Our parents have given up on asking us about our personal lives altogether. It’s a pleasant fantasy to think that they know that this is because of them—because each of us, in our own way, is tormented by the idea that we’re doomed to repeat history. But they’re probably oblivious. And my anxiety—my diligence, my micromanagement, my fear—I think that’s me fighting the inertia that would inevitably lead me to becoming them entirely. It’s me not wanting to repeat their history, their dysfunction.
So, career it is. I’ve picked something that is easy to lose myself in, something that can take over my whole life. And I let it. No, I want it to. I want my career to make me so busy, the static white noise of it to be so loud and overwhelming that it will drown out the emptiness everywhere else. No kids. No husband. No personal life. Just work. All work. And I’m good at my job. Fuck—I’m amazing at it. But—you get it—I have to be. Because then what am I without it? At work, I can control everything. I can micromanage. I can set unrealistic standards and challenge myself, and punish myself when I fall short. Which is fine, because perfectionism in my field is encouraged. So is single-mindedness. And being a female, having a family, having a life—all are obviously huge detractors.
And my siblings—all the same. Extremely successful in their respective fields. We have a pattern—we’ve all been molded by our childhoods in the same way. But we can’t talk about these things. It’s too painful to talk about with my siblings, and it’s just impossible to talk about with my parents.
They would deflect—“You think we were raised better?”
My mind just went to what might happen if I had children. Scary.
They would judge. Belittle. Dismiss.
And if, by some extreme long shot, we would have persisted in demanding closure, my mother would break down crying. Game over. That’s the trump card. The tears make me question my reality—am I making a big deal out of nothing? Am I blaming my parents for something that’s my responsibility? Am I being too harsh?
So for the most part, the struggle is totally internal. I feel pretty damaged, but I guess most people do, anyways. I feel guilty because I feel like I’ve thrown my parents under the bus by complaining about them and my childhood—they did do the best they could in their circumstance. And look, we weren’t hit. We weren’t abused. They had high expectations, but isn’t that a sign of caring? They always used to say, “We ask a lot of you because we see how much potential you have.”
I don’t know anymore—I go back and forth on it. One thing is for certain: I’ve become so afraid of losing that I’m no longer even playing the game. I’ve become so consumed by my anxiety, consumed by all that went wrong and the effect that it had on me, that I’ve stopped living.
Shelly, forties
I was sixteen when he raped me. I got pregnant, and my parents told me I had to marry him. My family were devout Jehovah’s Witnesses—and everything in my life seemed very black-and-white. I knew what was expected of me, and there were many rules I had to adhere to. One of them was that there was no sex before marriage; another, that I was not allowed to have a boyfriend unless the intention was marriage. And obviously, I knew I had to date and marry someone of the same faith. So I really had no choice.
I remember the conversation with my father. He told me I should not have put myself in that situation, and that I had to marry Kevin. Abortion was not an option. I was still a Witness at the time, and I believed that abortion was an unforgivable act; I would lose out on everlasting life, and there would be no way to redeem myself.
So we went to the courthouse and got married. I stayed for two years, and I got pregnant again. I had my second child, and when she was six months old, I packed up my car in the middle of the night and I drove us all to a homeless women’s shelter. And that was the first time in over two years that I felt I could breathe.
My parents didn’t speak to me. I was excommunicated from our community and forbidden from contacting any of the members. I was completely alone—all the people I’d ever known and loved had banished me from their lives.
I stayed in the shelter for six months, and then a friend took us in for about a year. My mom reached out to me after that and asked to be a part of the kids’ lives. We moved in with my parents for a few years, but my dad didn’t speak to me—and hasn’t since. It’s been over fifteen years.
My ex was a very violent man. While we were married, he repeatedly beat me. I’d call my mom, and she would take the kids while I went to the hospital. She saw me like that—like a bruised stray animal, scared and in tatters—but she never asked me if I needed help. I put a restraining order against my ex when we were finalizing the divorce, and I guess it wasn’t really a surprise when my mom came forward in court and claimed that she’d seen Kevin molest our oldest child.
Kevin ended up getting supervised visitation, but shortly after the divorce, he completely disappeared from our lives. He has only seen his kids once since then, and I obviously think it’s for the best that he is kept away from my children. But I never made peace with what my mother said in court: if she did see my ex-husband molesting our son, then why hadn’t she said anything earlier? I was tormented.
Was she lying now? In her twisted world, did she feel that she was finally doing something to help me and my children? On the other hand, she’d seen the way he beat me and she hadn’t said anything about that, either. Was she trying to redeem herself by confessing something that would break open the family that she and my father had forced me into?
I don’t know. My gut tells me not to trust her. She believes in the Bible above all, yet she turns a blind eye when someone is hurting her daughter—her own blood. This seems so contradictory, so twisted. She told me to stay with Kevin and God would reward me for my pain and suffering when I returned in the new life. But why is it not okay for me to leave someone who hurts me? And why does the Bible trump the welfare of your own child?
I’ve been excommunicated from Kingdom Hall, and I can’t speak to any of the members; technically, that includes my parents. I think they wouldn’t have taken me in had I not had children—they felt sympathy for the kids. Everyone was complicit in covering up the rape and pretending everything was okay. My parents can never acknowledge that they did anything w
rong. When I discuss things with my mother, she says, “We did the best we could, and we tried to follow the Bible.”
As for me, I need to make good with God before I’ll be accepted into Kingdom Hall and their lives again.
I thought that after everything happened, I was finally free of them. But unfortunately, when my son was five years old, he was diagnosed with ADHD. At ten, I noticed that he was talking to things and people who weren’t there. I took him in to get evaluated, and he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. He was put on medication and was doing really well, but as he grew older, he became medication noncompliant. When he wasn’t on his medication, he attacked me and his sister, and it became increasingly difficult for us to not fear him.
I looked up a six-month program that helps adolescents struggling with behavioral issues. My son would have left the program with mentors, job opportunities, and a support system to help him during difficult times. I sat down with my parents and explained my plan—told my father that I was afraid my son would hurt someone and I wanted to protect my daughter. My mother has always had a really close relationship with my son—I’ve always thought it bordered on unhealthy. She kind of acted like she was his wife, like she weirdly idolized him. My son could do no wrong—she would do anything for him.
Her response was, “If you take him from me, I won’t be able to live anymore.”
I was at work one day shortly thereafter when I was served with a restraining order—she’d filed it to keep me away from my son. After a court battle and a lot of money spent on lawyers, the order was dropped. However, my son went missing. For eight months, I couldn’t find him. My mother was in cahoots with one of my sisters and Kevin to keep him away from me. Kevin—who was abusive. Kevin—who she claimed molested my son. And she said she did it because she wanted to protect my son from me.
I was heartbroken and asked her about the allegations again, and about how she could send my son to live with Kevin when she claimed in court that he had molested him. She said, “I don’t remember saying that.” I asked her about Kevin beating me, about her keeping the kids when I went to the hospital for treatment. She “didn’t remember” that, either.
* * *
When my son finally came back to me, he was angry. He tried to commit suicide, and under my mother’s influence, he refused treatment for his mental illness. She claims that all he has to do is go to Kingdom Hall—some of the more devout JWs don’t believe in taking medication. My parents believe that prayer will make my son better and when he returns in the new life, he will return with no ailments. They don’t believe in the justice system, in voting, in modern health care—they believe that this was Judas’s arrangement, and that God is not “of the world,” so worldly solutions are not for his people. Only he can help them.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are led by “the Society”—a group of men who have been handpicked by God to lead them. These men don’t believe that women should be educated. They believe that we should dedicate 100 percent of our lives to serving God, finding a man, getting married, and having babies. If you go to school, you’re serving the world, you’re not serving God. They don’t want people to waste their time on efforts that mean nothing because “you never know when Armageddon will come.”
The best thing I did in my life was to leave. But my mother has her claws into my son, they’re dragging him into these beliefs—they’re brainwashing him against me and deeper into their community. I worked so hard to get away, only to feel like I’m regressing.
It feels like it’s been a lifetime since everything happened, but also like my struggle is not over yet. I got my GED, then I went to college, and then I put myself through grad school. It seems like I should be a different person, like I should move on. But I can’t—I yearn for my parents to tell me that they were wrong, to acknowledge the effect that their decision had on my life. I yearn for them to see me as their child and not some foreign object, some pariah.
I could have been so much more. My life could have been so different. I could maybe wake up every morning not feeling that I am broken, that I am unwanted, that I am a victim, that I am less than, that my existence is futile, that I am a liar and a fake. I wonder what it would be like to feel comfortable—to feel that my soul has settled. I live in the shadow of what I wish my life had been.
I wonder what it’s like to trust people, too. I trust no one. It’s hard to get close to people and to experience joy, but I’ve known nothing different. “I love you” means nothing to me—they’re just words that are tossed around casually. I think that it’s naive and gullible to believe that people are good. I don’t think they are—I think people’s morality and goodness is totally circumstantial and mercurial. At the end of the day, I think the only God people serve is the self.
I’ve lied to my own kids, and that’s hard to come to terms with. I can’t tell them that their dad beat and raped me. I can’t tell my daughter, so I tell her that her dad and I didn’t get along. How would she feel if she knew that she was a product of rape? She doesn’t even know that I didn’t even walk in my graduation ceremony. She’s graduating from high school herself this weekend and she asked me about my diploma. I had to lie to her—again. I think about her and how much I love her, and then I think about my relationship with my own parents. If, God forbid, anything ever happened to her, I could never harden my heart to her, I could never tell her that rape was ever her fault.
And what will my children think of me when I eventually tell them about my past? What will they think of their grandparents? How will they view the world when something they’d taken for granted—that they were the product of a consensual relationship—turns into the ugly truth? I don’t know what that does to young adults, and I don’t know how it disfigures their future. But I know that I don’t want to do to my kids what my parents did to me—I don’t want to be the reason for their unhappiness.
Elsa, midfifties
My day is pretty intense in the sense that it doesn’t really have a beginning or end. I don’t sleep like a typical person might—from whatever time at night, until her alarm rings in the morning. I am always on call, always ready. Every part of my day is measured—every minute, and I have to be very efficient in order to get it all done. So I don’t have time to process anything, and that’s probably for the best. I go, go, go, and I don’t give it time to seep in, what I’m going through.
I was eight months pregnant with my daughter when we moved to the United States—gosh, it’s hard to believe that was over twenty years ago now. My son, Marcus, who was four at the time, and I moved here for the same reason most immigrants do—for a better life. My husband stayed behind and worked, planning to join us once I’d had Chelsea. I’d been here for three weeks when I went to my ob-gyn appointment one morning, and he told me I was in labor and I needed to go to the hospital to deliver. “No, I’m not,” I told him. I wasn’t having contractions. I’d been through unmedicated labor with Marcus, and I still vividly remembered the pain. But sure enough, my water broke on the bus on the way there.
It was the most horrific feeling—being alone with my son, in labor, on a bus, having no idea where we were going or whom to trust for help. I reluctantly called my sister-in-law—we’ve never had the best relationship and I had been staying in her home, which was a nightmare. I asked her to meet me at the hospital, where the OB on call was telling me I’d have to sit down—“Let us take care of you now,” he kept saying. But I was so on guard, so used to taking care of myself—being the responsible one, the one in charge, in control—that I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t relax.
When Chelsea finally came, she had the cord wrapped around her neck, so she didn’t cry right away, and she was blue. But she was fine, and I was grateful that the delivery, at least, had been uncomplicated. When Marcus and I left the hospital, I remember clutching his hand and pushing Chelsea’s bassinet with the other. And I prayed to God, I said: “Please God, help me. Help me raise these children in this stra
nge land, all by myself.”
When she was four weeks old, Chelsea caught a virus. The doctor who helped us at the hospital was Greek, and she told me that her parents had come to America just like I had—alone, with nothing. And she said, “Both my brother and I are doctors now. Your children will be just fine. You are strong.” I remember everything about her—her name, her features, her words. I want to look her up, just to tell her how grateful I am for her help.
My husband didn’t end up joining us for another three months. In the meantime, we moved out of my sister-in-law’s apartment and to the Bronx. It was even more obvious there that we were foreigners with nothing but hopes. No papers. No job. The apartment was a tiny one-bedroom in a gloomy six-story building where the elevator smelled like urine and the neighbors were, generally, far from friendly. But my immediate next-door neighbor was a sweet older lady. She gave me her grandson’s bed for Chelsea to sleep in, and Marcus and I slept on a mattress that we’d found on the street. We had very little other furniture. Every night, though, my neighbor would come to the apartment and talk to me, give me advice, tell me about her life. In those five months that she lived there, I learned so much. She got me through those days. She gave me hope.
When my husband finally came—Chelsea must have been about four months old—life was hard until we got papers. He was a philosophy professor back home, and he worked as a bartender in the Bronx. I went back to school when I was thirty-nine and I got my master’s degree in engineering. I worked a temp job as an accountant and a few other part-time gigs, went to school at night, and then when I got home, my husband would take the night shift at the bar. For two years, we only saw each other long enough to hand off the children. In a sense, we always thought that if we couldn’t achieve anything in five years, we would have considered it a wash and gone back. But after I got my master’s, I almost immediately got a job as a structural engineer. Then, it was my husband’s turn to go to school—he got his paralegal degree, and eventually we felt financially secure. Life got a little bit easier, and we were actually living, instead of just surviving. We put in our time in the Bronx and then bought a house in a great neighborhood in the suburbs.
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