Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story

by Jewel

  At home my feelings were alive and well, if not always pleasant. I could tell that being hit did not feel good, and because I was emotionally alive, I could tell it was not my fault. But as any child who has suffered this way knows, the unpredictability and randomness of even infrequent rages can be excruciating. I could tell I was scared, and being able to tell that meant I could tell when I wasn’t. If I cut myself off from my only alarm system by numbing my feelings, I would be defenseless. Not having access to my senses could lead to disaster, and so instead of turning away from my feelings, I turned toward them. I studied them. I turned to writing rather than to drugs to take the edge off. I vowed to try to tell the truth about myself when I wrote—not the version of myself I had to learn to be in order to keep my dad’s temper from flaring, nor the version I had to be in bars to stay unseen, nor the persona I was onstage. At school, at home, in bars, I was an emotional contortionist, alternating between awkward self-aggrandizing and trying to win favor so as to fit in. When I wrote, I let myself be dead honest, flaws and all. But I was myself, I felt real. I went inside myself when a pen was in my hand and enjoyed that space in there. When I went in deeply to myself and my creativity, I was amazed at what I knew and saw. I had answers to things I did not otherwise have access to. I was able to see patterns in places that had confused me before. I wrote about the way my dad treated me. The way he made me feel that so many things at such a young age were my fault, and I was able to untangle the web of his projection and separate myself from him. At times I was too young to make sense of it all, but I vowed to come back later when I had better skills to deal with it. Until then, I told myself I could not control the pain or my situation, but I could control the pain I inflicted on myself. I was confused, scared, hurt, but I was alive in there. At least I had that. Maybe if I didn’t let it go, maybe if I used words like Hansel and Gretel used breadcrumbs, I could find my way out of the woods and avoid being eaten by the witch and the wolves. Maybe.

  four

  emotional english

  In fifth grade we moved from my uncle’s machine shop to the saddle barn on the homestead where my dad was raised. The barn was situated about a hundred yards from the cabin where my dad had grown up and where my grandpa Yule still lived. One large room downstairs housed the kitchen, living room, and dining area with a view of green meadow, gray waters of the bay, blue mountains, and white glaciers. A metal oil drum that had been welded into a coal-burning stove sat in the middle of the floor, radiating heat, its rusted pipe climbing through the ceiling to lend warmth to the upstairs, where I shared a room with my brothers. There was a small room, partitioned off, which was Dad’s. Countless times he must have gone into that saddle barn as a young man for cinch or rasp. No wonder he seemed disoriented all the time now that it was so completely repurposed.

  Winter was the price you paid for the unearthly Alaskan summers, dark and cold in a way you could not shake off or dress for. It is possible to dress for, but our hand-me-downs and secondhand clothing always left me with a chill. Alaska’s famed midnight sun eventually gave way to the winter solstice, its stingy grip allowing only the faintest dusk to slip through its fingers for a few hours a day. The coal stove would go out in the middle of the night, and I remember waking with frost on the tips of my eyelashes, making it nearly impossible to get out of the cozy nest of feather blankets in my bed. We would wake to inky blackness, and I would cook breakfast while Shane did the lion’s share of chores, milking the cow and feeding the horses while Atz Lee got dressed and ready for school. My dad was usually asleep still, often hungover in those years. We did the dishes and then walked two miles in darkness on the dirt road to the bus stop. Sometimes the ice would be so bad we could not walk a couple of steps without falling, so we devised homemade snow cleats by taking the removable soles out of our shoes, poking screws through the rubber bottoms, and then replacing the padded sole. It was a bit uncomfortable, as the screws always tried to push back up, but the thick padding kept them from poking us too badly.

  At school, recess was taken in a twilight state, that weak light lasting only a few hours, darkness descending again by the time we rode back to the bus stop. I remember looking down and not being able to see my feet. My eyes would strain to see the outline of the dirt road in front of me, but often it felt like we walked back and forth by braille on those days with no moon.

  At home in the evening, Shane again did the chores, Atz Lee got coal for the stove, and I would either milk the cow or help start dinner. My dad was a great cook, a skill required of him in Vietnam. His creativity shined in the kitchen; he loved to bake breads from scratch and make Swiss-style apple tarts. Our food was what we raised with our own hands, and the flavors of my childhood stay with me still. Fresh butter that I would make in the morning before school, squeezing out the buttermilk with a spatula. Fresh raw whole milk. Meat from our own cattle that we bled and butchered each fall. Fresh vegetables from our garden that we canned in the winter. Water from the creek. Sourdough bread from a starter that was older than I was. Alaskans can be quite proud of their sourdough starter. It is a living thing that must be fed and nurtured in the fridge. When you take some out, you add a few more ingredients back in so that its flavor keeps maturing. We got our starter from Yule, and he’d inherited his decades earlier.

  I was proud to live on the homestead and to live off the land. I knew the sound of porcupines climbing the trees in winter, and could track the cattle in the snow back to where the water was. Wolves sang me to sleep at night across the canyon, and the winds whistled, exciting my imagination. Alaska is a land of extremes, with mountains climbing out of the ocean and glaciers that reach down into the sea like great white limbs, impossibly slow. Too much food in the summer, and too little in the winter. It is a place that requires great preparation for a human to have any sort of consistent sustenance. It requires a hardy, practical, and energetic approach to life, one that served me well on the long and winding road I’ve taken since then.

  Extreme characters also seem to be drawn to Alaska, especially the smaller towns. Extreme political views, from hippie communes (there were a few rather famous ones that settled near the head of the bay in the ’70s, including the Love Family and the Barefooters), left-wingers, expats, outlaws, and mountain men who felt they needed to get just that much farther from the government. On East End Road lived a female belly dancer with a full beard. There was Stinky, who lived in an underground shelter he’d dug in an old junkyard—a refrigerator lying on its back served as a door, and it would hinge open, coffinlike, and up Stinky would emerge from his underground dwelling, still convinced a Cold War was possible. There were immigrants like my family, and fishermen, lumberjacks, and Russian Orthodox in their brightly colored traditional clothes. All of us living separate lives on the same peninsula. The rule was that everyone had the right to be themselves and pursue liberty how they saw fit. At night when we sang, I was always amused to see such a collection of hippies, hillbillies, and rednecks all sitting at the same bar.

  One of my favorite things about Alaska is that people are not jaded or too touched by pop culture. There is a tangible optimism that comes from making a living with your own hands. It’s honest and grounded and down-to-earth, qualities that served me well in a business that was anything but.

  Our own home reflected the extremes of the land. My dad’s drinking continued. I remember him being so “sleepy” on the drive home after gigs that he would ask me to help keep the wheel steady. There was lots of yelling, rage, outbursts, though not always when he was drunk. The abuse escalated in the drinking years though. It was random and I could never predict what would spark my dad’s temper, and it began a lifetime of walking on eggshells for me, trying to read the signs and check moods. I think he hit the boys occasionally as well, but I felt he had a particular problem with me for whatever reason. Maybe it was female need. Maybe I reminded him of my mom. Maybe. All I knew is we fought a lot.

  In some fam
ilies this brings siblings closer together, but it seemed to splinter us. Shane handled it by being the responsible older brother, reliable and true, who would escape into fantasy books. Atz Lee was the favorite, and quite a rascal, defiant in his right to play and goof off. He could take hours just to fill a bucket of coal, the fire long out while we were waiting for him. I handled the stress by trying to be the best at singing and horse riding, and by trying to eliminate the competition. I didn’t understand that it was not my brother’s fault he was the favorite, and I resented him badly for it. I had a sharp tongue and I used my intuition like a weapon; whatever insecurity and weakness I sensed in him, I exploited. I tried to make him feel as badly about himself as my dad made me feel about myself. My need to be loved was so strong that it took several years for my writing to expose the real issue, and for my conscience to get a foothold and defend my younger brother. To this day I am deeply regretful and sorry that I was not mature enough to see he was not an enemy but a victim in the same war. It took years of reflection to see that being the favorite can be a worse trap, as it leaves no door to exit by; loyalty to the love one receives, dysfunctional as it may be, is sometimes too strong a force to break free from. I had no idea what a gift it was that at least I knew I wanted out.

  Something my life has taught me is not to see things in black and white. People are neither all good nor all bad. Hurt people can become hurtful, and my father’s own actions reflected this.

  The worst incident I can recall involved Atz Lee and I both one morning as we got ready for school while my dad slept, hungover. As usual we were careful not to wake him for fear of his temper. Atz Lee and I got to fighting, as we often did, but it had to be done silently. Nothing in particular got us going, just some squabble that escalated, and we began to brawl with the mute button on. Kicks and punches and bites delivered in comic quiet. He would push me so hard it would knock me over, but he would break my fall at the last minute, offering me an extended arm, which I’d take so as not to land with a crash. I would bite him, then cover his mouth as we both stopped long enough to ensure he did not scream too vociferously. It was like a silent and brutal ballet, both of us having a go at each other and yet protecting ourselves from our father. This time, however, we woke him. We both froze as we heard his voice erupt like a cannon, calling us up to his room.

  Atz Lee and I went from being mortal enemies to being children unified in fear in the blink of an eye. He was seven, me nine. I remember climbing the wooden stairs, each saying we loved the other as we clung together, arm locked in arm. We reached his door and he was standing naked but for his underwear, his spine bent with rage. The room was tiny, just enough space for a twin bed against the wall that adjoined ours. We stepped inside, our backs to the window. I remember being vaguely aware of a willow bassinet that lay at our feet. It had been the bassinet that my grandmother carried my father in, made of willow roots. My father began screaming, I don’t care to recall what exactly, and it snowballed from there. I do remember his face being distorted with rage, barking at us like a drill sergeant. I remember veins bulging and a redness that can be achieved only by going genuinely apeshit. He hit my brother upside the face. I was next. It knocked me into the cradle. But I did not cry. I decided to deprive him of that satisfaction. I stood up and stared at him with a smirk on my face. He knocked me down again, incensed, and then dragged me to the bed. The next thing I knew, Atz Lee was there next to me, my dad straddling us both, shaking us, our heads knocking together. He kept yelling, spittle flying in my face. I thought I was going to die.

  I don’t remember leaving his room. I do remember climbing down the stairs weakly, in utter shock. In the absence of sanity, our bodies took over instinctively, and as if on autopilot my brother and I gathered our things to walk to school, my nose still bleeding. We had no idea what to do with ourselves. The episode took long enough that we knew we had missed the bus, and so we walked the eight miles to school, our faces red and stinging. I was in fifth grade, Atz Lee in third. We felt so much older, but must have looked impossibly small with our thumbs stuck out trying to catch a ride, part of us hoping a car would not come for a long while, to give our faces and our crying time to return to normal. And yet another part of us fantasized about everyone seeing what our dad had done to us. That feeling vanished as quickly as the marks did, though, as it does for any animal that senses survival is the enemy you know.

  I remember the day being dreamlike. It was so strange to witness how life just went on. Kids made jokes, kids laughed as usual. Teachers taught, recess happened, and kids played. It all just seemed like time should have stopped and some protective force in the universe should have risen from the ocean and said, Anoint these children with love! Take a moment not to pity, but to see them so they may know they are deeply worthy of tenderness! This did not happen though.

  At midday, my dad came to the school with our bagged lunches. In the scramble I had forgotten to make them. He was sheepish, this time his spine bent with shame and regret. I wanted so badly to be mad at him, but the child in me could not withstand the sad and broken form he now took, and I thanked him as I took the crumpled paper bag from his hand.

  I was so alarmed by what was happening at the time, by my father’s sudden behavior, that a knowing part of me thought, naively, that I could have a talk with him and that I would somehow be able to resolve this and I would stop being hit. I saw that my dad was afraid and I think that having a nine-year-old explain that you’re afraid and acting poorly by lashing out must have enraged him. I do know that my father was gripped with terror, a deep feeling of inadequacy because of the way he was raised, and I think he reacted in the most protective way he could, which was to say that I was the problem and he wasn’t. I remember the lights inside going out a little bit for me then. I remember my mind being torn down by his mind, his logic, his adult reasoning enough to confuse me into wondering if I really was the problem. And I began to really doubt myself.

  I cry now as I write this. So lasting are the scars of the child who never feels worthy of love. So many cycles in my life of having to learn that I am indeed worthy of tenderness. The lessons I learned from my dad, that he learned from his, would take me many years to unlearn.

  My dad was seldom this violent. It was typically a lot of rage and yelling. The more I learned in later years about his own childhood, the more amazed I am that he did as well as he did with us. He was far less violent than his own father.

  As children, we are taught what I call Emotional English. This is an emotional language we are taught in our homes, and just like our spoken language, the emotional language we speak most fluently as adults is the one we learned as children. What we are taught about interacting emotionally with each other and the world is modeled for us by our families, and is what we will grow up doing. No matter how frustrating, damaging, and frightening it is, we will perpetuate the examples of our parents and family—unless we can learn new ones. The tricky thing is that a person can go to school to learn a new language, we can find classes anywhere, in any town, but how do we learn a new emotional way of relating to our lives, loved ones, and most important, to ourselves?

  I have so much compassion for my dad. He endured so much as a child, and then he was shipped off to war. He had suffered from PTSD and it was triggered by the divorce and raising us kids and living in the barn. I’m amazed he held it together as well as he did. While he and I did not speak for most of my early career, we have a healthy and loving relationship now. Through a combination of therapy and self-examination, he has fought hard for the happiness he has, and has not only made amends to me, but allows me to feel a lot of safety and emotional maturity when we’re together. I love my family, and I love my dad—there were lots of good times and they were enigmatic brilliant pioneers who settled a new wild country. It took extreme personalities to carve a living from these extreme environments.

  Back then, when I looked at my family’s emotional dynamic and
projected it into my future, it looked bleak. Having studied PTSD and the effects of its trauma on the brain, I’ve learned to see this incident in a new light. There is nothing that makes what happened okay, but what happened does have a cause. It is common for people like my dad to self-medicate with alcohol or other things. When triggered, their first reaction is one of fight or flight, and blood stops flowing to the part of the brain that handles logic, redirecting it to the left hemisphere. You can see it in real-time studies done on the brain. A person consumed with irrational rage is literally out of their mind. Later I learned that there are two kinds of trauma: “Little t,” which includes issues of prolonged abuse, neglect, and alcoholism, and “Big T,” which encompasses war, rape, and near-fatal accidents. My father was the victim of both.

  But at least our dad was ours. He stayed with us and fought it out. My mother was absent, except for eccentric and happy notes I might receive on holidays. I never valued what a stand-up guy my dad was to keep us, despite his terror and inadequacy. He did not abandon us. It wasn’t until much later that I was able to appreciate this. At the time, being mad at him was easy. He was there every day. Learning to be mad at and fear my mom would take a lot longer.

  five

  a breadcrumb trail

  My dad never said a bad word about my mom, and it wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I asked about it. He said that when I was eight, she had told him that she needed a break from being a mom and that she wanted to explore her life without us. Rather than try to convince a woman to take kids she did not want, he took us, ill equipped as he was.

  After the divorce, I missed my mother terribly. I even named a white teddy bear Nedra so that I could snuggle with my mom each night. As is the way with small kids, I never asked why we lived with my dad and not my mom. I never asked why Mom didn’t come to see us. It just was. My heart ached for her so, and in years to come I made desperate attempts to see her, going so far as to hitch rides to Anchorage. I would show up on the doorstep wherever she was house-sitting (our house had been sold at some point). My mother often cried and seemed sad. She dated a man who made it clear he did not like children, though that didn’t keep me from liking him. He was into gourmet food and art and talked to me like an adult the few times I was around him.