by Jill Price
One area of research about how the storytelling we do about our memories shapes our lives that is especially thought provoking for me has to do with the ways in which memories are shared within families. As one article explained, “This work has revealed different roles in group remembering, such as the narrator (who speaks the most and contributes the most detail to the group recollection), the mentor (who facilitates remembering), and the monitor (who interjects to prevent perceived inaccuracies and to ensure that important details are not left out). Mentors and monitors might be conceived of as listeners who exert clear influence over the group’s final recollection.” It’s fascinating to think about this description of the process versus the way it worked—or I should say, didn’t really work—for my family, because I was a dominating player in the game. My family was rocked by a set of traumas during my twenties that had the effect of almost totally incapacitating me. Finally, we went to family therapy, and I was an unrelenting monitor, which totally undermined the purpose. That was all the more unfair because I had caused all of them a good deal of extra stress in those years.
The good thing about that set of family therapy sessions was that they led me ultimately to a therapist who let me talk and talk and talk about the host of memories that were repeating themselves so oppressively in my mind at that time, and the process of talking so much about them accomplished a good deal of healing. I went to one therapist before this one, but none of that therapy had helped me much. The style of my sessions with this therapist, in which I would talk and cry about all of my memories, seemed to be just what I didn’t know I’d been waiting for.
This set of “terrible twenties” years really started for me with the issue of going to college. I absolutely dreaded the idea. Once again, I was thrown into turmoil about leaving home. I’d never really liked the idea of going away to college, but I’d always known that my parents were determined that I should go. They thought education was hugely important in life, and there was just no question for them but that I was going. My dad also felt that going to college had turned his life around, and he thought it would do the same for me.
All I really wanted to do at this point in my life, though, was to get a job in LA, ideally working in the entertainment industry, which I knew so much about and had great entrée to because of my father, and then to get married and start a family. My dad found it hard to believe that I wasn’t dying to go away to school, but I didn’t feel that way at all. Friends have told me how relieved they were to be able to get away from high school and start a new life at college, or were just eager to move on by that point. I never had any desire whatsoever to go to college, and the way I interpreted all of the pressure to go to school was that it wasn’t good enough just to be me. All the pressure made me upset that my parents couldn’t accept me just as I was.
Eventually I did complete my applications, and I left for college by plane at 2:00 P.M. on Saturday, August 6,1983. I was seventeen and woefully unprepared. I had such intense separation anxiety that I returned home six times the first semester. Every month I’d be knocking on the door, and my parents were beside themselves. I had a $750 phone bill from calls home to friends. In my mind, my college experience was broken up into three distinct parts, ending up with a sum total of six years and one week of time there from start to finish.
When I was actually on campus, I went wild. I lived in a huge high-rise coed dorm, and there were parties all the time. I met people from all over the country, especially the Midwest and Chicago, and got to know a girl who had grown up in Saudi Arabia. I had fun, and I enjoyed getting to know so many new people. But I really wanted to be home. I kept my emotional distance from my new life, never really committing fully to it. Just when I should have been going through the process of separation from my immediate family, I was instead being pulled back home by my memory.
When I began to do less well in my classes than I had hoped, memories of Westlake and how I’d felt like such a failure there began to play relentlessly in my head. Once again I felt thrown by academic pressure. Every time I saw the disappointment on the faces of my professors, my mind would flash to the vision of me sitting at home struggling with school assignments that made no sense to me. I tried to fight the memories off by calling up the good times at St. Michael’s in sixth grade, but I couldn’t beat back the relentless replaying of the bad times.
On top of that, I put on weight, as so many people do when they go to college, and when I went home, my mother harped about that. All the memories through the years of her nagging me about my weight were triggered, and they began to haunt me again relentlessly. Maybe that should have made me thrilled about being off on my own, but I felt nothing like that.
By the end of that first year, I wanted to go home for the summer, but because during the last semester I had contracted pleurisy, a lung disease, and had to take incompletes, I had to stay for summer school. When I finally did get back home on July 7, I was determined not to go back, and for some time I didn’t.
In the fall of 1984, I started classes at the local community college, and being back at home allowed me to calm down and find some emotional equilibrium. By the fall of 1985, when I had been home for a year, I dropped all the weight I had gained and began to feel a little better about myself. I seemed to have reached a sort of balance again. My memories were still incredibly insistent, but I was feeling better about myself and learning to come to terms better with the phenomenon in my head. That relative peace didn’t last long, though.
On Thursday, March 14, 1985, my dad came home and told us he was going back to the William Morris Agency. The first thing I said to him was, “The Beverly Hills office, right?” He looked at me in anticipation of the storm he knew would come and said, “No, they want me to head the television department in New York.” I was shocked. If he had been summoned back to New York in the first years after we had moved to California, I would have been overjoyed. But at this point, the news was devastating.
The fear of leaving and the anxiety of starting all over again overwhelmed me. It didn’t matter that I was nearly twenty years old. The feeling that all of my memories from our years in LA would be ripped away was more than I could bear. I was thrown into such turmoil that in July, my parents decided that rather than moving the whole family right away, they would wait until Michael graduated from high school in 1987. For the next two years, my father would commute back and forth, and then we would all move. Among other factors, they had decided to live apart so I would have time to come to terms with the move. Though I wish I could say that I had convinced them not to do so, that I had overcome my anxieties and agreed to go, in truth I was hugely relieved. I desperately wish I had been able to grapple with my memory and win the fight to let go, but it was no contest. I accepted their decision gratefully.
For that year, my dad lived in New York and came back to California one week a month. My mom flew back and forth often. The stress on them and on my brother was terrible. My brother, who had always been stable and responsible, began to be rebellious and difficult. He would go off with friends and lie to my parents about where he had been, and he started rebelling in other ways too.
Finally the strain was too much for my parents, and in the summer of 1986 they told us that by the end of the summer or early fall, we were moving to New York. On July 29, 1986, I went to New York with the purpose of going down to Washington, D.C., to explore the possibility of transferring to American University. I was emotionally exhausted from worrying about the move and about all of the problems that I was causing my family, feeling guilty and ashamed that I was unable to get over my fears.
I was forcing them to choose between my desperate need to stay, which neither they nor I really understood, and the happiness of the rest of the family. After months of the stress, I was so distraught and conflicted that when I was sent back to California after the trip, I found myself hoping the plane would crash because I couldn’t stand the intensity of the situation anymore. As a month passe
d, I resigned myself to the fact that we were moving to New York. However, fortunately just then there was a shake-up in the William Morris Beverly Hills office, and they needed my dad back in California. On September 4, 1986, he called me and said, “I’m coming home. We’re not going to move to New York.” What enormous relief I felt.
Secure in the knowledge that my family was in LA to stay, I suddenly found myself able, even somewhat eager, to return to college. I had found emotional equilibrium again. The day I left to go back to college, January 12, 1987, was one of the few times in my life that I felt I was starting with a clean slate and felt good about that. I believed that everything bad was behind me, all wrapped up. I’d gone through the trauma of almost moving, and it had worked out that my family was staying and my life wasn’t going to be disrupted. In addition, my parents had agreed that I could bring my car to college, and I was getting an apartment, so I was confident that the school experience was going to be much better. I could never have anticipated the family crisis that came next—this time a life-or-death battle that taught me a great deal about just how transient our lives are, no matter how firm a grip of memory we have over them.
One of my real regrets in life is that my mother and I fought so much when I was growing up. She had been extremely close to her own mother, and they had a mutually supportive, symbiotic relationship. In fact, the morning after my parents got married, my grandmother, whom I always called Nana, and her sister, Elsie, showed up at my parents’ hotel room with shopping bags filled with deli food. My mother didn’t think anything of it, and my father knew from that day on that he’d have to make room for Nana in our lives too. Though my mother and I have also been extremely close, the way my mother harped on me about my weight meant that I didn’t feel the same kind of unconditional support she and her mother had felt for one another. By this time, the slightest comment from her that I took to be critical would send me into a rage, and we’d have a horrible fight. That’s just what happened during Passover 1987.
On Friday, April 10, I came home from college for the holiday. I had contracted an eye infection that was so severe I couldn’t open my eyes and had to be walked onto the airplane. On Saturday, my dad almost had to carry me to the doctor. That was the least of my worries that holiday, though.
Monday night, April 13, 1987, was the first night of Passover. My grandparents, my parents, my brother, and I were leaving to head to our family friends’ Beverly and Danny’s house when an argument broke out between me and my mom. Everyone left while my mother and I got into a terrible fight, and she stunned me into silence when, all of a sudden, she blurted out, “You know, I just want you to know that I went to the doctor, and I’m very sick, and my carotid artery could explode at any time. So keep it up. Keep screaming and making things worse, so it could maybe make my neck explode.”
Anger can change to regret in a split second and that was what happened. I stood there in the kitchen horrified as she explained that the doctors didn’t know exactly what was wrong. It turned out that her health problems had nothing to do with her carotid artery, but she was under a great deal of emotional stress and people say crazy things in those situations. At least she had gotten my full attention. The news of her illness came out of nowhere. My parents hadn’t wanted to upset me, so I had heard and seen no clues. All of a sudden, wham! Everything just stopped. I stopped. My mom stopped. The fight stopped. And as I recall that moment, time stopped.
The next day my mom and I went shopping. Everything seemed normal, but it wasn’t. There was a quiet space in my head where even the normal seemed distant, as if seen from a far place where it’s clear but isn’t. This was the first time that I started to feel what I can best describe as a disconnect from everyday life, which persisted for the next twenty months. I felt strangely distanced from the world and even from myself. It’s terribly difficult to describe, and all I can really say is that it was disconcerting.
I went back to college on Wednesday, April 15, though I desperately wanted to stay home. Trying to concentrate on my course work became a nightmare. My mind started racing with memories of times I’d spent with my mother, cycling through our good times and our fights. I called home constantly and came home one more time for a long weekend, April 24–27, but it wasn’t until April 29 that my dad called to tell me what the doctors had discovered.
My mother had been diagnosed with tinnitus, a continual ringing or roaring noise in the ear, caused by damage to the hair cells of the inner ear. The actor Tony Randall was afflicted with the disease and created the Tinnitus Foundation to help cure it. What a relief to find that although it was a serious condition, it was not life threatening.
That kind of scare usually sparks introspection, forcing reflection on the relationship that was in jeopardy and how much that person means to you. I should have taken a long look at my relationship with my mother at that point, buoyed by the relief that she was not in danger after all. Perhaps that could have taken place if there was more time. Maybe if it had all ended there, I would have found the inner space to self-reflect. It would have been a perfect opportunity to reconcile our differences and for me to work on our relationship.
Unfortunately, the drama of my mother’s condition wasn’t over yet. A few weeks later, in mid-May, I came home for two weeks and was waiting to go back for summer session in June. On Friday, May 22, Memorial Day weekend, I walked out the door at 12:30 P.M. to meet my friend Jonathan for lunch. My parents were walking up the driveway as I came out, and my mother was crying in great heaving sobs. I had never seen her cry like that before. My dad looked at me, shook his head, and shooed me away.
Obviously something truly horrible had happened, but I knew my father didn’t want to talk to me about it right then. He wanted to be alone with my mother. As soon as I got back home, I found my father, and he told me that my mother had gone for a brain scan that morning. The doctor who had diagnosed the tinnitus thought she should undergo tests to determine the cause of the ringing. The scan had revealed that she had a brain tumor and needed an immediate operation to remove it.
My father saw that I was about to break down from the news and wouldn’t tell me anything more about it. For the rest of that day, and in the days following, my parents acted as though nothing was unusual. That very afternoon, my mother was on the phone planning a Memorial Day party. On top of that she invited Danny and Beverly to come over that night so that Danny could help my dad build a new barbecue. I could not join in their stoicism; I was terrified, and my memory went into overdrive, calling up every unkind word I had ever said to her, every fight we’d had through so many years.
When I went back to college for summer school seven days later, I had a migraine headache every day. The summer heat was blazing hot, and I felt weak, so my mom called my doctor and explained what I was going through, and he told her my electrolytes were being depleted. He said to drink Gatorade and take better care of myself. I was constantly worried and nervous. School became a nightmare again because I couldn’t concentrate on anything except memories of my mother—good ones that made me angry at the unfairness of her condition, bad ones that made me feel guilty and ashamed.
Every time I called home, the answer was the same: everything is going to be okay. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be fine. I was certain that wasn’t true, and after a while I couldn’t stand being away. The surgery was scheduled for July 8, and I came home on July 2 for the holiday weekend. What did we talk about over that weekend? We talked about the new car that they were getting me. We talked about a party we were having that weekend. We talked about everything but the surgery. The amazing thing to me was that acting as though everything was fine worked for the others in my family. I really didn’t understand that then, because I didn’t have that ability, and their insistence on not talking about the surgery made me angry.
I was distraught when I went back for the second session of summer school on July 5. On Wednesday, July 8, my mom had her surgery, and I called my dad’s o
ffice as soon as I got back from class. His assistant was evasive, and that terrified me. When my dad finally called me later, I could tell something had gone wrong. He was always strong and sure, but in that call, he sounded more stressed than I had ever heard him: “Jill, something happened to Mommy’s heart and they had to stop the surgery, but don’t worry, everything is okay.” Everything is
okay. God, how I hated that mantra.
That was all my dad would tell me, and it wasn’t for two days that I found out from my mom’s oldest brother that the doctors had to stop the surgery because she had a heart attack during the operation. She had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia and had flatlined. The doctors had to break her ribs in order to get to her heart and shocked her seven times with the paddles before it started pumping again. When I talked to my father about it, he told me that when the doctors came out from the operating room, they looked as if they’d run a marathon. She suffered such trauma that they were going to have to wait to reschedule the operation until she recovered.
That night a strange new feeling began to come over me that added to my disconnectedness and persisted for months. I felt as if I were standing on a ledge, about to fall. It was hazy and indistinct at first, and I don’t even know how to explain it fully. Solid ground was gone. I didn’t feel that I could step back. I was just stuck on a ledge before some dimly lit huge abyss. The following weekend, I went home.
Finally, we got the word that my mother could have the surgery in November. My parents came out to college to visit on October 9, and I kept thinking that it might be the last time I would see my mom. I wanted to make up to her for all of the difficulties through the years, but as anyone knows who has gone through this sort of experience, there’s really no way to do that, at least not in a few days’ time. Our parents probably don’t really expect us to make amends for all of the hard times raising us; most often they don’t even really blame us for all the times we burst into a rage at them, or stormed out of rooms, or gave them the silent treatment. My mind was racing, though, with memories of how horrible I’d been to my mother; scenes of fights we’d had flicked through my mind relentlessly, and I was so on edge that of all things, I ended up getting into a fight with my parents.