A History of Scars

by Laura Lee

  I hovered in the garage once, the morning after a particularly vicious incident. My mother opened the door. “You know what happened last night,” she said to me. “Be nice to your sister,” and then shut the door.

  For a length of time, I resented my mother for absenting herself from any responsibility to protect us. I resented her for sleeping with me at night. I wanted to be left un-pestered, to be granted privacy. My small body functioned as a shield, or a reprieve. I myself didn’t seem to matter. She seemed to assume that if she were in my bed, he wouldn’t cross that line—he would leave her alone. I found her presence invasive. But I understood, too, that she was afraid for herself.

  * * *

  These are not moments I want to inhabit. Yet I can’t remove them from the narrative, as my father would prefer. These are moments that break the narrative.

  In the first few weeks of each semester, I teach my students Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.” And yet as I harp on about the value of not reducing a person to one single story, I realize how hard that is to put into practice. Our minds want continuity.

  Our visions of those closest to us are so shaped by the impact they’ve had on our lives, and so inseparable from that, that even if they themselves are paradoxical in their complexity, it’s easier to reduce. Especially in relation to certain subjects, like abuse.

  Still, it’s the disruption of the pattern that can be so distracting. How does one capture a fair picture of a person, if the pieces don’t add up to what we expect? Yet it can be tormenting to try to occupy that gray space—in feeling and acknowledging so many contradictory things, all at once, and not knowing what to do with the pieces.

  My father tried to protect those around him from whatever traumas he had undergone—suffering the sudden loss of his father as a child, growing up in poverty, as a result, during the Korean War—by not speaking of his past. This is what I assume, anyway. He didn’t allow himself to be known. Yet the effects were still clear. He became the trauma. Because of him, normal life seems too mundane—too lacking in adrenaline.

  * * *

  Over the years, I’ve confronted my father about the past. My family’s chronology, geographies, and medical histories are too complicated to plot on a single line. Time blurs. What doesn’t fade are his responses.

  My father has tried telling me that it wasn’t as bad as I remember; that his outbursts didn’t happen that often, that memory is fallible.

  He has tried to discredit me to myself. To tell me I am an unreliable narrator. His arguments change rapidly, in the style of someone who has a great deal to gain in denying.

  He has told me other things, as well, that rather than serving his defense, disturb me more.

  I remember where we were standing in the living room of my childhood home, in the most frank conversation he and I have had about the past. It is the only instance in which he has owned up and expressed regret.

  With regard to my sister, he argued, “It wasn’t just one-way, you know. She hit me, too.”

  When I responded angrily that she was a child, that she was trying to defend herself, he fell silent.

  With regard to my mother, his defense was similar; that it wasn’t just him, that she escalated.

  “Even if that’s true, it wasn’t an equal fight,” I told him. “You’re stronger than her. She’s smaller than you. What kind of man hits a woman?”

  To which he said sadly, “How was I supposed to know better?”

  I asked him how someone so intelligent, so well read, could have had such a complete lack of respect for women.

  His response was that their fights were actually a sign of respect, because it showed that he viewed himself and my mother as equals. He added, too, “I wouldn’t hit her now. Because she’s not equal anymore. You see?”

  That sentiment was supposed to make me feel better, I think—to reassure me that he wouldn’t hit a woman suffering from mid- to late-stage Alzheimer’s. He wasn’t that sort of man. Yet to this day, I find that comment the most disturbing. That logic can be so twisted.

  In that same conversation, I challenged my father to fight me, as an adult—to try to hurt me. “If you want to hurt someone, fight someone who can fight back!”

  Even at the time, I could see how warped my challenge was. How it was issued long after relevancy. Yet somehow I needed to proclaim it—both to let him know that I wasn’t cowed by him any longer, and to finally stand up. To rid myself of my fear of him.

  His response was sadness and confusion. “There’s something wrong with us. I thought you were different. She always said you were nice. But you’re so angry.”

  I demanded to know whether he regretted anything he’d done, whether he was sorry.

  “Yes, of course, I’m sorry. But what can I do now? It’s in the past.”

  He’d never been able to admit to that before: regret. Somehow, after all the denials, the counterattacks, the refusals to engage, it was the only thing left unsaid.

  He and I rarely saw each other. He hadn’t known, until that conversation, how much those memories tormented me, and how much time I spent trying to understand this man, in spite of myself.

  His advice to me, too, was “Forget about it. You should just move on with your life.”

  That conversation felt final. After that, there was nothing left to say.

  * * *

  Like my father, I can’t go back in time. I can’t alter my narrative. I can only write into the future. It wasn’t that my father was blameless in his outbursts, in those moments late at night, when I would hear him rushing down the hallway, or down the stairs. I knew the warning signs for his explosions.

  But what has haunted me since, in my nightmares, is my helplessness. The way I simply let things unfold, as though I were watching TV. I watched, and did nothing, as the ones I loved screamed for help.

  When my mother became violent in turn, the most I ever did was hide rulers. I knew what she meant when she asked me angrily once, “Where is it?” I stowed the wooden ones I could find in my closet and told her I didn’t know. The next morning, she threw away white plastic fragments, shatters from the flimsy imitation she’d used against my sister, instead. Those wooden rulers, oddly enough, are still at home today.

  In the single conversation in which my middle sister spoke of the bruises my father inflicted, she told me that my mother’s violence was the one she couldn’t forgive—because though my father was much stronger, he was a stranger to her. It was my mother’s betrayal that hurt. My sister has told me, too, how much she hated me; for many reasons, but in part because I was left untouched. He left before it was my turn.

  I’ve never fully forgiven myself, for the way I bore silent witness, without realizing I could have acted. In some ways I was just like my mother. I did nothing to stop the violence, partially because I was afraid for myself.

  In the interim I’ve built myself up, physically and emotionally, to protect myself from people like my father. And people like my sister, who became so aggressively violent and angry, in turn, that even he was afraid of her. I’ve also torn myself down—to make physical, and exterior, the inward pain.

  I bought a punching bag, hung it in the basement, and learned to fight. I learned to protect myself not from my father, but from my middle sister. I remember, still, the last time she attacked me. It was the only time I fought back. She stopped after that, because she knew that I was stronger than she.

  I lifted five days a week. I bench-pressed and leg-pressed multiples of my body weight, 125 percent or 150 percent or 300 percent, depending on the exercise. I tested my pain threshold, pushing myself so hard that it hurt to move each day. It made me feel strong.

  At times it feels difficult, to find the balance. To project enough strength to signal to those who might hurt me that I can defend myself, without driving away the ones who wouldn’t want to in the first place. In some odd reversal, the difficulty has become learning to be vulnerable. To let i
n the love of those who can still see the person I once was, before I erected walls.

  * * *

  I’ve thought back, often, to why I felt so frozen in inaction. Even when I was a child, less than ten years old, I had a sense of foreboding. I understood the consequences. I imagined my father in jail, losing his job, being deported. His citizen status was uncertain—I knew he was a permanent resident, even if I didn’t know what, exactly, that meant.

  Looking back, I don’t know that the ten-year-old me could have done things differently. I sensed that my mother wanted our lives to remain private—that she distrusted Americans, distrusted institutions. I imagined, too, my mother bearing the burden of young children and a job, alone—a burden that she eventually bore, regardless.

  I remember my oldest sister, home on a visit from college, while he was also visiting on a break, threatening to call the police if he didn’t stop. I remember him shouting back at her, “Go ahead!” And I remember her doing nothing.

  There were moments when I dreamed of someone else calling the police, of my father realizing consequences. There were moments when I dreamed of doing it myself. But I didn’t do anything.

  * * *

  It took me almost thirty years to call 911. Even then, I did so only after asking my neighbor directly.

  “Do you want me to call the police?” I asked, as she stood a few feet from me, blood streaming down her face. “Are you sure?”

  That fear of getting involved stops many of us, I think, even as adults, even in moments of crisis. We don’t want to interfere. Even when people scream for help, it can be easier to pretend not to hear.

  At some point, we have to do something. It wasn’t till I was almost thirty that I did something. It didn’t cure the problem—life isn’t that simple. But it did mean that for at least that night, the punches stopped. Maybe, for just that moment, that was enough.

  And in that sense, it was so easy. I wondered why it had taken me so much to take action, even when I’d seen the other side of it, even when I knew how quickly violence could escalate.

  Though we judge those in abusive relationships for not getting out, we also don’t intercede on their behalf, to help. Because on some level, we also know how messy it is—that things aren’t that simple. And so instead we turn away.

  * * *

  In the years since those childhood flashes of violence and anger, I’ve somehow hit middle age. Even as I only now am learning to stop seeking the seat closest to the exit, to stop planning my escape route.

  The moments that have given me peace have been both large and small. Some of it has required matching that intensity of fear with equal intensity of happiness, of love, from sources able to give it. To grapple with me, in safer ways.

  Part of it has come from finding my own natural home—in refuging for the past fifteen years on the cliffs, as a rock climber. In embracing a lifestyle equally intense in its sensations of fear and joy. In which I choose the risk I’m willing to undertake. In which I can choose my own way. In which I choose not to flee, but to endure.

  Part of it has come in having started to forgive myself. In having, for at least one moment, protected another, as I’d once wished to be protected. Part of it has come in knowing that I can protect myself, and part of it has come in finding people who I know will protect me. Who take my version of the past as what it is: my truth. Who will not invalidate it, because they are not benefited by a false retelling.

  Part of it has come in seeing what a different man my father is in his actions now, in caretaking. Part of it has come from recognizing that his and my lack of relationship arises now out of mutual recognition—that we will never be able to communicate, that we can only cause harm to each other—rather than out of a place of anger. Now, it is freeing, to know that my father’s opinions hold no sway over my life or decisions. I lived in his shadow. It is only through disregard that I have emerged.

  * * *

  Biology fascinates me. Think of rats birthing in trash bags on crowded streets in Chinatown, on Mulberry Street, feeding on scraps of dim sum, or mosquitos releasing rafts of spawn into still puddles of rainwater. This is r-selection—rapid reproduction, in which having many offspring compensates for a lower likelihood of each surviving and reaching maturity. Then think of the converse, in creatures that nurture: giraffes, elephants, whales. This is K-selection, in which more investment is made in fewer offspring, instead of the more scattershot approach seen above. Humans, too, are supposed to fall in this second category.

  I’ve often thought of r/K selection theory in relation to my own family, and families like mine. Without the parental investment typical of K-selection creatures, what becomes of these long-lived offspring? Do we find our own way, or do we succumb to the same forces that felled our parents? Do we become lost? Are our lives as valuable as those who were nurtured, in conventional ways, or are we forever stunted?

  It isn’t just about r/K selection theory, either. It’s also about our most fundamental images of nature, the ones we see on all the nature documentaries. We see a predator—coyote, hyena, lion—approaching a cluster of sheep or gazelles or zebras. We see the herd breaking into a trot, gazelles springing in every direction, but still swarming in one trend. And then eventually we see those who lag, slowly but noticeably falling behind. We know it’s one of these creatures who will be felled, one of these sick or elderly or simply not as sure-footed. How does it feel when you know you’re one of those falling behind, wondering if the lion is going to spring on you, savage you?

  Then, too, there’s genetics. Those who write fictional versions of Alzheimer’s disease rarely pay heed to the personality changes it involves, beyond simple memory problems, to the unpredictability of the day-to-day. My sisters and I used to fight over genetic testing. We, who grew up with the chaos of our mother’s degeneration, wanted to know if that same clock was ticking in us.

  My oldest sister didn’t want to know, couldn’t bear the concept of that information being available. Because genetic testing for early-onset Alzheimer’s would’ve begun with mapping the APP, PS1, PS2, and APOE4 genes in my mother’s blood, not ours, because Alzheimer’s has no cure, because genetic testing requires counseling, it isn’t possible to get testing, as far as I know, without the consent of all affected by the results.

  My family inheritance seemed a late November apple, riddled with worms. Our history lost, our bloodline tainted with illness. Then, too, beyond simple genetics, there’s the environment of family. My father and middle sister taught me about the importance of self-protection. It was due to them I learned to wrap my fists in tape, put up a punching bag, and defend myself. I tried to learn how to unfeel the pain of my own blood. I began lifting multiples of my own body weight, and later in life I began rock climbing, as a physical reprieve from all the ways in which I was powerless.

  We climbers talk of base strength. It’s one’s base strength that matters, as much as one’s upper body. Your vertical grip begins with the curl of your toes, which travels up from your base to your knees, hips, core, and then finally your forearms and fingertips.

  When you toss your body upward, lunging for a hold, and fall, screaming, twenty or thirty feet below, the fault lies, more often than not, in the tilt of your toes against the edged rock: the angle, the push away of your center of gravity. It’s just physics.

  Your ability isn’t measured in how many party-trick, fingertip pull-ups you can muster on doorframes. It’s measured in balance, knowing how to shift your weight over your toes; timing, when to throw for a hold; and power, flexed biceps unleashed as last resort, lactic acid pumping through veined forearms.

  It’s in how thoroughly you’ve caulked the cracks of your body, jammed white putty in the crumbling red brick of your fears. I can cross-train the rotator cuffs of my shoulder girdles. I can arc-weld the metal of my mind. I can send those fuckin’ badass climbs, the ones that bisect the sky.

  But what if my odds of inheritance are already imprinted on m
y genes? What if patches of steel wool can’t keep mice from swarming? What if the only thing I can do is climb into the sun, hoping I’ve built enough base strength to carry through?

  * * *

  Whether I want there to be or not, there are similarities between him, this stranger whom I’ve never known, and me. I used to fight it—to dismiss any parts of myself that resembled him. To want to reject every part of him, which meant rejecting large chunks of myself, as well. Yet, though he and I may have superficial interests in common, I can see now that we are also innately different from one another. I own that knowledge.

  It has taken this long, for me to learn to let go.

  I’ve lived a life full of my own mistakes and adventures. Yet throughout, my actual outward journey, the one I tell myself when casting my own story, has been one related to family. How to reconcile myself to its fractures, how to heal myself. To do so, I’ve had to put as much physical and emotional distance between us as possible. I have strived for normalcy.

  Even now, at thirty-three years old, a few hours near my father’s energy are enough to threaten everything I’ve claimed for myself. It is hard for happiness to take root near someone so deeply dissatisfied, so deeply angry. He is so deeply damaged and unforgiving of what has harmed him, in a way that I recognize, in a way that I hope to dispel from my own character, in my own time.

  I know that I will never feel safe near my father.

  He is someone whom I will never be able to access, whose entire life will pass me by, just as mine has passed his, our stories brushing up against each other only occasionally.