The Holiday

On the grief of learning more

Content notes: abuse, suicide

Photo by Joy Newell

“My father was an alcoholic,” my mom says in the awkward silence between subjects after one has been exhausted. She does this often when I visit–interjects with a heavy truth between everyday updates, almost as if she’s been waiting to say it the entire time.

“Oh! I don’t think I knew that.” My mother looks surprised as I tell her this. It’s true, I didn’t know it. In fact, I know very little about my mom’s past other than I knew she was abused, from Germany, had a son before me, and moved to the United States in her 20s. We never had the chance to talk much about her past, as we were all trying to survive the present in our household.

She moves on to the next subject quickly.

I’ve been on a history-gathering mission about my childhood for months now. When my grandmother died, my most safe and reliable source of information was gone, and my relationship with my parents hadn’t been restored yet. I’ve been slowly but surely getting closer to my parents as I’ve had to step in as their primary caregiver.

It was important to me to focus on rebuilding our relationship because I had spent many years no-contact, low-contact, or extremely boundaried in my communication. I couldn’t care for them in a way that felt safe for me until I could reconcile the trauma I endured and the care I didn’t get from them growing up. Before this healing work, our conversations often stayed surface-level, not telling them much about my everyday life out of self-protection. This also meant we never got to talk much about what happened to us as a family, let alone what happened to them before I existed.

Before Thanksgiving, I had many therapy sessions prepping for the fact that this would be the first holiday I had spent with them in over a decade. This would be the first time we had eaten at the table as a family in over two. I wondered what the table chatter would be like and prepared to defend myself when my mother inevitably dismissed my childhood experiences.

A few weeks before, I made a small, passing comment to my dad on the phone about how I’d love to ask a couple of questions about my childhood one day. In another silence between subjects, my mom asks, “So, what do you want to know about your childhood?”

…Thanks, Dad.

I was just about to get up to use the restroom, and this question knocked the wind out of me. I finally had the opportunity–the one that so many people do not have and one I’ve yearned for–to finally learn about my history and corroborate my memory. I scurried to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, overwhelmed, deciding what to ask first.

I start by asking for clarity about a timeline from my childhood that feels fuzzy and am yanked down the halls of memory. I was told stories about my father’s involuntary psychiatric inpatient stay that my grandmother manipulated him into. My dad told me about the time he had to go to the hospital after a seizure. My mom had left at that point, and it was just him and I, so the EMTs told him they were calling CPS if I had nowhere else to go. I told them I knew where to go and walked down the street to a neighbor’s house until he came home. My mom reminded me of the time I tried to hang myself with a telephone wire. All memories I had blocked out came into clear focus as they were told back to me.

Later, my mom told me about how her father sexually abused her and that when she told her mom, she didn’t believe her. I reminded her about when she didn’t believe me when I told her that her boyfriend did the same to me. She had forgotten.

After a marathon of a conversation about my childhood, we end on the topic of my psychiatric inpatient stays. I told them how, after six straight years of stays, I didn’t need a hospital. I needed to feel like they cared about me. I needed more resources–many I know they had no possibility of giving me because they couldn’t even access them themselves.

My mom likes to tell me and everyone she can that I was a “difficult teenager.” She even told my partner this when I went to the bathroom before this conversation. She talks about how I slammed every door in our apartment, ran away, snuck out, and didn’t talk to her.

Truth is, I hated her. For a long time. She put me in unsafe situations. I watched her do drugs. I watched her boyfriend toss her across a bathroom. She abandoned me and left my father time and time again. She cheated on my father and told him it was his fault. She tried to kill herself and told me it was my fault. She put her needs before mine throughout my entire childhood, and it left me traumatized, unnurtured, and full of hatred. “I hated you, I really did. That’s why I had to stay far away for so long. I had learn to not hate you anymore,” I told her plainly.

“Oh.”

I am rich in generational trauma. The more I learn about my parents and childhood, the more understanding and empathy I have for what happened to me over the years. The more understanding I have for both of my parents–but especially my mother for all the unearthed trauma that still sits between her bones. This doesn’t dismiss the very real experiences I had and the ongoing impacts of CPTSD, but I also know that my parents were deeply under-resourced people with a kid they didn’t know how to take care of. Even now, I watch (and help) them try to navigate healthcare and Medicaid, receive help from a stretched-too-thin social work system, and hold on to their autonomy as age and illness slowly pull it away.

We are sitting at the dinner table for the first time in over ten years as a family. On the way to the table, my dad had to stop and sit down to rest halfway between the living room and kitchen because his mobility is getting worse. I pass the mashed potatoes. I cut the turkey into bite-sized pieces so my dad could eat them more easily. I open the cans of cranberry sauce–one jelly, one chunky. Each task a moment to catch my breath after feeling suffocated by memory and the reality that my parents are still under-resourced people who struggle to keep their house clean and functional. My mom says, “It’s nice to be with family–the little that I have.” Every comment is some admission of grief.

We change the subject again. My parents say this is the best holiday they’ve ever had and they are really glad I came to visit.

There are questions I never got to ask and questions I’m unsure I need answered. I’m always trying to balance the very real reality that my parents may not be able to answer my questions for much longer with the slow cadence my nervous system requires when learning more about my family’s complicated history.

The more I learn, the more I understand them and myself. The more I learn, the more empathy I have for them and the more frustrated I am with the systems that led them to their own abuse and trauma. The more I learn, the more there is to grieve.

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Talk soon,