Burn It Down Page 11

  When my mother appeared at my door, I launched into an account of what had happened that night. I ran through my culled list of examples of his worst behavior from years past. I sat on my bed, one hand gripping its painted-white metal frame, the other gesturing frantically in the air. “I can’t live in the same house as him anymore!”

  “What do you want me to say, Marisa?” She sounded exhausted, defeated. “Do you want to go and live with your grandparents?” She began to quietly cry.

  That night, my mother couldn’t save me.

  I didn’t respond to her question. Instead, I yelled for her to leave me alone, slamming the bedroom door for emphasis. I sat on the bed in stunned silence. Did I want to go live with my grandparents? How incredibly fucking unfair. My grandparents lived forty minutes away from my school and my friends, in an apartment in Queens across the street from a senior citizens’ recreational facility. I wasn’t the problem. Why should I be the one to be forced out?

  I unclenched my fingers from the bedframe and wiped my face. My anger filled my bedroom.

  At sixteen, I understood that my mother was never going to kick my father out of the house. However wrong that was, and however right I was that living with him was cruel and unsafe, didn’t matter. It was going to be my job to protect myself.

  I grabbed a pen and a notebook out of my backpack, and began to write.

  I still recall exactly the letter I hastily scrawled to my father that night. Addressing him by his first name, I wrote that he was no longer a parental authority in my life. If he insisted on speaking to me, I would just pretend I couldn’t hear. The letter ended with a threat: If he wanted any hope of meeting the children I might one day have, he would stay out of my way.

  Of course, he didn’t. But from that day forward, I built a wall. Each time he’d throw an insult in my direction, crack a dirty joke, or come home with those red-tinged eyes, that wall was reinforced. I stopped hearing him. It was no small feat to pretend that a two-hundred-pound coked-up gorilla-man didn’t live in the same house as me, but my anger was louder than my father could ever be.

  My anger culminated when I was twenty-one, when my dad—dead to the world following another cocaine binge—was supposed to let me into the house to pick up my laundry. I was no longer living at home, but my mom assured me he’d be there and would leave the door unlocked.

  I knocked till my knuckles ached. I screamed like a maniac on our front porch. I cried fiery hot tears. The bag of laundry I couldn’t get to became every day my dad had ruined, every terrifying moment he’d put me through. I wanted that bag of laundry, and I was going to get it.

  And so, I punched through a window.

  Shards of glass flew around me like diamonds. If it hurt, I don’t remember the pain. If it made a sound, I didn’t hear it. Neither did my father, who, unconscious somewhere upstairs, did not wake up, even after I climbed inside and stood shaking and shrieking in our dining room.

  There was something beautiful about the glass exploding into diamonds. I think, maybe, the beautiful thing was me, allowing my anger to manifest.

  Our family cat stared at me and the piles of shattered glass at my feet. It was the cat’s stare that broke my anger. I had never been—and am still not—the kind of person who lashes out. I very rarely “lose it.” But after that day, there was no denying my anger’s power. As a woman, as a writer, and now as a mother, I have been punching through windows ever since.

  While pregnant, I worried about genetics. When interviewing pediatricians who inevitably asked for family health history, I had to acknowledge my father’s existence in my DNA, the DNA I shared with my unborn son. I wondered at what age my son would ask about my father—and at what age I’d be able to answer honestly.

  Mostly, I was terrified that my son might resemble my father. That he’d inherit the “bad genes.” That I might raise a bad man, a selfish man, the kind of man who could hurt a child. That I’d raise an addict. How could I prevent this unborn person from becoming a man like the man who’d raised me?

  But our genes don’t define us. Blood doesn’t make family. I’ve had to push against science and social norms, push against relatives and friends who feel differently, to insist upon these truths for myself. From age sixteen on, I refused to concede that my father’s blood relation to me had to mean anything at all. I went through the lengthy, frustrating process of legally changing my once-hyphenated last name to my mother’s maiden name. I spoke plainly about my situation at home to teachers, therapists, and family members but only mentioned my father when asked directly about him and usually to explain that he was not to be treated as a parental authority. Friends from college assumed my father was dead, or absent, not living twenty feet from my childhood bedroom and still married to the mother I mentioned frequently and with affection. I was all the proof I needed to believe that it was possible to redefine what “family” meant in everyday life.

  But realizing I was going to become a mother, feeling the weight of what lay ahead, meant acknowledging that my father was a part of me so that I could best ready myself to be a better parent than my parents had been to me.

  My father died the week my son was born. A small gift, but I cannot dig his DNA out of my son and me, where it hides in our warm and alive bodies. But instead of feeling powerless, I remember that the same blood flowing through my veins today flowed through me when I survived that history.

  I’ve written through my anger for most of my life, but I’d never interrogated it until I began to parent my son. I’d never thoughtfully asked questions of it.

  Anger, why do you stay? Anger, what do you give me? Anger, what do you cost me?

  As a mother, I’ve turned these questions over in my mind often. I am thankful to my anger for protecting me, as a child and into adulthood. My anger has fueled me, has given me energy and a will to succeed even when I am floundering. When I am afraid, I feel that fear as anger—and I know I can face it down. I know I can control it.

  The intensity of my anger is matched by the intensity of my love. I don’t truly want or expect for my child to never experience anger. Rather, I want his early years to be focused on feeling secure, so that when he does get angry, he is able to trust that he can feel those feelings and share them with his family if he wants to. He’ll know that I will help him when he is feeling angry, that I will work to understand his anger. He will feel supported in those ways in which I was not; he will not be a child navigating adult circumstances alone. He will not have the childhood I had, because I know how to do better.

  My son looks only like me, like his father, and like himself. I do not see my father in him. He is not growing up steeped in rage. His childhood is not a war against blood. He understands family as the people who love you and who you choose to love, and he understands home as safety and comfort.

  My son will inherit many behaviors and ailments and anxieties from me, but he will not inherit my lifetime of anger. Instead, he will benefit from the ways I’ve learned to turn anger into action. He will learn that anger can be motivating rather than limiting, and that we can manage how our anger expresses itself. He will punch through his own windows, and I will be cheering him on when he does.

  I will determine carefully which pieces of my childhood to share with him, and when, but I will share—and that sharing will become one of the ways I teach my son to be a good man, a man who is nothing like my father.

  On the Back Burner

  DANI BOSS

  I am a walking middle finger. My heart thrums to the bassline of my newly discovered anthem: “Killing in the Name Of” by Rage Against the Machine. The band likely didn’t write it for middle-aged, perimenopausal women. The song is about so much more, but for me the meaning is personally distilled as the lead singer first speaks, then screams the thing I’d like to say most: “Fuck you / I won’t do what you tell me!”

  I’ve begun really cranking this one when I’m alone in the car, shaking my head like a pissed-off lead singer while I h
oller through the sunroof. All of this only takes place on the open road. At stoplights, I turn it down and behave. I was raised to be a good girl. I may scream that I won’t do what you tell me, but the likelihood is that I will.

  My first whiff of The Change came at bedtime, but not in hot flashes. I was trying to explain my frustration to my husband, Trevor. We have a blended family, with four parents for two kids. Most of the time that means we have other adults to rely on when things get hairy. To me, that should mean that we are more efficient than a traditional family because there’s almost always backup. But my stepson’s football helmet had been forgotten in the midweek household shuffle, and his first practice was the following day. The blood rattled around in my veins. My heart pounded songs of war.

  Trevor wondered why it was a big deal, why I couldn’t just let it go. “Will this be important in a year? It’s just a forgotten helmet,” he offered.

  “Just? Just? Do you have any idea what this is going to do to my day tomorrow? The coach has to be called. An alternate time to pick it up has to be arranged. Now I’m going to inconvenience other people because we can’t handle ourselves. It’s possible that he will miss practice tomorrow because the adults couldn’t manage a simple task. We look lazy, incompetent, and uninterested in our kid’s life. This is not nothing.”

  Trevor sighed. “Have you read The Miracle of Mindfulness yet?” he asked. “I really think it could help.”

  I rolled my eyes. He had been trying to get me to read this book for months. He thought it would help my increased moodiness if I learned to live in the moment. It probably would, but I didn’t want to stifle my anger anymore. I wanted to rage.

  Searing tears began to fall, which just made me angrier. I paced the room, gesturing in a way that suggested I was trying to subdue a large, wild bird, and persisted in trying to make Trevor as mad as I was, with no luck.

  “A book can’t fix this. Things used to annoy me, but now I hate them and want them dead.” My anger, so long repressed, had risen closer to the surface of my skin.

  I clicked off the light and pressed my teeth against my lower lip to form the F that began my silent protest to the darkness. Fuck you! My core tightened. My throat closed shutter-fast around the hard -ck. Keeping the you silent was easier. This was not how I spoke to people. I didn’t recognize myself this angry.

  A trip to the gynecologist followed. My symptoms? Being forty-nine, telling the kids working at a fast-food joint that they needed a grown-up on shift, chasing down an irresponsible driver to tell him that cutting me off was “a dick move,” howl-crying in the closet when I felt there was nothing to wear. There was no blood test that would confirm it, but she’d seen enough women in tears, shocked at their own rage to confirm: perimenopause had arrived. The doctor couldn’t prescribe anything for relief right away unless I wanted to start hormones. I didn’t, so I’d just have to slog through it and come back if I wasn’t feeling better.

  And slog I have. What am I supposed to do with this anger, so long tamped-down and unexpressed? I have no elegant plan for transitioning into a take-no-shit approach. A lifetime of saying yes to things I didn’t want to do—unpaid after-school meetings at my teaching job, extending myself in relationships with no regard for my own comfort—left me feeling like a mugshot-in-waiting. Any minute now, I’d lose it, and only women my age would nod with understanding as I was carted off to jail. But I have no role model to measure my outbursts by. Healthy examples of boundaries and how to express one’s anger were absent in my youth.

  I never saw a woman I knew speak her mind in the moment she felt wronged. The few women I did know who defended their psychological space were thought of as unhinged or undisciplined, as much by women as by men. They were called names like “bitch” and “hysterical.” I learned from the women I respected that anger was not our place.

  The only safe place I saw for women to release their anger was among other, trusted women. My mom and her best girlfriends planned venting parties when the men were away. Their grievances were a surprise to me, not because I hadn’t witnessed things they should be pissed about, but because they hadn’t shown much sign of distress in the moment. Equally surprising was the abundance of seventy-five-percent-off-post-Halloween candy. Women hauled it out of cavernous purses and slapped it down on the coffee table. An offering? The price of admission? They filled their guts even as they spilled them. Sometimes they smoked, leaving a barfly haze that somehow cushioned the things they talked about. We girls were sent to play while they talked, but we heard pieces of the conversation, usually about men: “… yells at the kids all the time,” “… flirting with Suzie the Floozy!” “… tailgates like a crazy person.” The amber-toned, seventies living room of Mom’s best friend was the place for all the words to come out that they had been waiting to say.

  Phrases like, “I wish I would have said…” often preceded sentiments of deep frustration. Sometimes a woman in the room would say she had said something shockingly honest or confrontational—“So I was, like, ‘Don’t you talk to me like that! You’re the one with the problem!’” When asked if she had really said that, she would admit quickly that, no, she hadn’t. But she sure wished she had. Nobody blamed her. They all understood that the clarity and the words would sometimes come after the moment of anger.

  In this way, I began to believe that anger was not the province of women. All these secret-squirrel meetings during which so much female anger was unleashed contrasted sharply with their silence about these issues everywhere else. A tight-lipped, squinty smile is what I learned could repress anger.

  Rage was the dominion of men, who seemed to have unlimited social safety. My mother showed me how to respond to an angry man: lowered head, those tight lips, and attending to every detail that might end this particular tantrum or ward off the next. Be meek. Get small. Stay busy. Men emitted. Women absorbed.

  The child of a very angry father, I learned young that my best shot at getting praise was to run myself ragged trying to please him. I happily dangled in his arms upside-down in car engines to turn wrenches in spaces too small for his big hands. I brought him cold drinks and bowls of salty snacks he hadn’t asked for. I learned that my role as a girl was to try to keep the peace through my work and my silence. I decided his moods were my responsibility; the only possibility for his approval and family happiness was through my service.

  My father’s anger could stop traffic. The road we grew up on had a twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, but people treated it more like a freeway. If Dad saw someone coming down our road too fast, he greeted them in the street, puffing himself up like a wild animal, screwing up his face into something menacing. He would point right at the driver’s face as if issuing some kind of ancient Sicilian curse, and bellow, “SLOW DOWN!” with all his might. His voice echoed deep in his barrel chest and didn’t lose power as it dispersed into the atmosphere. My father’s yelling unperched birds.

  He took on the Coast Guard, Canadian border agents, and the cashiers at RadioShack. Nobody ever questioned his right to rage. He did not seem to suffer consequences socially. Because of him, I knew that angry men were powerful and dangerous. It was best to avert your eyes and become as invisible as possible when they began to yell, as if by being still one could avoid becoming a target. This is also how I imagine one would act in the presence of a velociraptor.

  Now that my estrogen is receding, I have fury that rivals my father’s. And though his had all the free air to expand into, mine is constantly made unwelcome. Yelling is avoided in my marriage. It’s an agreement I made, and one I want to live by. But lately, it’s harder. When I break the rule, I’m reminded that yelling doesn’t feel good to the listener. I’m cautioned: don’t be like your father. Girlfriends interrupt a rant with a hand on my forearm. “Dani,” they say, as if trying to bring me back to myself. The worst is when someone obviously tries to change the subject just when I’m getting started. I comply. I comply, but only because the part of me that wants to be
liked is a little stronger than my fury.

  I hated Dad’s rage, how he seemed so incapable of controlling it, how it made me so scared and small. I resented him for taking it out on us all the time, and the way it changed what I thought of my own value. I do not want to taint my stepchildren’s experience with me by letting my anger affect who they become. Bellowing, howling anger has been written on top of my DNA. It’s how I want to respond to frustration. But because I was also taught to be a good girl and keep it to myself, my anger feels warped into something even more unnatural than hateful. I resent that, too.

  I recently heard my stepdaughter grumble as she came to the pantry to help me clean late one night when we’d been working to ready the house for entertaining.

  “Gosh, boys, feel free to help,” she whispered. I recognized her frustration in no time. The boys were sitting on the couch, done for the day. I was still working. She felt a gendered kinship and responsibility that they did not. The inequity ticked her off, but she could only air that to me. I stopped cleaning and suggested she speak to them about it. She couldn’t. I understood and didn’t force her. But then we were both mad. As sure as she is becoming a woman, she is also being indoctrinated into a system I recognize—one that rewards female martyrdom with adoration and gratitude but leaves little room for her to air her frustration. I told her it was okay to be angry and to say so. That her anger doesn’t have to hide in the pantry.

  That night I sent my stepdaughter back out to the couch to relax with her father and brother. I hope she’ll learn to regulate her anger by both examining and expressing it. I hope I can help her. I’m still trying to figure out how to help myself. At midlife, I have withstood enough baloney. My anger feels righteous and I feel entitled, after so much silence, to let it rain on all of creation. But that’s not how I was raised. It might look more like a drizzle. It might look like a copy of The Miracle of Mindfulness sailing across my living room.