Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  I see monkey and nigger written on buildings now next to old murals of Barack and Michelle Obama. Having a black president was a nice symbolic gesture, but then you see messages like that and you start to wonder: How far have we really come?

  Repression, cruelty, anger, and injustice—these things just breed more of the same unless there’s a hard stop. I’m worried about my children and grandchildren; they’re being robbed. Their future is being stolen from them, and their biggest loss is opportunity. So we’ve got to fight to make things better—all of us have to, even those who aren’t directly affected. We’ve got to make things better. We’ve got to live in the blessing of today and not give any more weight to the madness of the world.

  Justine, early forties

  When I was in college, I remember that a girl living down the hall from me had a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt stuck on her door. It read, A woman is like a tea bag; you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

  Well, I come from a long line of strong tea.

  My mother is an amazing woman. When she was a young girl, her parents sent her away to boarding school. My grandmother—who, by the way, is still alive and stoic as ever—had no use for babies, she used to say (and still does). She liked her kids grown, so she hired nannies to take care of them and then, once they were old enough, sent them away to school. When they came back, they were interesting young people who could match her witty banter and keep her entertained. And my mother was nothing if not entertaining. At eighteen, she ran away to Europe with a man nearly twice her age. They got married, spent a few hot months traveling around France, Italy, and Greece, and then at the end of the summer, they realized they weren’t right for each other. So, without bothering to get divorced, they parted ways amicably.

  The thing about my mother is that she could have made things really simple for herself. She could have lived off the family money, married well, and spent the rest of her life on vacation. But there was always something about her that, at least for me, seemed unpredictable. Even when she looked at people, she wasn’t really looking at them but somewhere beyond them, like she wasn’t really sure they were worth her time. She was already searching for the next best thing. So she blew off my grandmother and her life advice (of which she has plenty and gives freely) and applied to grad school in New York.

  A few years later, she’d finished school and was working her way up the ranks at a big firm in the city. She went out to drinks with a girlfriend one night and met my dad. The way she told it, it was one of the few times in her life that she found it unnecessary to scan the room for someone more interesting. My father was definitely not a looker. He’s aged well, but we have photos to prove that, while my mom was timelessly chic, my father seemed underwhelming next to her. He’s built stocky—he jokes that it’s the Italian in him (there isn’t any). He’s a couple of inches shorter so that, upon agreeing to go on a date with him, my mom knew that she was likely giving up one of her favorite things, her high heels, for the rest of her life. (She claimed that she was certain they would end up together.) But what he lacked in looks, my dad made up in kindness and personality. He was the life of the party, always smiling, always happy and optimistic, regardless of what was happening under the surface. He didn’t come from money, and that was a novelty in the circles my mother ran in. So she was drawn to him.

  His favorite story to tell us is the time that, a few months into them dating, they were walking along the water when these “three WASPs” who had been hanging out on their yacht abruptly rose to their feet and serenaded my parents with what was apparently a popular song at the time. The chorus went, “Is she really going out with him?” My dad didn’t miss a beat. He dropped to his knee and asked my mother to marry him. She said yes, of course. After they’d kissed, he turned to the three men and my mother claimed he flipped them the bird.

  So, that’s my parents, in a nutshell.

  When my grandmother met my father—on the same day they announced their engagement—apparently she immediately hated him. Their conversation was testy and high-tension, like a sideways glance might send either of them into a tailspin. I can’t say that she’s ever gotten over the sentiment, but my mother always did what she wanted. So after a couple of months spent hunting down her soon-to-be-ex-husband and officially procuring a divorce, my parents got married, my sister was conceived two minutes later, I was born a little over two years after her, and my brother, hot on my heels.

  Growing up, I idolized my mother. She was beautiful and a little cold—she said she liked to leave people wanting more—so that my siblings and I always fought among each other for her attention and praise, both of which were in short supply. She wasn’t a stay-at-home mom, which was still kind of unusual back in the 1980s, so we were raised mostly by nannies paid for by my grandmother. I know now that my grandparents were bankrolling our lifestyle. My father also worked, of course, but his career was kind of a “bonus”—although he had a solid job and made good money, his work was never really spoken about to us kids. For a long while, I wasn’t even sure what he did. Whereas my mom’s work was hailed to us as all-important. She spoke about it constantly, about how challenging it was to be a woman in the workplace, how hard she worked to get where she was. A career was expected of my father—of men in general—but what she did, oh, that was uncharted territory. She was really good at highlighting how essential her job was to her, so we expected it to override all her other responsibilities—including us.

  We lived in a relatively large apartment in Manhattan, so it wasn’t immediately clear that my parents were having issues because sound didn’t travel well. But eventually my siblings and I caught on to the muted sounds of almost nightly arguments coming from my parents’ room. My older sister takes after my mom—she never much cared about what was going on with other people; as long as she got what she wanted, she was fine. But I’ve always been more of an empath, more like my dad, and I wanted to know what they were fighting about. I took to roaming the halls after bedtime, hoping to overhear. And one night, I heard enough to piece together that my mom had been having an affair with her boss from work, whom I’d met many times before. I hate to say it because I love my father, but this guy was exactly the type of guy you’d expect my mom to be with.

  No matter what might have been going on with my parents, they never let on to us kids that they were having problems. I didn’t tell my sister and brother what I overheard—my brother was too young to understand, and I always had a sense that my sister would back my mom, that she would rationalize her behavior, and I didn’t want to hear it. As the months went by, the arguments died down. I assumed that my mother had stopped the affair. She kept her same job, though, and as far as I knew he still worked with her, so I always worried (on my father’s behalf) that things would heat back up. I’ve always been very partial to my father, and have always felt very protective of him, so finding out about the affair really soured me to my mother and bonded me even more to my dad. I had always sought my mother’s acceptance and love, but the revelation about the affair made me want to antagonize her. I picked at her words, derided her choices, made her feel bad about how she’d mothered us, every chance I got.

  One by one, the three of us left for college. During my junior year, my mother called me and told me she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. I took some time off school and went back home to help take care of her (my brother and sister did not). Once I got home, though, it was my dad who struck me as worn down. He’d lost weight and seemed really tired, and he took me aside to give me instructions about her care. He said that she was insisting on working from home on the days that she felt up to it, which I found pretty typical of her. When I went in to see her, she seemed fine—in good spirits. She asked me about school and the boy I was dating, of whom she didn’t approve, but what’s new there… and then I went to my room to unpack.

  The doorbell rang, and I went to answer it, but I saw that my dad was standing in the doorway
, talking to my mom’s boss from work (the guy she’d had an affair with all those years ago). And to my surprise, my dad motioned the guy in. He made his way to my parents’ room and closed the door behind him. When I asked my dad what that was about, he said that it was work-related—they had some big project coming up.

  I stayed home for about three months while she went through chemo, and her boss came to visit her several times a week. So, I gathered, the affair had never stopped. My dad just kept going about things, business as usual, bringing her meals to her in bed, fluffing her pillows—showing her fucking lover in.

  I wanted nothing more than to confront her, but it hardly seemed like the right time. I kept my mouth shut and seethed when he visited her. Right before I was due to go back to school, though, I caught my dad alone in the kitchen. He was making her tea. I asked him straight out how long it had been going on, and he didn’t act like he didn’t know what I was talking about—he didn’t insult my intelligence, which I’ve always appreciated about my dad, that he treated me like an adult worthy of respect. He confirmed that they’d been having an affair for six years—which means it had never stopped since I first discovered it all those years ago. I told him that I had overheard them arguing one night, and he said he figured I knew. I asked him how, and he said he’d noticed I had started giving my mother a hard time.

  I left to finish up school, and my mother fully recovered. I got a job and an apartment about two hours away from the city, and although I spoke to my dad every week, I didn’t visit home, hardly ever, and my mom and I all but cut ties. My dad and I got lunch in the city often, but I avoided her altogether. It was an unspoken thing, but she knew that I knew. I resented her for bulldozing over my father, for not appreciating him. He deserved to be with someone who loved him, not someone who treated him like a toy whose sheen had worn off.

  I was at an event at my kid’s kindergarten one day when my dad called to tell me that my mom had fallen and was in the ER due to a head injury. I asked him how he was holding up. Life had taught me to be more worried for him. He said he was all right but that she was asking for me. I said I’d try to make it but had no intention of going to see her. I hadn’t seen her in years—she’d met my kid once, when he was born.

  The event ended, and we went back home and had dinner. I was putting my son to bed when my cell phone rang again. It was my dad, telling me that my mom had passed away. I felt nothing at first (and I was surprised at how little I felt in terms of sadness or loss), and then I felt angry all over again because it felt like she’d had the last word.

  My father told me at her funeral, by way of explanation, I guess, for the infidelity that he allowed in their marriage for all those years, that she was a strong woman and she was going to have life her way. “I was happy to be in it, to be part of the show,” he said. “And I got you guys.”

  Her lover was at the funeral, too, by the way. I guess it was small consolation that he looked pretty grief-stricken, the poor sap.

  So, about strong women. My mother lived the life she wanted to live, others be damned. I guess there’s something to be admired about that, even if ours were the lives she destroyed.

  Maggie, thirties

  I went through a family album a few weeks ago and came across a photo of myself when I must have been no older than five or six. I’m sitting on our dining room table with a pencil in my hand, doing what was probably that night’s homework. My mother is looking over my left shoulder; my grandmother, over my right.

  I remember these scenes vividly. My mother’s watchful eye, my grandmother’s unforgiving one—it took hours to get through the simplest assignment. I wrote and rewrote the alphabet and numbers; I colored perfectly inside the lines; I learned poems by heart and rehearsed them in front of an audience of my grandmother’s friends. Over time, I started taking pride in being, I guess, perfect.

  Once, in second grade, I didn’t get an A on an assignment and came home crying so hard that my mother, pitying me, decided against punishing me. Another time, I was playing in my parents’ bedroom with a friend; we decided to climb the credenza that held their brand-new TV, toppling and shattering it on our way up. I was so afraid of the punishment that I hid under my parents’ bed for the remainder of the night. They let me. I woke up the next morning with a sore neck from having slept on the cold floor.

  I’m telling you this because these instances of me being less than a model daughter are so aberrant that they stand out like mountains in the otherwise flat topography of my childhood. My parents expected a lot. In their insistence that I be “the best”—whatever that might have meant in that particular moment—they discharged any concern they should have had with speaking unkindly. Over the years, I’ve internalized their language and now the unkind voice I hear in my head is no longer theirs.

  When I turned sixteen, I developed an eating disorder. Bulimia, for me, was about punishment and control. I hated my body for being less than perfect, and I hated myself for being weak—for not having the discipline to work out and eat well so that I could have a perfect body—and so I started throwing up. It wasn’t always after a binge. Sometimes, I’d decide that I’d eaten “too much”—the amount was arbitrary and mostly based on my emotional state at the moment—and so I’d throw up until my stomach felt empty. Other times, I’d empty out the kitchen and then spend an hour next to the toilet bowl with a gallon of water next to me, my index and middle fingers covered in vomit.

  It’s sick, how good it felt to throw up. I’d go into that bathroom feeling disgusting and leave feeling… perfect again. I felt like I’d kind of cheated the system, too. I could eat whatever I wanted and I had a shortcut to skinny. And the fact that I knew how much damage I must be doing to my body was just a bonus, because I felt that I deserved it. I felt deep, deep disappointment and shame in myself, in my eating disorder, in my messiness.

  I was in my early twenties when I outgrew bulimia, but I never stopped equating my body image with my self-worth. When I am happy with myself, with my body, I am unstoppable. When I am not, I feel unworthy of love. And I can feel both of these things on the same day.

  Bulimia was probably just a side effect of the issues I still battle as an adult, it’s just that now the side effects aren’t as readily identifiable. There’s a point in most people’s lives, I think, when they realize that their parents have really fucked them up. My moment came a few months ago. I’d started going to therapy to manage my anxiety and I was telling my therapist about how much trouble I have with the unknown, with not having control, with gray areas, with anything undefined—how much anxiety I feel every day, fueled by an ever-replenishing fear of failure. And it finally clicked for me that anxiety was my brain’s response to the drill sergeant lodged inside my head, barking out expectations, directions, corrections. So I’ve replaced an eating disorder with an anxiety disorder. Progress: zero.

  I came to these realizations pretty late in life because I thought that looking back into my childhood meant blaming my parents, and I didn’t want to blame my parents. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, right? There are so many ways to go wrong when starting a family and especially when raising children. I do believe that my parents did the best they could. Wait, that’s not true. They could have divorced, but then that would probably have come with its own set of scars. So what’s the point of the blame game?

  I was talking to my mother the other day about my struggle with the stress in my life—I never call it anxiety when I’m talking to her because she’d rush to diminish it—and I told her that I learned from them that “imperfection needs to be punished.” She demurred. “You didn’t turn out so bad.”

  My parents’ response to anything that could be construed as criticism about my childhood is to throw the fact that I’m a functioning adult in my face. And I guess to any outsider, I am. But I wake up every day feeling that my life is harder than it needs to be—and that I am to blame, that I do it to myself. My anxiety is crippling. Sometimes, I h
ave trouble going out in public—just the thought of taking the train somewhere, for example, is totally overwhelming: What if I miss the train? What if the cabbie tries to swindle me by taking a roundabout way? Will I get in everyone’s way with all my bags? Am I standing in the wrong place?

  I have intrusive thoughts about terrible things happening, and so most nights I lie awake and torture myself with what-ifs. If anything triggers me, I find a way to fit it into a narrative that proves that the worst-case scenario will happen. There are whole weeks that go by that I am so consumed by a thought—it seems that I think nothing but it. I wake up and it’s the first thing I think. In the shower. It’s what’s preoccupying my thoughts on my way to work, in between emails and meetings, and at drinks. I have no break, no “off” switch, until I go to sleep. It seems that my fear stems from the thought that if I can’t control the world around me, it will fall apart. The irony is that I can’t even control my own thoughts.

  Who would understand this besides my therapist? Well, in spite of our issues, my mom and I are close. My therapist says that we have a codependent relationship. I know that my mother certainly overdepends on me; I spent my childhood being her shrink. But whenever my back is to the wall and I need someplace to release a bit of steam, hers is the first number I dial. I must be suffering from memory loss because every time the phone rings, I have a sense of hope that maybe she’ll say something to bring things into focus, to make me feel better. But inevitably, I hang up feeling disappointed, or worse. My mother has a way to turn the tables—to make you feel bad for her. So instead of getting a little bit of levity from my own burdens, I end up carrying some of hers, too.