For the longest time, I imagined telling you this—my version. I felt I had a card in my pocket to pull out and play. I even imagined reaching an age where we might shake our heads and laugh about it, marvel at how we survived such difficult, desperate times. But then once we were back in a good place, I wanted to stay there, just as I had done all those years with my father. Humiliating you or myself was the last thing I wanted, and so we kept moving forward, time eroding my hurt and anger.

You never said that you were sorry, but I knew you were. I knew by your attention, and your patience if I was having a bad day. I knew by the way you sometimes came and stood near me when I was cooking or doing the dishes, your hand on my back. I think you just never found the right words.

November 1999

When I was a girl, I wrote a letter to my mother. “Are you here?” I asked her. “Will you please let me know that you are?” And then I wedged it into a little hole in the kitchen cabinet we both knew about; we had decided one rainy afternoon that it was a wonderful hiding place, and she’d tucked a $10 bill in there and then held a finger to her lips. The money was long gone when I inserted my note.

Jeff, do you remember when you took a whole carton of my cigarettes and soaked it with the garden hose? I wanted to make you work and pay me back, but your father called it “an act of civil disobedience” and sided with your concern about my health and my recent case of bronchitis. You, who the very next year, when you were in high school, would start smoking yourself, probably to hide the fact that you were smoking marijuana all the time, and, no, cigarettes didn’t work to mask the smell, and neither did the incense burning in your room, and neither did gargling Lavoris.

That was around the same time you were begging to go to church, much to my surprise and your father’s delight, and you were playing electric guitar and drums in the sanctuary, and some were claiming to be high on Jesus, though I suspected that wasn’t all. “Day by Day” and so on. It was when you both began questioning us, examining us, striving to find your own way and do it better.

As parents, we pack your bags and strap them to your little backs before you are even old enough to carry them, and then you have to spend the rest of your life unpacking and figuring it all out. Sometimes, I feel I can see it all spread out in front of me—dates and patterns, a clear path emerging, the design, the words that might define me, carved in stone.

November 28, 1982