A History of Scars

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.