Consolation I, by Vivien Szaniszlo. Prints available on Etsy
I’m leaving shallow waters
I’m leaving all my dreams of you
Just Jinger, “Shallow Waters”
When I was small I used to lie in bed before sleep and imagine what I would wish for if I could wish for anything. It was something like praying. I never wished for money. I wished for a mother with an ordinary job and an ordinary car, who knew the name of my school and what grade I was in and which teacher I had that year. We could be poor. I already knew what poor was and it did not frighten me. I wanted a warm place to come home to and someone who would be there when I did.
I got most of what I wished for, in the end, and all of it by my own hand. I started waitressing at twelve so that I could eat, and I did not stop working after that. I left the country I grew up in, and then another, and built businesses, and a family, and a home that is warm when my children come into it. The oldest wish was the only one I could not grant myself, and for most of my life I kept a story that let me go on hoping I might.
The story was that my mother was damaged. Something had been done to her, long before me, and what she did to me was the shape of that damage passing through her. It was not a story I invented, and it was not false. She was damaged; that part I still believe. The story’s error was in letting a smaller truth stand in for a larger one. Every sentence of it had a memory behind it. It never contradicted itself, and I could tell it to other people in a form they could receive: a difficult family, a hard start, a daughter who got out. People understood that story. They admired what I had made of it.
It did more for me than explain the past. It organized the future. If she was damaged, then damage could be repaired, and I was, after all, in the business of repairing myself. I believed that if I could get educated enough, insightful enough, secure enough, and healed enough, I might one day be able to hand her what I had learned. My ambitions were my own, but that hope ran through them, and for a long time I did not notice how much of them it was holding together. I was building a life, and leaving room in it for my mother to become someone different.
The story also let me work. Building a life from nothing takes a level head, and a level head is not something you keep while looking directly at what was done to you. So I looked selectively. I held what I could hold and set the rest down where I could find it later. Sometimes this was a deliberate choice. Sometimes I suspect I understood less of what I was setting aside than I realized. But I had work to do, and I needed to remain capable of doing it.
I understood perfectly well why I needed the acceptable story. What I was less prepared for was the price of telling it. It is difficult to feel a sense of accomplishment if the very nature of what I overcame has to be hidden. The version I could tell let people admire what I had built. It did not let them understand what it had been built on, because that part cannot be said at a dinner table, or in most rooms, without changing how the people in the room look at you afterward. I could list what I had done. I could not weigh it, because the weight was in the part I had left out.
I thought the price of the story was paid in childhood. Some of it is still being paid.
I knew what the story was for. What I did not see was how ordinary it was. Benjamin Franklin once remarked in his autobiography:
So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
We recognize that ingenuity easily in other people, in the parent who cannot see a child’s cruelty, or the family that explains away in its own what it would condemn in a stranger. Organizations do it too, calling themselves families while expecting their members to tolerate what no family should, and in much of the world that tolerance is simply what family means, but that is another essay. It is harder to see when the person we need to understand is also the person our survival depends on.
Jennifer Freyd, who has spent her career studying what she calls betrayal trauma, has a kinder word for this than denial. She argues that when the person who harms a child is also the person the child depends on, not fully knowing is not necessarily a failure of perception. It can be how the child preserves an attachment she cannot survive without. The blindness can be the price of staying.
That explains the child. It does not explain why the story lasted decades past the dependence that required it, and for that I have to go back to economics. Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, in Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), describe how a justification built to protect a decision comes, with enough repetition, to be believed by the people repeating it. In economics we have a narrower name for one way that happens: the sunk-cost fallacy, allowing what has already been spent, and cannot be recovered, to govern what we are willing to spend next. What I had not considered was how much of my own life I had invested in the possibility of my mother’s transformation. Every year of hoping, forgiving, and preparing myself to help her made the prospect of abandoning that hope more costly. And every disappointment could be explained within the story I already believed. She needed more understanding, more time, perhaps more of what I had not yet become capable of giving her. The explanation could absorb almost anything, including the evidence against it. Tavris and Aronson’s book is about that reversal, in which the evidence that should weaken a belief ends up strengthening it, because giving the belief up would mean admitting what it cost to keep. What I can add from my own experience is that the blindness outlasted the dependence by decades, because the day I no longer needed it looked like every other day.
Even by the measure meant to tell me I had healed, the story did well. Attachment researchers place great weight on coherence: a painful childhood told with clarity, perspective, and supporting memories is one of the things they look for in a secure adult. Mine held together. It contained genuine memories and persuasive explanations, and I had built a substantial life while believing it. What I cannot determine is how much of that coherence helped me become secure, and how much depended upon leaving certain things outside it.
I would add one thing to Freyd’s work from the inside. A story like mine does not only protect the child. It protects the adult she becomes, by giving her a past she can mention at a dinner table. And it protects the mother, by leaving the door open. Damaged people can be helped. Damaged people deserve another chance. Each step of that reasoning is a kind one, and together they move the question from whether someone is safe to whether I am being generous. I did not notice that either.
What ended the story was not an insight. It was my children.
For years I had recognized a pattern in how my mother dealt with other people, one in which another person’s vulnerability became an opportunity for her own gain. I kept an exception for myself, supported by the explanation I had spent my life constructing and contradicted by what she did. When that same pattern reached the family I had built, the cost of keeping the exception was no longer mine alone. I will not describe what happened. It is enough to say that I recognized in it the thing I had grown used to, and I understood that my children would grow used to it too if I let the story stand.
The costs had been mine, and I could carry them: explain them, endure them, go on imagining that things might one day be different. I could not ask my children to do the same. I wanted them to grow up knowing that love did not require them to accommodate cruelty, that relationships did not confer unlimited access, and that they were allowed to protect themselves even from members of their own family. They come home to a warm house and someone who is there, and they do not know yet that this was ever a wish. The explanation that had preserved my attachment to my mother was no longer one I could safely organize my decisions around, and I set it down.
The second story is harder for me to tell, although it accounts for things the first one could not. It arrived in parts, some of them angry, the way a pattern does: by repeating, in other people’s lives and then in mine, until the exception I had kept for myself was the only thing it failed to explain. It asks me to understand her behavior as something she did, repeatedly and to her own advantage, rather than as the overflow of her own suffering, and that changes what I believe I was protecting all those years, and what I can responsibly allow now. I do not always manage to stay present with it. Sometimes I can describe it with clarity. Sometimes I find myself at a distance from the very things I know. The facts do not disappear. My capacity to stay with their implications does. I do not take that as a sign the new account is wrong. In me, understanding something and being able to live calmly beside it have not arrived at the same time, and I do not know whether they will.
There is research that suggests the two stories may have been doing different work. Jennifer Pals studied how a group of women, followed for decades, told the hardest experiences of their lives in middle age. Those who had arrived at a coherent, positive resolution tended toward resilience and, years later, satisfaction with their lives. Those who had kept exploring what the experience meant tended toward maturity. The women who had done both tended to have both. Her research says nothing about which accounts were true. What it says is that making peace with an experience and continuing to question it are different processes, and that one does not do the work of the other. I think I have been asking one story to do the work of both. The first was a resolution, and it gave me the steadiness to function. The second is an exploration I have not finished, and it has cost me some of that steadiness. Being able to tell a story and being able to bear what it means are not the same capacity, and I am learning, in my own case, that the second one arrives later, if it arrives at all.
I have often heard the words that the truth will set you free. I understand that Christ was speaking of a freedom greater than psychological comfort, but the familiar promise has become difficult for me to read without asking what freedom means. The first story gave me freedom of a kind: to build, to hope, to be welcome at the tables I now sit at. The second has given me another: to recognize danger and protect the people who depend on me. It has also brought grief, for a mother who existed only in the future I imagined for her, and I cannot honestly say that my inner life is freer than it was.
I would not go back to the first story. I also will not say it gave me nothing, because I am standing on what it gave me. As a child I wished for an ordinary mother who would come home, cook a meal, and love me through the difficulties of an ordinary life. And as an adult I spent years leaving room for that woman to arrive. I no longer organize my life around her arrival. But there are still moments when I find it easier to speak about the mother I hoped she could become than the mother I believe I had, and I am not yet sure what to make of that.
The painting at the top of this essay is Consolation I. This is the artist, Vivien Szaniszlo, introducing it.
Research: Freyd, J. J., Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse, and Freyd & Birrell, Blind to Betrayal. Tavris, C., & Aronson, E., Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). Pals, J. L., Narrative identity processing of difficult life experiences: pathways of personality development and positive self-transformation in adulthood, Journal of Personality.
