BY KATE LEFFNER
[content warning: domestic violence]
Before I Was Born
I finally left home when I was twenty-two. My father moved me to Boston so I could attend a master’s program and in two days, drove us six states in a pick-up truck from Wisconsin to Boston. I didn’t know how to drive and still don’t have a license, but since I’d always lived in cities as an adult, it never seemed to matter. It was summer when we left and when we passed through Chicago, hot and congested with tourists and buses, I started to roll down the window. Don’t, my dad told me. I’ll put on the air conditioner. I didn’t know how to say that I also just wanted to suck in breath from the city, just one last time. I attended undergrad in Chicago and I felt my chest tighten when we passed the apartment where I lived alone.
The apartment, more of a room than anything else, had felt like the inside of my mind. I kept it so clean, in the hopes of mitigating my panic attacks, that it barely looked like I lived there. I was obsessive about my eating, I thought that food was something that could also be kept clean, and only ate eggs, spinach, avocados, or nothing at all. When I first toured it with my father, the real estate woman whispered to me, “Seems like your daddy takes care of his little princess,” a line straight out of a B-rated movie.
“Are you sure you want to go?” my dad asked me. Right before I left, my mother raced out of the house with a weekend bag she had recently bought for herself. She pressed it to me with tears in her eyes. Take it, she said as memories flooded in. I saw her explaining Kierkegaard to me when I was a kid, drawing with pastels in the kitchen. I saw her screaming and my father punching a wall but when I blinked they were gone, buried deep. I thanked her and pressed the bag close.
Before I went to Chicago for college, my father said he’d get his shotgun during an argument. Afterward, I was claustrophobic and would take the stairs instead of the elevator, convinced strangers had guns in their pockets. In my first year of college, I sent my mother an email that said that I wouldn’t come home until my father went to therapy.
My mother told me to bring it up with my father. I did not. Instead, I would wait for my parents to pick me up for the holidays in the lobby with my bags under my arm and fresh cookies in a Ziploc bag.
In the parking lot of a gas station in Ohio, with the lamplight flickering on and off, my father nodded off. I read a romance novel my mother packed into my bag. It was about a woman who escaped a domestic violence relationship with her husband and fell in love with a policeman in a beach town. My mother read a lot of these books.
When the woman was in the bath, the ex-husband snuck into her house. The policeman appeared and pointed a gun at the ex-husband. The woman cried and the policeman held her gently and told her he loved her as the ex-husband was carted off to jail. When I was a kid, my mother closed the curtains when my father started to raise his voice. When I suggested we leave, go to a shelter, or call the police she told me that I didn’t understand what it was like out there, in those places. Even when he called us cunts and charged, sending us spiraling to the
floor, even then she told me not to call. Having a home, and private schools, gave us a certain safety, and the love we had for him, the intense empathy that started conversations: he was tired. He was overworked. He didn’t know how to handle his feelings because of the way he was raised. He didn’t hit us like that. At times, I would convince myself of these things and ask her to stay, fearful of the outside world, only to spiral into a panic that we had to leave, and then into a deep suffocating sense that there was nowhere we could go.
Often, I felt sorry for him because he couldn’t control himself. I remember holding him while he cried.
“Where are we?” my father said in his sleep. I shushed him. He told me to just leave him alone, God, why wouldn’t I just shut up? He needed to sleep.
I had a difficult time making friends. I felt that I was always missing cues, and the closeness I felt in my family felt impossible to replicate. How would anyone understand the incredible safety of hearing my mother affectionately call my father an asshole after a fight and hearing him laugh instead of scream? Or understand the fierce loyalty I felt toward my brother when he shoved my dad when he went to hit me?
My mother, when she was feeling particularly resentful, would say I was cold to others. When she was feeling more generous, she said I just didn’t know how to let people in. This changed in my first year of college. I fell in love with a woman in my Russian literature class. She was in her junior year and had a full-time job, gave out practical advice, and had a dry sense of humor. We wrote each other letters in the summer about Checkhov, Putin, and Dostoevsky, which felt like discussing my unformed thoughts, unspeakably intimate. Once one of the letters arrived right before my father started getting worked up and I remember holding the letter tight to my chest like a talisman while he shouted. I felt that the way my friend loved me and the way my father loved me were inexplicably different but I didn’t know how to articulate it. At night, I started Googling phrases I previously ignored: learned helplessness, Stockholm Syndrome, trauma. I circled around the word abuse but could not land. That was something that had happened to my mother and my grandma, to other women, to people whose fathers’ didn’t move them into apartments or cook them dinner at night. Wasn’t I too functioning to be abused? Wasn’t I too privileged?
The first time my father hurt me, I was five. It is one of the clearest memories I have. I was sick and my throat was scratchy. My parents were renovating their bedroom and were sleeping in the living room on a pull-out bed. I shook my father’s bare sweaty shoulder and his hand shot out and gripped my neck. He stood up fast and held me up in the air. I grabbed his hand and tried to speak, but couldn’t get anything out. His eyes were open but he made no sound and eventually my mother woke up and said his name. He let me down. Sleep apnea, my mother said the next day after furiously researching.
There was a bridge to pass over to get from New York to Massachusetts. My father laughed in a nervous way. He hated heights but loved nature and the mountains we passed through looked like something out of a magazine, green and purple, close enough to touch.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Why don’t we do more things like this?”
“I'm hungry,” I said, digging through my backpack.
“You are a brave, brave girl,” he said to me. He was crying. “How are you so sure?”
“I believe in God,” I said, though I didn’t and the words felt false on my lips. But it was something to say, something with power behind it. If I told him I believed in myself, it didn’t feel like something he would understand.
“You are braver than me,” he said. The comment should have made me feel closer to him, flattered even. Instead, it made me angry. I could feel him leaving in the way he didn't look in my eyes. I didn’t realize it would be this easy, all I would have to do was not need him, and suddenly he would become small and quiet.
In the apartment, he set up my DVD player and bed as I put away groceries.
“It’s ugly,” he said. “I can’t leave my daughter in a place like this.”
“I like it,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” he said. His face was red and it seemed as though I was both the daughter he wanted to protect and the one who put her in danger. I was both an extension of him and an enemy.
“Why are you never happy?” I said. At that moment I remembered a story I heard on a holiday with his family. When he was a kid, he wrapped his younger brother up in a blanket and threw him out of a window. Often I can’t tell what my father did or has done, there are too many stories that shift in his or his family’s retelling, and the uncertainty and the love I had for him kept it shrouded with confusion. But there was something about his reddening face that made me think of this story at that moment.
He stopped fighting his brother when he grew up. I had thought this was a sign of maturity, but now I wondered if it was because he could fight back. I had taken it so personally when he wanted to hurt me. I thought it was because I had been pushy or demanding. It was clear now watching him and the familiar narrowing lips that he had been battling something long before I was born.
When he left, he told me to text but I could see something had changed in his eyes.
“Sure,” I said and locked the door.
Years later, after my parent’s separation and his jail time, I learned to sleep in my bed throughout the night and got a new phone number. After I became someone else, poorer but self-efficient, an average girl fading into a street of people like at the end of a Meg Ryan film, it finally feels safe to let myself remember the things I liked about him: cooking squash and watching TV. In the aftermath, I let myself miss him.
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Kate Leffner is a writer and marketing specialist in Boston, MA. Her writing focuses on intergenerational trauma, grief, queerness, and radical self-care. She has an MFA from Emerson College and has featured in The Femme Edition and The Dillydoun Review. She lives with her girlfriend and their two cats, Orchard and Phoebe.