What did you believe as a child that turned out not to be true?
Date: 13 October 2026
That being male made me evil. And wrong. Any expression of independence or rebellion was labelled chauvinism.
“You and those goddamn balls of yours” was commonly heard in our home. There was no father in it.
I had no idea what it meant to be a good man.
“Men were oppressors, maintainers of a patriarchy built on fear,” my mother recited to me from something considerably more radical than Gloria Steinem.
My sexuality was dissected and despised. Puberty was hard. I did more than think about killing myself. I planned.
When did you begin to suspect otherwise?
Date: 13 October 2026
At the end of my first marriage.
“Sideburns are too masculine,” I proclaimed. Nuala rolled her eyes, glanced at her friend and said, “See what I have to deal with?”
The mild contempt stung. I set out to become a man’s-man-woman’s-man.
List them. The drawer, the bottle, the photographs, the thing on the high shelf. Say who they belonged to if you know.
At my grandmother’s house on South Padre Island, everything she gave to her younger lover was taboo to touch: his cologne, watches, shaving cream, office, desk, VHS, stetson, portrait and cars. Everything that was his was forbidden. Nothing of hers was forbidden to touch, and in effect it all belonged to her.
He shall remain Nameless. Not because we detested him, which we did, but because naming him would make him recognizable. We never asked about the extent of their relationship. He would leave his toiletries in my grandmother’s bathroom. We were never allowed to touch them. My brother loved to apply generous amounts of his expensive shaving foam. One day he was forced to use soap to shave.
“No one touches my shaving cream, claro?!”
We hated him for making such a big deal out of it.
Not long afterwards my brother happily perfumed himself with an oversized bottle of lover boy’s cologne, which was shaped like the chiseled torso of a man. My contribution to the rebellion was to move the bookmark of my grandmother’s romance novel and see if she noticed. She never did.
“I behoove you to stay out of my office!”
One day when the house was empty, I sat at his desk and searched for contraband. His portrait in a giant stetson kept watch on the room. When he sat at his desk he would admire himself.
At the back of a drawer I found a VHS of Scarface. No contraband. He was a man who wanted to be Tony Montana, not one who was.
The stetson never gathered dust on the high shelf in his closet; the maid made sure of that. It was felt, smooth and sensitive to the elements, a hat that had never been out in any. My grandfather’s hat had been out in all of them. His father gave it to him, and the Dust Bowl scoured it matte. It smelled of my grandfather. Prairie and Competence. It protected his head on the ranch and at the bank, and at both places it hung from a nail driven into a wooden beam.
Nameless’s vintage Porsche 911 would leak oil in my grandmother’s garage, next to his 1976 red-striped Gran Torino. He preferred to drive a Lincoln. All of them were “noli me tangere.” It means “no touchey.” Grandmother liked to teach us good words.
We sneered at him. We did not think he belonged in Grandfather’s chair. Nor did we believe he belonged in Grandmother’s house, on the bayside of South Padre Island, amidst the tasteful decor. His plastic-covered couches were endless conversational fodder.
After Grandfather died and before Nameless, my brother and I found, in a dusty drawer at Grandfather’s ranch in Oklahoma, a World War II canteen and a compass from his Marine Raider days in the Pacific. We claimed his old leather chair too. We marched across the ranch on 100-degree summer days with the compass that pointed nowhere in particular.
I sneer less now, but I still resent him. He was excellent at helping her spend money, and she became penniless. I could have used some of that money to go to university.
“I never regretted a moment with him!” she told me shortly before she died.
He kept the cars, the portrait, the stetson, and the watches. She retired to Mexico on her Social Security checks. The chair went to South Padre Island. If I could sit in it, I would wear it smooth.
Describe the room you went to when you wanted to be left alone. Where was the light coming from?
I never had a refuge. No Star Wars duvet, no portal I could seal to protect me while I read X-Men comics. My mother didn’t believe in closed doors. It was a corner room with bunk beds for when my brother visited.
When she left the house, I exhaled. When she was home, I faked privacy the only way I could: immersion in my Apple II and my favorite vice, my collection of pirated games.
During one particularly vicious fight, I fled to my room and locked the door.
“Oh, I see, you’re going to make me break down the door? Don’t you worry, I’ll get you!”
She got a hammer as she belted out her version of “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.” In her adaptation, she didn’t wash him out. She castrated him.
American doors aren’t doors at all; they’re basically cardboard with a doorknob stapled on. It was a hollow-core door, and I was an idiot who thought I could hide behind it. The hammerhead punched straight through. She tore through it easily. No splinters.
Her arm shoved through the holes, groping for the knob. Then came her face, poking through the ragged cardboard with a twisted grin, hissing, “I’m going to get you and cut those balls of yours off.”
Eventually, as always, she tired. She collapsed into sobs at the top of the stairs. From banshee to broken child in under five minutes. That was my cue to act: play therapist, hug her, pat her back, and whisper whatever lies might keep the peace. I unlocked the door and sat down next to her, listening to her heavy breathing.
Then the voice returned.
“You’re nothing but a loser, and I wish I’d never had you.
“You’re worthless. You think all women are weak? Fine, then, I’ll do it sneakily. I’ll get you. Maybe I’ll poison you. That’s a good idea. If more women killed men, then men would behave.”
She paused for breath. I thought surely it was over. It wasn’t.
“Sometimes I ask myself how you could be my son. You’re a maggot. I wish I could squash you.”
Even though she tricked me every time, it was hard to keep my guard up. I’d believe the storm had passed, that surely we were finally good.
She grabbed a pencil and drove it into my wrist. Clean, fast, deliberate. Left a scar, a perfect little circle. If someone asked about it, I’d say it was self-inflicted. And in a way it was. The injury came from a part of me that briefly believed that I was safe.
The door was never replaced. For years, day and night, the light from the hallway came into my room through the holes she’d gouged in it, every time she went to the toilet. Then we were evicted, and the door stayed behind.
What could you hear from your bed at night?
The house was silent at night. No boyfriends, no late visitors, no phone calls. My mother read. Eventually I’d hear her haul herself up the stairs to bed and let out a long sigh. The day had ravaged her.
Storms were the exception. The trees thrashed against each other all night, and water roared out of the drainpipes. By morning the bayous had burst their banks, and the floodwater carried the city’s trash out to the Gulf. For days afterward, the Bayou City smelled of peaceful rot and belligerent growth.
What part of the house did you avoid, and why?
The kitchen. Dishes leaned in towers in the sink. In the pantry, a sack of potatoes had gone to rot, shrunk and wrinkled inside their skins and furred with dark spores. Their pale shoots crawled down toward the gap under the door, as if trying to get out. The cockroaches no longer scurried away; it had become their domain. There were no drawings on the fridge. Just filth.
At some point we stopped fighting it and surrendered the room. We lived on Church’s, Jack in the Box, and Popeyes.
We moved every two years, and to me it was always an adventure, a chance to start over. You can’t lose friends if you only ever make acquaintances.
So the unfamiliar never frightened me. Home did. Fear that never ceases becomes background noise. It’s hard to remember the first time I was afraid, because I tuned it out.
One moment does stand out. My mother had been abroad for two years, presumably finding herself. While she was gone, I invented her: an idealized mother who gave me all the tenderness I was missing. Then she came back.
Years later I understood that it wasn’t her that frightened me. It was the distance between the mother who walked back in and the one I had made up, and the realization that the one I had made up would never materialize.
How old were you, and where were you when it happened?
I was about nine. MommaPete had just moved into a beachfront condo at the Marisol on South Padre Island. To me it was a temple, and her bedroom was its holy of holies. Sand drifted into every corner. Passageways were tightly bordered by towering brick canyons. The brick was the color of slightly burned bread. In a cubbyhole by the pool, a Coke machine hummed day and night, waiting for my quarters. The dunes came right up to her balcony. I loved to visit. My home was on the other side of the island.
Who else was there, and what did they do about it?
MommaPete drank, and by afternoon I was usually on my own. At the pool I fell into friendships with vacationers’ kids, friendships that ended when their week did.
So when I fell and a stranger picked me up off the concrete, there was no one to run to. She carried me inside to find MommaPete, past the Coke machine, through the cool of the passageways, into the holy of holies.
MommaPete was passed out on the bed. The stranger put me down, sat on the edge of the bed, and let out a long sigh.
Nobody explained who this woman was. “It’s just me” was all she said, and it explained nothing. I worked it out myself.
What is the cruelest thing that one of your parents ever said to you?
Date: 29 September 2026
She didn’t say it to me. She said it about me.
I was nine when my mother came back from France. She had been gone two years. We were mourning her father. No one met her at the airport.
At night she called her brothers about their father’s estate. First she pleaded, then she threatened, then she raged. We eavesdropped, which was easy. One night she screamed into the phone:
“I’m going to chop these kids into little pieces and put them in trash bags. Then you’ll listen to me.”
My brother and I took her side anyway.
Not long after, they took her to the mental hospital.
I think I was her favorite. She hated all three of us anyway.
What did you promise yourself you would never repeat?
Date: 2 April 2026
I would not terrorize my child. Harsh words like “You are worthless. Don’t you worry, I’ll get you” would never be hissed. There would be no grinding psychological torment. No talk of mutilation.
My mother could laugh like anyone else. She could hold you tenderly, could sing, could charm a stranger into believing she was the most dazzling woman alive. And then, without warning, the bottom would drop out, and you’d be falling.
I learned to live in that free fall. To smile when I wanted to scream. To read the slightest shift in a face, or the pause in a voice. My son will not have to learn this skill.
I would not have a favorite tool for punishment: a brush, the one with steel teeth. Robust, efficient, cheap. No threats of invoking the “Holy Trinity” of the brush, broom, and hammer. Love and loyalty would not have to endure being smacked.
And yet I said things. “I expect you to move out at sixteen.” “My marriage to your mother is doomed.” “If it were not for you, I would be nursing my mental health on a beach with blazingly white, sun-scorched sand.” The aftertaste of those words still twists my face. He looked down each time, and I knew I was slowly estranging myself from him.
What conditions bring it out in you?
Date: 2 April 2026
Nothing. But other things make me go mad. I might scream; my nature is not gentle. I can moan and pout. It has been hard to nurture a gentle nature in me. Mental illness has tainted every aspect of my life. The terror from my childhood occasionally comes out when I take things personally. When I am hurt. Lied to, disrespected. The constant, terrifying threat of my mother’s unpredictable violence mutilated my childlike gentle nature, and yet I have never struck out at anyone. At least not with my hands.
This question is about violence in a family. If it is heavy for you, there is someone to talk to: help, by country.
What is the question you never put to the parent you found hardest to reach?
Date: 2 April 2026
I made my father up. For years. I couldn’t stand the empty space where he should’ve been, so I filled it in myself. My version of him was kind and gentle. He showed up when he said he would. He quoted Plato at you while he flipped pancakes. He waxed poetic about my mother’s laugh in fat love letters. I built him out of nothing, which was exactly what he’d given me to work with. The handful of things my mother did tell me about him turned out to be made up. I wanted to look him in the eye and ask the only question that counts: were you ever going to come save me?
What made asking impossible?
Date: 2 April 2026
His absence. The sting of it branded a vow into me: no child of mine was ever going to be left guessing where I was. I’ve spent my whole life trying to be the opposite of him, which means being there for my son. Compulsively. What I still don’t know is if I can ever be whole, no matter how often I convince myself that I will never do the same thing. I will do everything I can to be present for my son, but I will probably never be whole, and that is OK.
