Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (6 page)

Something my life has taught me is not to see things in black and white. People are neither all good nor all bad. Hurt people can become hurtful, and my father’s own actions reflected this.

The worst incident I can recall involved Atz Lee and I both one morning as we got ready for school while my dad slept, hungover. As usual we were careful not to wake him for fear of his temper. Atz Lee and I got to fighting, as we often did, but it had to be done silently. Nothing in particular got us going, just some squabble that escalated, and we began to brawl with the mute button on. Kicks and punches and bites delivered in comic quiet. He would push me so hard it would knock me over, but he would break my fall at the last minute, offering me an extended arm, which I’d take so as not to land with a crash. I would bite him, then cover his mouth as we both stopped long enough to ensure he did not scream too vociferously. It was like a silent and brutal ballet, both of us having a go at each other and yet protecting ourselves from our father. This time, however, we woke him. We both froze as we heard his voice erupt like a cannon, calling us up to his room.

Atz Lee and I went from being mortal enemies to being children unified in fear in the blink of an eye. He was seven, me nine. I remember climbing the wooden stairs, each saying we loved the other as we clung together, arm locked in arm. We reached his door and he was standing
naked but for his underwear, his spine bent with rage. The room was tiny, just enough space for a twin bed against the wall that adjoined ours. We stepped inside, our backs to the window. I remember being vaguely aware of a willow bassinet that lay at our feet. It had been the bassinet that my grandmother carried my father in, made of willow roots. My father began screaming, I don’t care to recall what exactly, and it snowballed from there. I do remember his face being distorted with rage, barking at us like a drill sergeant. I remember veins bulging and a redness that can be achieved only by going genuinely apeshit. He hit my brother upside the face. I was next. It knocked me into the cradle. But I did not cry. I decided to deprive him of that satisfaction. I stood up and stared at him with a smirk on my face. He knocked me down again, incensed, and then dragged me to the bed. The next thing I knew, Atz Lee was there next to me, my dad straddling us both, shaking us, our heads knocking together. He kept yelling, spittle flying in my face. I thought I was going to die.

I don’t remember leaving his room. I do remember climbing down the stairs weakly, in utter shock. In the absence of sanity, our bodies took over instinctively, and as if on autopilot my brother and I gathered our things to walk to school, my nose still bleeding. We had no idea what to do with ourselves. The episode took long enough that we knew we had missed the bus, and so we walked the eight miles to school, our faces red and stinging. I was in fifth grade, Atz Lee in third. We felt so much older, but must have looked impossibly small with our thumbs stuck out trying to catch a ride, part of us hoping a car would not come for a long while, to give our faces and our crying time to return to normal. And yet another part of us fantasized about everyone seeing what our dad had done to us. That feeling vanished as quickly as the marks did, though, as it does for any animal that senses survival is the enemy you know.

I remember the day being dreamlike. It was so strange to witness how
life just went on. Kids made jokes, kids laughed as usual. Teachers taught, recess happened, and kids played. It all just seemed like time should have stopped and some protective force in the universe should have risen from the ocean and said,
Anoint these children with love! Take a moment not to pity, but to see them so they may know they are deeply worthy of tenderness!
This did not happen though.

At midday, my dad came to the school with our bagged lunches. In the scramble I had forgotten to make them. He was sheepish, this time his spine bent with shame and regret. I wanted so badly to be mad at him, but the child in me could not withstand the sad and broken form he now took, and I thanked him as I took the crumpled paper bag from his hand.

I was so alarmed by what was happening at the time, by my father’s sudden behavior, that a knowing part of me thought, naively, that I could have a talk with him and that I would somehow be able to resolve this and I would stop being hit. I saw that my dad was afraid and I think that having a nine-year-old explain that you’re afraid and acting poorly by lashing out must have enraged him. I do know that my father was gripped with terror, a deep feeling of inadequacy because of the way he was raised, and I think he reacted in the most protective way he could, which was to say that I was the problem and he wasn’t. I remember the lights inside going out a little bit for me then. I remember my mind being torn down by his mind, his logic, his adult reasoning enough to confuse me into wondering if I really was the problem. And I began to really doubt myself.

I cry now as I write this. So lasting are the scars of the child who never feels worthy of love. So many cycles in my life of having to learn that I am indeed worthy of tenderness. The lessons I learned from my dad, that he learned from his, would take me many years to unlearn.

My dad was seldom this violent. It was typically a lot of rage and
yelling. The more I learned in later years about his own childhood, the more amazed I am that he did as well as he did with us. He was far less violent than his own father.

As children, we are taught what I call Emotional English. This is an emotional language we are taught in our homes, and just like our spoken language, the emotional language we speak most fluently as adults is the one we learned as children. What we are taught about interacting emotionally with each other and the world is modeled for us by our families, and is what we will grow up doing. No matter how frustrating, damaging, and frightening it is, we will perpetuate the examples of our parents and family—unless we can learn new ones. The tricky thing is that a person can go to school to learn a new language, we can find classes anywhere, in any town, but how do we learn a new emotional way of relating to our lives, loved ones, and most important, to ourselves?

I have so much compassion for my dad. He endured so much as a child, and then he was shipped off to war. He had suffered from PTSD and it was triggered by the divorce and raising us kids and living in the barn. I’m amazed he held it together as well as he did. While he and I did not speak for most of my early career, we have a healthy and loving relationship now. Through a combination of therapy and self-examination, he has fought hard for the happiness he has, and has not only made amends to me, but allows me to feel a lot of safety and emotional maturity when we’re together. I love my family, and I love my dad—there were lots of good times and they were enigmatic brilliant pioneers who settled a new wild country. It took extreme personalities to carve a living from these extreme environments.

Back then, when I looked at my family’s emotional dynamic and projected it into my future, it looked bleak. Having studied PTSD and the effects of its trauma on the brain, I’ve learned to see this incident in a new light. There is nothing that makes what happened okay, but what
happened does have a cause. It is common for people like my dad to self-medicate with alcohol or other things. When triggered, their first reaction is one of fight or flight, and blood stops flowing to the part of the brain that handles logic, redirecting it to the left hemisphere. You can see it in real-time studies done on the brain. A person consumed with irrational rage is literally out of their mind. Later I learned that there are two kinds of trauma: “Little t,” which includes issues of prolonged abuse, neglect, and alcoholism, and “Big T,” which encompasses war, rape, and near-fatal accidents. My father was the victim of both.

But at least our dad was ours. He stayed with us and fought it out. My mother was absent, except for eccentric and happy notes I might receive on holidays. I never valued what a stand-up guy my dad was to keep us, despite his terror and inadequacy. He did not abandon us. It wasn’t until much later that I was able to appreciate this. At the time, being mad at him was easy. He was there every day. Learning to be mad at and fear my mom would take a lot
longer.

five

a breadcrumb trail

M
y dad never said a bad word about my mom, and it wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I asked about it. He said that when I was eight, she had told him that she needed a break from being a mom and that she wanted to explore her life without us. Rather than try to convince a woman to take kids she did not want, he took us, ill equipped as he was.

After the divorce, I missed my mother terribly. I even named a white teddy bear Nedra so that I could snuggle with my mom each night. As is the way with small kids, I never asked why we lived with my dad and not my mom. I never asked why Mom didn’t come to see us. It just was. My heart ached for her so, and in years to come I made desperate attempts to see her, going so far as to hitch rides to Anchorage. I would show up on the doorstep wherever she was house-sitting (our house had been sold at some point). My mother often cried and seemed sad. She dated a man who made it clear he did not like children, though that didn’t keep me from liking him. He was into gourmet food and art and talked to me like an adult the few times I was around him.

To me, my mother seemed magical. She was always quick with a mystical story and seemed shamanistic and powerful. She was an artist and full of expansive ideas. She worked in stained glass and etching and won competitions for her work in local galleries. She made anything seem possible, exuding passion without anger or violence, a seemingly calm and nurturing reprieve from my dad, who felt tightly wound, dangerous and angry all the time. I had such a child’s need to believe she wanted me and loved me, that when she insinuated to me at one point that my dad had blackmailed her so he could keep us from her after the divorce, I ate it up. She was fuzzy on the details, and had I been able to reflect a bit more clearly at the time, or had I cared to see through my love to find the truth, I would have seen holes in this concept, if for no other reason than the fact that my dad did not act like he wanted us.

When I was in fifth grade, I think, I remember that I was very homesick for her but had no way to get to Anchorage. I guess my dad could not take me, and she would not come get me. In Homer you could call the local radio station if you wanted a ride somewhere. You offered to split gas and said where you were going and what date you needed to be there. So I put an ad on the “ride line,” saying I would split gas (with money saved from babysitting, I believe) and that I wanted to go to Anchorage. The person who answered my ad was a man who had taken some photos of me a couple of months earlier. He had seen me in a grocery store with my father and was taken with me, offering to shoot my pictures for free. He was a professional photographer, he explained, and would be happy to let us keep some of the photos to advertise our show. He would even take some of my dad and me for posters if he could use the photos in his portfolio. My dad was flattered and wanted some headshots for our shows at the Homestead Tavern, the restaurant-bar we sang in at the time, so I got dressed up in the prettiest dress I owned, but it had been bought for me before the divorce and it didn’t fit well, in any sense of the word. It
was a bit small and a bit frilly. My dad brushed my hair and we went to this small trailer. The photographer was warm and enthusiastic, and inexplicably made me so uncomfortable that I could barely sit still. I wanted to crawl out of my skin being around this man. My dad was oblivious, he was so flattered, and both men were telling me how to pose against a marbled blue pleather backdrop. Meanwhile, I couldn’t even elicit a smile. My father was baffled. I didn’t smile in one picture. He was very disappointed in me. When we left I said, “That man made me very uncomfortable,” and my father chastised me, saying, “You know, that man was doing a very nice favor for us and you really should have been more polite.” We did get the photos eventually and I looked very uptight—stern and perturbed. I still have them. When I look back at the photos, I actually laugh.

Fast-forward several months. Jewel Kilcher is looking for ride to Anchorage, will split gas. The photographer was my only answer. I was very apprehensive, though he never made any obscene gestures; he never gave me any reason to mistrust him other than creeping me out. I questioned myself—why am I so uncomfortable? Just take the ride. I missed my mom so badly I decided to go ahead with it. I think my dad dropped me off at the gas station in town, but I can’t remember. I had my money in my pocket and offered it to the photographer for gas. He wouldn’t take it. He was very nice and said he had an extra sandwich in case I was hungry on the five-hour drive. I had packed my own.

I remember that he was very proud of his sports car, and I also remember that I kept my hand on the passenger-door handle so I that could fling myself into the road at any moment. My internal alarm was really going off. I had a small pocketknife in my jeans pocket. When I asked him what took him to Anchorage, he told me that he really had no purpose for going—he simply was going so I could have a ride. I think he felt this would have a positive effect on me, but it just creeped me out further.

Alaska is full of these long, desolate stretches of road where there are no towns and no civilization. I had to use the restroom at one point, and normally I would not think twice about peeing alfresco, but I knew my only option was waiting for the mountain rest area at the halfway point. I waited to say something until we got near, and he pulled over. There was no traffic, no one there. I was so frightened to go into the bathroom by myself that I waited until finally another car pulled up and a woman went into the restroom, so I could go in with her. I don’t know why I thought that would keep me any safer. I let the photographer know when he dropped me off at my mom’s house that I did not need a ride back.