Please Don’t Hurt Me
My good old days weren’t
If there are four words to sum up my internal dialog through most of my life, it is these: Please Don’t Hurt Me.
I was “raised” by a loud, opinionated woman who “took no shit.” She was a force of nature, most often a storm. A tornado. A flash flood. The kind of weather you can’t prepare adequately for — the kind that costs hella money to fix, and nothing is ever left quite as it was after an instant of that.
If you’ve ever had a human in your life whose side-glance could leave you heartfully sorry you are still breathing their air — then you know.
I didn’t especially like her rougher edges, and her temper was legendary.
I did my best to please her and keep her calm when I had to be in her presence, which actually wasn’t that often growing up. 20 minutes here and there that could make or break the day. She came home each weekday afternoon at a quarter to four. I remember running to greet her at her car. I guess I hoped my enthusiasm might help counter any bad mood in the driveway before she pumped it through the house like mustard gas.
She wouldn’t be in the kitchen all that long before she’d head to her bedroom either to gab on the phone with one of the women she’d just spent 8 hours with at the factory, or to nap. Or both.
But she was usually in the kitchen long enough to yell at her own mother, my grandmother, who was dutifully making dinner for the family and fully prepared to flinch. I don’t remember the context of most of their exchanges, I just remember feeling sorry for Nanny, yet happy I was not my mother’s current target.
My grandmother. Nanny. She spent upward of 18 hours a day locked in her bedroom. She would get up in the early afternoon to prepare our dinner, and disappear around 7:30 that evening. She would get up to come read me a bedtime story and tuck me in, then back to bed she went.
I knew a few things when I was little;
My father worked outdoors all day, most days, when he wasn’t “laid off” which was a very bad thing, angered my mother a great deal, and meant my father would be at home more often with me.
I knew I had better one-on-one interactions with each of them, and the more people in the house at the same time, the more potential there was for an explosion. I knew to try to stay out the way of that.
My father was kind and gentle and full of stories. When we were alone.
My grandmother was sweet, and loving and full of stories. When we were alone.
My mother was smart, and funny and direct. She, too was full of stories. When we were alone.
The only member of the house who had no amount of positive time for me was my brother, the eldest. If he had to have a sibling show up when he was soon to be 15 years-old, he wanted a little brother. He got me instead, and he was never a bit happy about it.
He scared me. He was violent toward me. Menacing. He was menacing. He made me afraid to cross through the living room when he was in it. Please don’t hurt me. But he would. And laugh about it. I despised that vacant laugh.
Staying out of the cross hairs is a ridiculous game for a small child to learn, but I became adept as possible, as fast as possible.
I knew my arrival was a general disappointment to the household, and I tried to be an exemplary little girl. I didn’t get it right often enough, but I tried hard. Much of the trouble was rooted in the fact that ALL of them seem to have wanted a boy child, and that fact was constantly on display.
I let other kids use my body as early as ten years old. I admit to some curiosity, but what I really wanted was connection. Maybe a little protection, which was seldom otherwise offered by the boys. Growing up in my house really was a lot like prison, come to think of it. From a young age I just wanted to be old enough for my release.
I felt responsible for everyone’s pain. All their disappointments in life were somehow mine to repair. Maybe I could make up for all the things they wished had been different. I was more than willing to give it a go. Just, please don’t hurt me.
Third grade, or perhaps it was just after, was a real eye opener. Until then, I had perfect report cards and perfect attendance in school. I was working toward college.
Princeton.
I wanted to go to Princeton.
I’d ridden through there by car ride exactly once. My brother used to go to a place called, I think, “The Brain Bio Center” where they would test his blood and give him a whole bunch of vitamins in an attempt to fix his “mental problems.” 1973 or so. I can’t say why I got to ride along with him the once, but I loved the idyllic town and seeing the grand old buildings, and I decided it was for me.
What happened soon after was a turning point. I got a true glimpse behind the curtain, and I never forgot it. See, I had deluded myself into believing that my parents actually valued education. I had fully absorbed the notion that if I worked hard in school and did well, I could have the future none of them did. I cannot tell you where I got that notion, but I suspect it was my grandmother. She’s for sure the one who told me, “you’re smart. Don’t work with your hands when you can work with your head.”
At any rate, my parents were both in the living room at the same time, which was rare. I gleefully declared, “I’m going to Princeton!”
And they laughed.
Not a quick smile or a soft chuckle.
They laugh-laughed as if I’d told an exceptionally funny joke with perfect timing. Laughed.
Once my mother gathered herself, she screeched, “Who’s paying for that?!?” Then laughed some more. “College ruins people! Look what it did to your brother.” My brother was in fact diagnosed as schizophrenic in college, when I was five, much later amended to bipolar. But it wasn’t college that “ruined” him. I assume for all the world he arrived angry.
They didn’t care about my efforts. The times I went to school knowing I had a fever and felt terrible I might as well have spent in bed, where I belonged.
The days I quietly cleared a surface to do my homework while their angry chaos swirled through the house, felt ridiculous now.
She crushed my spirit that day. I couldn’t be the boy they wanted so desperately. I couldn’t be rough and tumble for my brother. I couldn’t hate my mother enough for my sister. I couldn’t ease my grandmother’s obvious pain. I couldn’t temper my mother’s temper with sweet softness, wit, or kindness. And I couldn’t find my father a steady enough job.
But I could be an excellent student! I really thought I was making them proud. Turns out, they didn’t care what kind of student I was. Once it was obvious I was not the little boy they wanted, maybe all bets were off.
So I didn’t keep doing it for myself. The only things I did for my Self were peacekeeping measures. So they might hurt me less. Humiliate me less. Love me a little. Please don’t hurt me work.
I once had big and lofty goals for myself. I was going to make a lot of money! Money was the thing we seldom had enough of, and all of our problems stemmed from the lack of it. At least according to my mother — this elusive woman who gave me so little of herself yet influenced everything.
I came to understand my mother as something of an unfillable pothole. The more you tried to fill it, the deeper it seemed to get. I tried to meet every expectation she threw at me, and do it better. Do a little more. Give a little more than was asked for. Never enough. I sobbed beside her hospital bed when she took her final breath, and it wasn’t in sorrow. It was relief. My release from a sentence that had lasted nearly 52 years, prison-to-prison, arrived in that moment.
I have had to reimagine my life many times over. I’ve had prosperity and near-poverty, over and over. A well-ordered home life for my children, and the subsequent years my partner and I lived in a gutted apartment above the little bar we owned. I have now returned to the original “scene of the crime.” I am back in the house where I grew up and learned to flinch. It was never the building’s fault. It’s actually a lovely home in a beautiful, quiet neighborhood of folks who smile, wave, and mind their own business.
But the ghosts.
Not apparitions — at least not visible ones — I’m talking memories. Bone-deep memories. No matter how I clean this place up, no matter how cheery or warm, I believe I am back here for a reason, and it is, in part, to confront my original years here, and evaluate all I carried away from it and back to it.
I couldn’t sell this place when it was empty, and I tried. It became the default landing spot when COVID took our bar away, along with my already-waning attachment to the city where I’d lived for nearly 35 years after escaping here.
With the final parent dead, the reasons to not be here evaporated. And I was in desperate need of a front porch and good old peace and quiet.
I cry pretty often over a couple people not currently in my life. They’re alive and well, they just don’t have time for me. Yet if my mother inadvertently taught me anything, it is that I cannot -will not- insist any other human being pay me any attention they don’t have the pockets for.
I’m rebuilding my soul by first fully acknowledging Her. As I reimagine this crime scene into the lovely space it always should have been, I’m seeing all the time I suffered behind those four little words,
Please, don’t hurt me.
Peace, Lovelies
-MM
