The Tyranny of “Should”
You Broke Me And You Left Me For Dead
When I was seven, my mom met a woman in a department store and talked about my father’s drinking and his other women. She gripped my hand as she talked and I looked up at this tall, strange dark-haired woman with the bob, the brown eyes and the pretty earrings.
My father was in and out of AA from 1965 until he died in 1984, still a relatively young man. On paper he died of congestion of the lungs. I’ll get the death certificate someday. Not that you can rely on that. His best friend, a doctor, was with him when he died and I am sure he would “spare the family”.
My mother told me that she realized he had a problem when she came home from town one day and there was blood on the stairs. The house was chillingly still. She continued up the stairs with increasing dread. When she opened the door to the eastern room, my father was passed out on the bed and I was bleeding from the head in my cot.
That was Christmas of 1965.
I was eighteen months old.
She sent him to fancy drying-out clinics EIGHT times. And when he began to drink “again” (An acquaintaince told me many years later that he had never really stopped) after 15 years she said “It’s only wine”.
He was almost never home. When I asked where he was, I was told he was at a meeting. When I asked him directly where he was going, he would say that he was going to see a man about a dog.
My mother made it clear locally that if anyone approached our house without good reason when my father was away, she would shoot with my father’s shotgun. She was a bad shot, she added jokingly.
My father dabbled in local politics.
Once when I was about ten, I waited in the car for him for hours outside an office, my bladder filling and painfully expanding with every minute that went by. I sat there and waited and waited and waited.
I don’t do waiting well. Maybe that’s why. And the pain got worse and worse. I was shy. Finally after waiting about three hours (an eternity for a little girl) I went into the office and a woman (Of course! A woman) let me in and showed me to the bathroom. My father was nowhere to be seen. He came out soon afterwards. No apology, no explanation.
Sometimes he would ask what class I was in, in school, if we were alone, trying to converse with me. Once I asked him for twenty-six bucks to buy a violin.
I begged and pleaded but he refused. Then he abruptly changed his mind, drove to the boarding school outside of visiting hours (rules were for other people, not for him) pulled me out of study, insisted that I buy the violin and play it for him in an empty classroom. My tears clouded my vision as I clumsily drew the bow across the strings and played “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” for him. My sister sat and fidgeted.
It was too late.
I didn’t want it any more.
I was tired of wanting things.
Long hair.
Pretty dresses.
Beautiful shoes.
My own room.
They used me as a farm labourer and an unpaid servant. Once I got a third degree sunburn in the small of my back from bending over as I weeded the beets exposing my fair Celtic skin. (Whoever said if you do something right the first time, you don’t have to do it over, has never weeded beets).
My mom once sent me a card where she wrote:
‘I’ve been a rotten mother’.
Most of the time she sings her own praises, how she gave us a secure childhood. She seems to have buffered away the beatings she gave me with the rod of the stairs, the screaming fits and her terrifying and disconcerting unpredictability.
Just a couple of years ago, my sister scorned me for knowing nothing.
When my mother was in hospital having another baby, I was sent to my aunt’s, my sister reminded me. I loved it there. The sun always seemed to shine. I herded the calves through the thistles, their feathery seeds wafting in the breeze. My aunt was such a sweet woman. My brother and I often joke that it’s amazing that she and my mother had the same parents. My mom’s brother was a sweet, kind man too. I miss him, still.
“You were fearless”, my aunt said, shortly before she died. I wondered why she said that. I never felt particularly fearless. One of my older sisters was there too; if she had been born today, she would have been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism. But those were different times. My mother didn’t even tell my aunt that my sister was prone to fits.
My other sister, the firstborn stayed at home during my mother’s confinement. My father simply wasn’t there. She told me:
“Sometimes I was afraid that the pigs would knock me over when I went to feed them. I now know that they could have killed me and eaten me.”
She continued:
“I was tossing gasoline on damp twigs to ignite them. I could have burned the house down.”
She was eight years old. If anything had happened to her, it would have been days before she was found.
I hoped and prayed that my parents would show up and suit up. They never did. I had the starring role in all the plays at the boarding school I attended: Jerusha in “Daddy Long-Legs”, Danny in “Calamity Jane”, Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet”. Only once, in all those years, did my mother attend a play in which I starred. Sometimes she sent us stuff but never included a note. She never once wrote me a letter. Or gave me any indication that she cared about me.
On my brother’s fifth birthday nobody would drive us so we had to walk to school. We walked about a quarter of a mile and then he wouldn’t walk anymore. He dug his heels in and my eleven-year-old sister beat him and beat him and beat him, screaming at him all the while. I was about a hundred yards ahead, further down that hill, that still, sunny, green-leafy morning in mid June.
I remember the first time I made dinner. I will never forget how relieved I felt:
“Now I can make dinner for me and the other kids.”
Up until then I could only make cornflakes. I had four younger siblings and they needed to be fed.
It was more than relief, much more. I felt self-sufficent, yes, triumphant even. Now we would eat.
I used to feel terrible pain and self-pity about my childhood.
I know what others have endured too. Thank you for sharing.
These events are over now, they are in the past.
So why did they continue to pain me?
Why me?
Why did these awful things happen to me?
This is where that most terrible word in the language (and all its derivatives) enters the fray in its eternally stultifying, murderous, pathological posturing:
‘Should’
It shouldn’t have been that way.
He should have taken better care of his family.
My sister should have loved me and taken care of me instead of rejecting me and ridiculing me.
Our neighbours should have intervened.
The authorities should have put us in care.
My bare freezing feet don’t hurt anymore in the loose brown leather t-bar sandals (there never were any socks) my mother bought for me in the local shoeshop in town. (“You’ll grow into them”). My thighs and arms no longer smart from the rod of the stairs. I no longer lie in bed at night worrying about impending doom from far-away possible calamities, like the lack of world peace.
Today I have every physical comfort I could reasonably wish for. I live in the most desirable area of the whole country, if apartment prices are anything to go by.
I eat delicious food.
I have beautiful dresses in my wardrobe, silks, linens, the finest cotton.
My duvet is made of some kind of ox down and the covers are made of egyptian cotton.
I wear couture shoes.
My children are fit, healthy and successful.
So what’s the problem?
The pain comes from one idea and one idea only:
‘It shouldn’t have happened’
My intolerance (a fine old-fashioned vice — no 1970’s Reader’s Digest ‘perfectionism’ here) rails against the reality of what was.
My arrogance roars an alternative plot to the heavens. A better plot, with kinder characters and loving parents.
Where mom rose and got her children ready for school instead of letting them fend for themselves. Where she came downstairs and helped me make my sandwiches instead of me pressing cold hard butter onto soft bread and making crumbs of it in the process. I wept tears of frustration at the futility of my efforts; my older sister had refused to make my lunch for me and I was unable to do it right myself.
Where Dad prioritized clothes for his children above drinks at a local bar-room for his fair-weather friends.
You are “should”.
Fuck You, “Should”
Allow me to accept gracefully what is and what was.
I don’t know if there was a ‘reason’ for my suffering. But it did happen, whether I liked it or not.
I read your amazing stories on Medium, you brilliant writers and the wind of the events you describe blows through me.
Your memories enrich my emotional life and stimulate my creativity.
I applaud your bravery and your generosity.
Thanks for sharing your lives with me and for inspiring me and giving me the courage to share my life with you.
I’ve got just one thing to say to “Should”:
“Fuck You!”
You read to the end. Thank you so much!
This is an updated version of a story I first published on medium in July 2016.
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