I grew up in the shadow of my war hero father and experienced trauma from his unpredictable and often dangerous behavior. Even though I loved him, I feared him and sensed something terrible had happened to him at war. I didn’t learn any details until he was 90. I wrote about reconciling our complicated relationship in my new memoir, Little Avalanches.
As I began to work through the scars of my childhood with him, I remembered an accident that happened when I was eight. That day, I balanced on a red rubber swing, palms wrapped around rusted chains, and soared through a cerulean blue sky. My foot slipped, and I slammed into the sand pit, elbow first, and my arm bent backward instead of forward, twisting nerves between sharp bones.
My mother, who I lived with then, rushed me to the hospital. I spent the next three months in a fluorescent-lit room. I had two surgeries and lost half of my triceps muscle. My mother wore a soft round dent in the chair cushion at my bedside, her soft touch a comfort against the pain. (I alternated living with each parent after their divorce.)
When I was released, my arm was disfigured, and I could barely lift a pencil. Instead of hugs and kisses and assurances that I wouldn’t look hideous for the rest of my life, my father made me carry a full teapot up and down the hallway, his idea of physical therapy. My mother’s gentle care was hundreds of miles away in the corner of California, where she had moved to get away from him years earlier.
The most painful part of the experience happened when my father insisted my nerves be tested for atrophy. A doctor slid 25 needles into the tender flesh of my forearms, sending a jolt of electricity into each tiny rod. My father ignored my plea for help and didn’t want to hear about my suffering. He shamed me for complaining.
When I became a mother, I vowed to give my children a life without such pain. I wanted them to be free — of fear, of trauma, of the need to live up to my expectations. I told myself I would raise them with kindness, keep them safe and protect them from judgment. But my father’s lessons about keeping quiet and avoiding conflict were hard to unlearn.
As my daughters grew, I tolerated strange hairstyles and funny clothes. But I said, “If you get a tattoo, get it on a body part you can live without.” My directive was clear. Mom does not approve of inking. But I was not really clear. I did not tell my children that I could not bear the pain of imagining a needle sliding in and out of their skin because I experienced it, hundreds of times.