 It’s time for another edition of SE(N)O, an essay series on A+ for personal stories we wish we could tell on the accessible-to-our-employers-and-everyone-we’ve-ever-known mainsite, but can’t for personal and professional reasons.
This is filler text to keep the contents of this A+ essay, which is a pretty cool one but also very personal, below the members-only cut on the page. This entire essay is available to A+ members, but can’t be readable or searchable by anyone else, like employers or people I went to college with or family members or my neighbors or my kindergarten teacher or my ex-landlord or my current landlord or most people, really. Once my ex-landlord tried to “connect” with me on LinkedIn, which was extra weird because we had actually had kind of an acrimonious relationship — lookin’ at you, Alan! Anyways, you will enjoy reading this essay if you like reading about family and memory and growing up and figuring things out, but you will unfortunately not be able to read this essay unless you are an A+ member, so if that does not describe you maybe it’s something you want to look into! It’s a sweet deal, you’ll get to read lots of stuff like this and also not like this, so if this ends up really not doing it for you, you still have plenty of other options. Whatever floats your boat.
This post was originally written in 2015 and republished in 2021
My dad has never been cool. He isn’t funny or charming, can’t repair his own car, isn’t very good at grilling. But he does have a scar that’s kind of neat. On the flesh of his torso, near his sternum, is an oblong patch of skin shinier and whiter than the skin around it, with small angry hatch marks around it that marked where stitches had presumably been. It’s maybe as big as a walnut, and looks almost like a cartoon eye with lashes. As children, my brother and I poked at it tentatively while Dad held forth about the aortic aneurysm he had suffered as a child — a dilated aorta, prone to thin walls and rupture — and the surgery that had corrected it.
My mother included this in the family medical history for my brother and I, and when I was thirteen, our doctor recommended that we both be screened for any heart problems we might have inherited from our dad. Aortic aneurysm in children is rare, and can be associated with hereditary diseases, from Alagille syndrome to Ehler-Danlos. My mother was particularly concerned with whether my dad’s heart condition might be associated with Marfan’s syndrome since my dad is tall, 6’2″, and lanky. My parents were divorced by then, and my father refused to cooperate with my mother or doctors to help clarify anything. It was an unpleasant process, the echocardiogram; gel was spread across my chest and the ultrasound instrument pressed with what felt like a lot of force against the hard bones of my chest.
In the meantime, the cardiologist asked my mother to expand on the heart issues in our family history; when she told him about my dad’s procedure, he said that didn’t sound right. To have surgery for an aortic aneurysm, the doctor said, my dad’s scars would have be long and vertical, a slice down the center of his chest. He would have been like a little butterflied chicken on the operating table. The scars my dad actually has, the doctor said, sounded like they had been a routine surgery for a cyst under the skin.
When all this was explained to me, I was aware that it was odd, but it felt like just one more facet of the complicated worldview I had to buy into at least a little bit to make living with him bearable. Dad’s perception of everything around him was always a little off; like the refracted image of a straw inside a glass of water, things just shifted slightly, usually because they were tinged by paranoia or a desire to control every minute aspect of them. He consistently overestimated how long it took to get places, sometimes by as much as twice the time, even on trips he took routinely. He had rules for social etiquette that no one else had ever heard of but that he insisted were common knowledge, like that we couldn’t go play at the same friend’s house twice in a row; we had to alternate with inviting them to our place. Once, we parked on the parking garage roof on a trip to visit the Museum of Science in Boston; a traffic jam on the roadway outside meant that when we tried to leave, we were stuck waiting in the car on the hot rooftop with dozens of other cars. Dad got visibly frustrated, hanging out his window and shouting; when another motorist politely suggested he calm down for the sake of rooftop morale, he interpreted this as a personal threat and got out of the car, offering to fight the guy in front of the gathered SUVs and station wagons and us.
When my parents divorced, there was fertile ground for these creative nonfiction endeavors to grow: routine communications from the court or a social worker were a sign that someone was going to take custody of us away from him. If my brother or I needed to adjust the custody schedule for a trip or extracurricular activity, it meant that we were abandoning him and somehow in league with our mother. If he hadn’t seen a certain friend of ours in a while, he suspected that he had lost standing in the community because of the divorce, and other families were telling their kids to stay away from our house. He repeatedly called the therapist that the court suggested my brother and I see, trying to pressure her not to advise the court to take away his visitation rights, something she had never indicated she would do. It was easy for a misunderstanding about a scar to get lost in the shuffle, especially as my brother and I dove into the pursuits of teens our age. I spent my time applying to colleges and having sex in the backseat of my boyfriend’s car; my brother worked on finding inventive places to hide weed and collecting the full System of a Down discography.
It wasn’t until years later, sometime in college, that I really thought about Dad’s stretching of the truth again. We were on a family vacation, I think on the Jersey Shore. We were browsing around some touristy shop — maybe a place that sold fudge? — and Dad was chatting with the cashier as the rest of us looked around. She told him that she was an art student, and he replied “Oh, my daughter applied to art schools. What’s the place called? RISD, I think, in Rhode Island.” This was patently untrue. I had gone to a small liberal arts university and never even taken an art class there. I applied to Brown, very close to RISD, and I had some friends who had gone there, but I had definitely never applied to RISD or any other dedicated art school. Even a lesser lie — “my daughter is really interested in pursuing art” — would only have been sort of true. I had taken art and photo classes in high school, and something of mine had won some minor award, but a dozen other kids from my small high school class had won similar awards for similarly mediocre art. To have him misrepresent my interests in that way would have been one thing, annoying but not all that out of the ordinary; it wasn’t uncommon for him to get my age wrong by a year or two; he often mixed up my brother and I’s food likes and dislikes; he had the same habit that many parents do of exaggerating or de-emphasizing aspects of our childhoods as they faded into nostalgia. But to have him create a specific, concrete action of mine in his memory that had never occurred — that felt like it crossed a line into something I knew was strange. I don’t remember whether I told him I overheard him, or corrected him. I suspect I didn’t.
This past year when I visited Dad for Christmas, he asked me very seriously, “So do you not paint anymore? Is that not still a passion of yours?” I have never painted. I mean, I have, in a literal sense, but I have never been a person who paints. I told him this, and I really do think he was genuinely surprised; I could see it in his face. I remembered how upset he had been when I told him I was studying abroad for a semester in South India; he angrily asked why I had told him I would be going for a summer semester in France, something which I had definitely not said because I had never even explored doing that. In his mind, he had a daughter who was an avid painter in her free time, who wanted to go to art school and study in France; someone who was like me biographically but different in significant ways.
I don’t know much about my dad’s background. Well, I do and I don’t. He grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, in a working-class family; his dad worked on telephone lines. His mother had some sort of mental illness — from what we’ve heard, my mother and I guess that it was likely bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. She was hospitalized (or institutionalized?) for stretches. His parents later divorced; his father remarried, and eventually died of a stroke. He has one sister, a few years younger than him. Both of them went on to college and then graduate school; she became a lawyer, he became a market research consultant in finance, he married my mother. His sister never married; my father and mother divorced around 2000. Now he and his sister live together in a big house with cats, where they rarely interact with other people or even really each other.
I know that much, and believe it to be more or less accurate. But the smaller things, the anecdotes and asides that provide musculature to that skeleton of his biography, I’ve become less trusting of in recent years. Dad tells a story about how, when his mother was hospitalized, he used to get up at 5 am to cook his dad breakfast before he left for work. As a kid I found this endearing, the image of my babyfaced dad at the stovetop. But this was the early 1960s, in the deep South; it would make much more sense for my grandfather to have had his daughter do the cooking, or even to have just done it himself. Dad claimed that he had known John Hinckley Jr, who went on to try to assassinate Ronald Reagan in an effort to impress Jodie Foster. This is possible; Hinckley also lived in Oklahoma and Texas, they could have crossed paths. But it also now seems like the kind of thing Dad could have exaggerated; maybe it was a friend of a friend who went to Sunday School with Hinckley. My dad speaks about his own father in glowing terms, performing the kind of unconditional respect for a father that I think he thinks everyone should have. But my mother says that when she married my dad, her father-in-law wasn’t invited to the wedding.
I don’t feel like I can ask my dad any of this, or more accurately I don’t feel that if I do I am likely to get a useful answer. We’ve been able to broker a sort of polite amicability by way of never talking about anything that might come close to actually mattering, and I am afraid to break it by asking directly about any of this. I asked my mom about a lot of details — after all, they were married for 13 years — and she could provide some basic information. At the end of our phone call, she suggested I try to talk to my dad’s sister if any of it was really important. “Because probably 80% of this is Dad’s personal interpretation.” I hadn’t told her why I was asking, or that I was writing a piece about exactly that.
Recently my dad visited my partner and I in the city we now live in for his 62nd birthday; he was here for four days. Dad was full of stories about my childhood, and even knowing him, I found myself surprised at how many of them sounded off, misremembered, or just made up wholesale. Dad told me to my face the story of the time my brother broke his collarbone; he related it dramatically, blow by blow, apparently forgetting that I was present when that happened. He insisted that Jeff Koons’ sculpture “Balloon Dog,” which we had seen once together, was small piece about a foot high, only barely conceding when I googled it and confirmed that it’s ten feet tall. He told an animated story about Pedro Martinez’s famous 17-strikeout game against the Yankees in 1999, how he “grabbed the kids” and made us watch it, telling us “you’ll never see anything like this again.” I have no memory of watching the game as it happened, just reading about it in the paper later. The game in question was in the evening on a Friday night; it is possible that my dad had custody of us that night. I would have been eleven or twelve then; it is possible that I just don’t remember. But I loved (and still love) baseball and the Red Sox; how could I have forgotten seeing that game?
Gaslighting, as it’s known, is what occurs when the person with the upper hand in some sort of power dynamic lies to and confuses the other person in an attempt to get them to doubt themselves, to believe they are crazy, to consolidate their own power as the true arbiter of reality. The term is taken from the 1938 play Gas Light and film adaptations in 1940 and 1944, in which a conniving and manipulative husband secretly changes small elements of their shared home and then denies that anything is different to convince his wife she’s losing her mind. Gaslighting as we now understand it can include physical practices, like those in the play — hiding someone’s car keys that they leave in the same place every day and telling them they must have misplaced them because they’re so forgetful, or rearranging furniture and denying that there’s been any change. It can also be purely psychological, namely: lying. Like someone claiming that a huge blowout fight the previous evening never occurred, or like my friend’s father, who flatly claims that the beatings she received as a child never happened. The lies and tricks don’t have to be about major things; in fact, in some ways it’s almost more effective if they’re about banalities, because why would someone lie about that? No, it makes much more sense that you’re just wrong or confused. Again.
I’ve never thought this applied to my father. Naively, maybe. He’s so confident in his interpretation of events and they’re not usually things that seem like they would benefit him — why make up a hobby that I never had? I always thought someone who was gaslighting did so intentionally, with great premeditation; tenting their fingers and cackling like Mr. Burns. Lundy Bancroft says in “Why Does He Do That? Inside The Minds of Angry and Controlling Men” that even when it seems otherwise, gaslighting is virtually always on purpose. “‘Is he consciously lying?’ The answer in most cases is yes. Most abusers do not have severe memory problems.”
It seems like there are instances where this becomes more complicated, though — ones I didn’t know about before doing research for this article just to cover all my bases. Bancroft says that “a small percentage of abusers — perhaps one in twelve — may have psychological conditions such as narcissistic or borderline personality disorder, in which they literally block any bad behavior from consciousness. One of the clues that your partner may have such a disturbance is if you notice him doing similar things to other people.” My father, it has been suspected by more than one mental health professional, has narcissistic personality disorder. Intrigued, and also feeling a little nauseated, the way you do when something feels true and you don’t want to look at it head on, I looked into it further. There are myriad and vibrant communities online for people whose parents have NPD, although the vast majority seem to be NPD mothers, for some reason.
The prevailing theory, it seems, is that the mental gymnastics that define NPD — beliefs that they are superior to others, the best at virtually everything they do, destined for special greatness, and that any failure or inconvenience they suffer is the result of conspiracy against them instead of normal mediocrity — can be powerful enough to retroactively reorder one’s sense of reality. It’s not quite lying for the purposes of making oneself seem better or more important. It’s more that one’s belief that one is better and more important is so strong that any evidence to the contrary gets edited until it fits the narrative. One person on a children-of-NPD-mothers forum told a story about informing her mother of how much it hurt her that her mother never told her she looked nice at any point during her wedding day. The mother furiously insisted that of course she had, even though the daughter would certainly have noticed if this happened, as she’d been desperate to hear that validation for years. As the daughter put it online, in her mother’s mind, she was a great mom, and complimenting her daughter on her wedding day is what a great mom would have done, so of course she must have done it.
I don’t usually extend my father credit he may not be due, but I truly don’t believe he’s running around the house systematically screwing with the gas lamps and then twiddling his thumbs when I say I see them flickering out. I think he’s living in a refracted version of the world I’m living in, one where details (and sometimes major events) are different but fully real. And in some ways, this is much worse, at least for me personally. If I thought he was intentionally trying to harm and manipulate me or others in my family, I could write this part of him off, harden myself against it, as I have so many other times with so many other things he’s done. This, though, feels more complicated.
It’s hard for me to be as angry at him if he doesn’t know he’s doing it, but it’s hard to forgive him, too; certainly there are times when my dad’s creative interpretation of his own experiences has been harmful, even seemingly malicious. For instance, when he tried to convince the court during my parents’ divorce that my mother was mentally ill and couldn’t be trusted to care for her own children so he should have full custody, or when he claimed to a lawyer that my brother was emancipated from my mom (he wasn’t) in an attempt to stop paying child support. Certainly there were times when living with him made me feel crazy, like my brain and heart were things I couldn’t trust. Sometimes there still are.
Does his mental illness provide a neat explanation, though? Much of what my dad makes up — times we had together as a family, novel anecdotes from his youth that paint him as endearing or self-sacrificing or suffering a dramatic heart problem, theories about how my mother or the family court system are conspiring together against him, an exemplary father — fit squarely within the expected behavior of a narcissist creating his own mythology. But why so insistent about the size of a Jeff Koons sculpture, or the dozens of other insignificant falsehoods he’s insisted on that have nothing to do with him? Is it possible to get so accustomed to rewriting your own life in your brain that you just do it out of habit? Or is it not so different from what all of us do, our powerful and powerfully faulty brains just being wrong sometimes?
After my dad left, I told my partner, “I can’t even tell you how much of that wasn’t true. It’s really crazy.” I had, I thought, been fairly levelheaded while my dad was actually here; only a few times, usually over something very minor, did I snap at him “No, I didn’t,” or “No, that was someone else,” or “That isn’t how it happened at all.” I was aware that, in those moments, I sounded petulant and unhinged, that my harping on objectively very minor disagreements made things uncomfortable. It didn’t matter; I couldn’t stop myself.
Gently, Franklin asked, “And you’re totally confident that your recollection of all those things is the right one?”
“Yes! Yes. You don’t understand.”
I talk about it with my friend C, whose family history shares some of the same contours as mine, and who is older and has had more therapy than me. We are in the backyard of the building of her brand-new apartment; upstairs are all her boxes, still mostly packed. It’s nighttime and there’s no outside lighting and it’s almost comically on the nose, us talking about how we can judge what’s real when we can’t even see each others’ faces.
“Is he a liar?” she asks.
“I mean, he says things that are not true.”
“Okay.”
“But I think he thinks they’re true.”
I tell her about the baseball game he says we watched together, how much it nagged at me. Because the characterization of himself in it — invested in us, helping us form golden childhood memories, knowledgeable about sports, even — was antithetical to the kind of father I remember him being; because it casts him in the role of a positive father figure who has warm, fuzzy All-American experiences with his kids. “But also,” I tell her, “I think I’m a little jealous. He gets to believe this alternate narrative, this better version of events than what really happened. And I don’t.” I wish I had gotten to have the dad my dad thinks I did. And what kind of daughter am I, I wonder privately, in that fantasy landscape, that collage of half-true memories? Does she call more often? Is she thinner? Is she straight? Does he love her more? If I could choose which one of us to believe is real, who would I pick?
I tell C that what’s really weighing on me is how it heightens my awareness of my own human fallibility, the frailty of the lump of Jello jiggling inside my skull. Not in the way that people who have been gaslighted doubt their own perceptions of reality, I say, but in the way where I’m realizing that even though my dad is out of control with it, we’re all creating our own narratives as they happen, and they’re all subjective. I’m confident in my understanding of how my life has occurred, but my dad would say the same thing. I think about the year that my dad lived in North Carolina while we were still in Massachusetts, and how when he came to see us we’d have to stay in hotels. I remember that as an unequivocally miserable time, all three of us having to sit in small dingy motel rooms together with no distractions to hide the fact that my dad didn’t really have much to say to us, nor us him. In my memory, that was a year of weekends together that felt like bad dates, all of us tense and awkward. But in our adulthood, it’s come to light that for my brother, that was a fun year of adventure; it was like going on vacation, with free cable and beds you could jump on. He loved it. The truth is that although I don’t remember being with my father during that legendary 1999 Red Sox/Yankees game, I also don’t remember being anywhere else; I can’t recall any specific details about it at all, actually. The city’s communal memory of the event has replaced my own individual one; based only on my own recollection I have no idea, really, what happened or where I was.
What about the present moment am I rewriting in my head even as it happens? How does my understanding of last Thanksgiving dinner, only a year ago, already diverge from that of the other people present? One evening when I was young, maybe twelve, I was suddenly overcome with hyperawareness of this without being able to name it, and it felt unbearable. I couldn’t handle the idea that I might not remember this exact scene, what we wore, what we had for breakfast. (I was a very anxious child.) I walked around the house taking Polaroids of my family, and on the backs I wrote as detailed a description I could fit of the precise context. Mom has just finished emptying the dishwasher. She’s going to change into her pajamas. This feeling is what I was trying to describe to C; this feeling, and also the fact that I later lost those photos, ensuring the eventuality that I was so worried about.
C tells me that I’m just doing that thing that people who grew up in crazy households like hers and mine do, second-guessing my own perceptions. She says the exact details of what happened or didn’t aren’t important. “I think the important thing is that you really want to yell, ‘Dad, that wasn’t my experience,’” she tells me. “You feel like that isn’t how it happened, and that’s what matters. Trust your intuition.” She thinks I want to be allowed to say “You think you were a good dad, but you weren’t.” She wants me to say that my feelings are facts, or at least that I’m willing to respect them as if they were. I want to tell her that I think there’s room for both; that I can let my emotions stand as objective truths while also making space for the fact that I might not, in the end, have any objective truths under my belt, that I’m not sure to what extent any of us do. Instead I tell her that I think she should install her floating shelves on the north wall of the office room. We install them on the south wall instead.
There’s this Adrienne Rich line of poetry that I’ve thought about a lot over the years. “This happened every night/this never happened.” I knew there was something in the poem about a parent coming into the child’s bedroom in the middle of the night, which felt ominous to me. I had always imagined the lines to be the kind of back and forth I now have with my dad: This is how it happened. It is. It IS. Trying to confirm what I know to be true by yelling it louder than him. I looked up the actual poem as I was writing this piece, and realized I had either misunderstood or misremembered it entirely.
You sleep in a room with bluegreen curtains
posters a pile of animals on the bed
A woman and a man who love you
and each other slip the door ajar
you are almost asleep they crouch in turn
to stroke your hair you never wake
This happens every night for years
This never happened…
What if I told you your home
is this continent of the homeless
of children sold taken by force
driven from their mothers’ land
killed by their mothers to save from capture
this continent of changed names and mixed-up blood
of languages tabooed
diasporas unrecorded
undocumented refugees
underground railroads trails of tears
What if I tell you your home
is this planet of warworn children
women and children standing in line or milling
endlessly calling each others’ names
What if I tell you, you are not different
it’s the family albums that lie
will any of this comfort you
and how should this comfort you?
Adrienne Rich, excerpt from “In The Wake of Home,” from Your Native Land, Your Life
It’s not about vaguely implied abuse or gaslighting at all, really. It seems about, or at least this section of the poem is about, institutional violence and how that implodes the history of a nation, a community, a family. Things I have no experience with, really, no touchpoint for. It’s not a poem about me or my experiences at all. I’d repurposed and reinvented it in my head, creating a pastiche of the real thing and what I needed it to be.
Which is a way of saying: the memories my dad has and the present he moves through aren’t real. Or at least they’re even less real than most of ours. It’s something, though, that many of the memories he’s created are ones with my brother and I, ones in which all three of us seem happy. If I have a choice to take this small thing, I guess I will. And at the same time, the truth is that nothing about the confusing, terrifying aspects of our childhood would change even if I could get Dad to admit to them happening the way I remember them. This, at least, is a fact. I’ll never know for sure how much of my memories are technically true any more than I’ll understand Dad’s. Part of this is because I grew up in a household, in a life, wallpapered with funhouse mirrors. Part of this is because I’m a person.
I asked my best friend, who’s in medical school, and she told me that if my dad had had surgery for an aortic aneurysm, he would either have had a long scar down his torso or a small one near his groin. As far as I know, he has neither.
I called my mother and asked her if she had, by any possible chance, documentation of specific custody schedules from 16 years ago, so that I could confirm whether I was in fact even with my dad at about 7:30 pm on Friday September 11, 1999, when Pedro Martinez struck out so many batters that even Yankees fans cheered and put up K’s for him. I was excited by the prospect of this singular, specific, verifiable event, one that had been witnessed by thousands and thousands of people. Unlike most of what my dad and I disagreed on, it was recorded forever; there was only one, provably true narrative. It would have been so satisfying, such a neat slam dunk for my sense of my own objectivity, if she could have confirmed for sure that I wasn’t even with my father that day. If she said I was instead with her, doing my homework on the living room couch, her calling me from the kitchen to help clean up the dinner dishes. Of course, no such documentation exists.
I went for a routine doctor’s appointment recently; I’ve only been a patient with this practice for a little while, so I brought in all my old medical records and family history. After looking at the notes from the cardiologist I saw when I was a kid, who noted what could maybe possibly be a borderline mitral valve prolapse, she agreed that it was worth having one more echocardiogram as an adult to make sure it hadn’t progressed into something serious. It was probably fine, she said, but you never know for sure.
