You Are Lovable

Six years ago, I was standing in my kitchen when my mother called to tell me I wasn’t lovable, and I remember almost nothing about the moments before the phone rang, which is what trauma does: it erases the ordinary and leaves only the wound. What I remember is the wood floor under my feet and her voice and then the additional information that she and my father would not be available to me during my divorce, though they intended to maintain their relationship with my ex-husband. When I hung up, I slid down to the floor and stayed there for hours, sobbing in a way I hadn’t since I was a child, and when I finally went quiet hours later it wasn’t because I felt better but because I had simply run out of sound. I did not call anyone afterward. There was no one to call.

That sentence is the one that matters most. I had friends. I wasn’t too proud to ask for help. I had simply arrived at my mid-thirties having learned, through decades of meticulous evidence, that when I was in real crisis, no one came. My parents had taught me that. They had been teaching me that my entire life, so reliably and so completely that by the time my mother said the words out loud on that phone call, she wasn’t telling me something new. She was finally saying what had always been the operating principle of our relationship.

I grew up as a third wheel in my own family. My parents’ primary relationship was with each other, sealed and sufficient, and I existed at its periphery as a kind of satellite, close enough to orbit but never central enough to matter. My mother understood me as an extension of herself rather than as a separate person with an interior life of my own, which meant that my primary function was to reflect well on her. I was to be perfect, or something close enough to perfect that no one would look too closely, because my imperfections were embarrassments to her and embarrassments were intolerable. When I failed at this, which was often, because I was an AuDHD child in a world that had no language for what I was and no patience for what I needed, she would withdraw. She would simply remove herself, stop speaking to me, leave whatever room I entered, make her absence into a punishment so total that the only rational response was to figure out what I had done wrong and correct it immediately. She never told me what I had done wrong. That was the point. The ambiguity was the mechanism.

What I understand now, with the distance of years and the framework to name it, is that I was the family scapegoat, which is a clinical term for something that is experienced as total and atmospheric and nearly impossible to see clearly when you’re inside it. The scapegoat is the designated problem, the one whose existence absorbs and contains the dysfunction that the rest of the family needs to disown, the one who gets identified as the source of every difficulty so that everyone else can maintain the fiction of their own health and normalcy. In my family, that was me, every moment of every day, and it wasn’t only my mother who participated. My father participated. The whole family participated. The story of me as the problem was so thoroughly established and so consistently reinforced that I internalized it completely, the way children internalize everything their families tell them about who they are, because children don’t have the developmental capacity to evaluate those stories critically. They just become them. I became mine, and I carried it for a very long time before I understood that it had never been true.

What this produced in me was a vigilance so constant and so finely tuned that it stopped feeling like vigilance and started feeling like personality. I monitored the emotional temperature of every room before I entered it. I read facial expressions and vocal tone and body language with the desperate attention of someone whose safety depended on early detection of disapproval, because my safety did depend on it. I learned to anticipate needs before they were expressed, to make myself useful before I could be found wanting, to shrink the parts of myself that were most likely to trigger the withdrawal and amplify the parts that were most likely to earn the warmth back. None of this was conscious. None of it was a strategy I devised. It was survival, and it became so habitual that I carried it into every relationship I ever had, long after I had left my parents’ house, long after I understood intellectually that I was no longer a child dependent on her approval, because the nervous system doesn’t update its threat assessments based on what you know intellectually. It updates them based on what it has learned to expect, and what mine had learned to expect was that love was temporary, conditional, and subject to revocation without notice.

The double bind of my childhood was this: I was too much and not enough simultaneously, always, with no available path to being the right amount of anything. Too intense, too loud in ways that could not always be heard, too focused on the things that actually interested me and insufficiently focused on the things I was supposed to care about, too sensitive in ways that created inconvenience, and also never polished enough, never sufficiently composed, never reflecting the image that was required. There is no surviving that bind through performance, because the bind isn’t actually about your performance; it’s about the fact of your existence, which is inconvenient in ways that no amount of self-correction will ever resolve. What the bind produces instead of survival is dissociation: you learn to experience yourself from the outside, to watch yourself as though you were someone whose behavior you were responsible for managing rather than someone who simply lived in a body and had needs and feelings. You become the editor of your own experience before the experience has finished happening, and eventually the editing becomes so automatic that you stop noticing you’re doing it, stop noticing that the person moving through your life has been so thoroughly curated that she barely resembles the person underneath.

I have been editing myself for as long as I can remember, and I didn’t fully understand what I was losing in the process until I stopped.

The mechanism of conditional love expressed itself consistently across my entire childhood and into my adult life, and the consistency was its own kind of message. When I attempted suicide in college, my parents did not come to the hospital; my boyfriend’s family came to pick me up and bring me home to recover, and my parents never mentioned it afterward, not once, as though the fact of their daughter nearly dying was a social awkwardness to be moved past rather than a moment that called for showing up. I remember waiting, in the days after, for a call that never came. That waiting was its own education. When I fell at work and sustained an injury that left me with excruciating chronic pain that I’ve managed every day since, they did nothing and said nothing. When Charlotte was born, when my then-husband was deployed to Afghanistan and I was managing a newborn alone, my mother called from several states away to register that she was not receiving adequate attention, and when I failed to adequately address this concern while being a solo parent to an infant, she stopped speaking to me for months. I was alone with a baby and my mother was punishing me for insufficient attention to her feelings, and I remember thinking, even then, that I shouldn’t be surprised, because I never had been. Every crisis was another data point in the same argument, and the argument was that my pain was not something they would show up for, that my need was an imposition, that the designated problem in the family was expected to solve her problems alone and quietly and without troubling anyone.

I believe my mother is undiagnosed AuDHD, though she would be scandalized by the suggestion, because she has organized her entire identity around the performance of neurotypical respectability and the word itself would land as accusation rather than explanation. But I think about what it must have meant for her to raise a daughter who embodied everything she had spent her life learning to suppress and conceal in herself, all the intensity and sensitivity and difference that she had been taught made a person shameful and unacceptable, now walking around in her house, impossible to ignore. I think about the cruelty of being seen most clearly in the person you are least willing to acknowledge, and I think about how the punishment she visited on me for being too much was also, in some way she could never have articulated, a punishment she was visiting on herself.

This doesn’t excuse any of it. It doesn’t change what it cost me or what I had to rebuild from. But it locates the origin of the wound more accurately than “my mother was cruel,” because cruelty wasn’t quite the right word. The right word was something more like terror, and what she was terrified of was the version of herself she saw in me, and what she did with that terror was make it my problem to solve.