My parents had me in their early twenties, which meant we grew up together. They weren’t emotionally prepared for marriage or parenthood then, and if their upbringings had been happier we might have all been spared our fates, but that’s the way the cookie crumbled. Despite their tender ages, I was a second-chance baby, one they feared they’d never have after an ectopic pregnancy nearly killed my mom a year prior. As best I could tell from early childhood on, I existed largely (but not entirely) to keep my mother company.
Some kids thrive on constant attention. The brother who arrived when I was 18 months old was one such beast. But I was a different creature, at least to my extroverted parents, and enjoyed spending time alone. My dad likes to reminisce about what an odd duck I was, and how my parents weren’t always sure how to relate to me: “We couldn’t punish you. You’d get irritated with us and disappear to your room before we could send you there.” I was reading by three and he joked that my vocabulary exceeded his by the time I entered kindergarten.
Illness marred my childhood in more ways than I’ll recount here, interfering in my schooling and friendships. It arrived so early in my life, and dominated it for so long, that my parents and teachers sometimes struggled to articulate what, exactly, was ‘off’ about me. It was hard to compare me to other kids when our formative experiences had so little in common. Difficulties with eye contact, physical contact and disruption of routine were some of what stood out. In 2023 there’s more awareness of what that potentially heralds, but in the ’80s and ’90s, if you were a girl and you were strange, it was up to you to figure out how to correct it.
Several times in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I was asked by my half-hysterical mother if I’d been molested. What else could explain my preference for so much physical and emotional space? My answer was an honest ‘no.’ She knew such trauma could change how children behave, but she wasn’t quite savvy enough to realize that everything I’d gone through medically was its own sort of violation. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that someone — in this case, my physician wife — acknowledged the scope of the horrors of my illness. “These days, pediatric patients like you are enrolled in mental health services during their hospitalizations,” she explained.*
Sustaining friendships was more difficult for me than making them, partly due to social deficits and partly because of my frequent medical absences from school. It didn’t help that I wasn’t interested in opening up to anyone, but I compensated for that by honing other skills, and by middle school had earned a reputation for being an impartial listener. Besides serving as a so-called ‘conflict mediator’ for students attempting to resolve their disagreements (we were trained and overseen by guidance counselors), I was a rogue confessor of sorts. Classmates divulged things to me that they wanted off their chests without it being blabbed all over school, stories about estranged birth parents, problems at home or an abortion procured over summer vacation.
At home, my silence continued to bother my mother, who wanted her kids to confide in her. When I came out to my parents at 17, she’d done the crying-and-wanting-to-hug routine, but she and my father remained outspoken Republicans for a few years afterward and the political tension between us was thick. Briefly, she seemed to consider the idea that my sexuality itself was the cause of whatever had long been lacking in our mother-daughter relationship. Even though I had younger sisters by then, she unofficially adopted a straight girl who was a year ahead of me in school, a situation made more uncomfortable by the fact that the girl already had a mom who didn’t seem to understand my mom’s bizarre new age-inappropriate friendship with her daughter, who I only knew by name.
I had been usurped in my mother’s affections by a junior version of herself — someone who wanted all the things my mom prized and seemed to think I was rejecting by coming out, like a husband and kids and domestic drudgery. It was something I’d never forget, even years after they mostly lost touch, and I knew it had equally troubled my father. When one of my sisters came out as a teenager, she received the opposite reception. It brought her closer to our mother, who had a second chance to correct what she’d bungled the first time around. My sister aided in the process by needing our mom’s adoration and approval, two things I hadn’t been concerned about collecting.
But those developments were still a long way off in 2001, when I was 18 years old and more or less emotionally estranged from the mother with whom I still awkwardly lived. It was a time in my life when awful poetry flowed prodigiously onto legal pads I fed into a shredder with great embarrassment as an adult. That summer, Lucinda Williams released Essence, her follow-up to the incredible Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, and its first song, “Lonely Girls,” immediately grabbed me by the heart.
In the longing spaces between its spare lyrics, I thought not only of my own situation, or the classmates who’d told me their tales of woe, but of all the lonely girls in my family. There was my mother, who wrongly thought children would save her from ennui and loneliness. And my maternal grandmother, who’d never gotten along with her mother — who in turn bitterly hated her mother. There was my dad’s mother, who was alone her whole life, and her mother, who’d been scandalously ditched by a no-good husband in a small, gossipy town in the early 1930s when my grandma was an infant. Thinking of them, and the universality of our experiences, I realized we were connected in our loneliness. Which meant, in a peculiar way, that I wasn’t really lonely at all.
* By my teens or early twenties, I knew I had PTSD, or medical trauma, or whatever you want to call it, from those lengthy periods of illness. That much had been evident by the age of eight or nine, when I could be anywhere in the world and the smell of the hospital would suddenly overwhelm me, making me feel sick. Worse were the occasions when I was expected to visit others at the hospital, especially children’s hospitals, and nearly passed out. Once, I made it as far as my parents’ garage before vomiting and being sent back inside.
When I complain about people who weaponize sexualities, gender identities and diagnoses they may or may not actually have, I am speaking as someone who knows firsthand how deranged and offensive it is to attempt to weaponize any of it — and how unhealthy it is to adopt a pathology as an identity. You don’t get to emotionally abuse others and wield a get-out-of-jail-free CPTSD card; you don’t get to hold your family emotionally hostage or intimidate critics into silence because you’re LGBTQ+ or autistic. The sooner social media echo chambers let go of that nonsense, the better off we’ll all be.