To Whom It May Concern

To whom it may concern,

I’ve started many letters like this over the years. Some of them have included a last will and testament, some of them words of maudlin and saccharine kindness to overcome the bitterness I might impolitely leave in my wake. I’m writing this to nobody in particular, to everyone, to the beginning and the end of everything. I want my reason to walk away to be exonerated, blessed, purged with sage on a brisk and overbright dawn.

That won’t happen. This is a punishing effort, necromancy without knowledge. We’re trying to raise the dead here, because I’ve grieved my parents hundreds of times. This is just the most recent, and maybe the most final, barring that most final of goodbyes.

I just finished a longform essay by Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian novelist I admire, called “Notes on Grief,” in which she details mourning the loss of her father in 2020. I mourned with her as I read; I cried at times for the picture of uncomplicated affection she crafted for her reader. This author has a gift for painting poignancy in plain speech, hurling an equation at the page that detonates profound simplicity. I felt like I cried for different reasons, because my parents are alive, and I’ve incessantly practiced being a grey rock, intentionally uncomplicating my affection.

Is this how I want to spend the last years of my parents’ lives? It’s not, but it’s the way I spent the first years of mine. I’m like the scorpion who asked for a ride across a river from a toad, only to sting the toad, drown us both, and blithely explain that it was inevitably “in my nature.”

No, wait. That’s the story I’ve been told since I was eleven years old, when I became unlovable, difficult, unstable, embarrassing. I envied smaller people, I envied happier people, and when I crushed myself inward in every attempt to disappear, I was ashamed that I couldn’t. A stronger person could, surely; I was just crazy enough to be unlovable, and just sane enough to be impure, manipulative, worthy of reproach and contempt.

My sister, for the record, is crazy too. She’s passed the severity test, though; she’s crazy enough to have acceptance, care, the ability to live with her parents at the age of 26, drink and do drugs, and openly explore her sexuality as a woman under their roof. Allowances are made for this beautiful hurricane, whose temper and tantrums are just part of her dimensional personality and mustn’t be suppressed. She’s an adult, after all. She’s delicate, after all. Her wellness should never, ever be taken for granted, because what if we lose her?

I’m looking behind me, some kind of lost. I’m bewildered that it took this to get here, in therapy with a mediator, after I committed the cardinal sin of standing up for myself and my family when every fiber in my heart knew what it would cost to set a boundary. I know that I’m a person of relatively low value in this world; people would rather dismiss me than fight for a relationship with me. I am, after all, impure, manipulative, and worthy of reproach and contempt. I’m the worst kind of person, and I can’t seem to disappear after all this time. There are children now; there is a husband who loves me more than I deserve. It would be inconsiderate.

I was homeless at twenty one. I was evicted from my parents’ house after an entire lifetime of homeschooling and one disastrous year at a conservative private college because of a concern that I would corrupt my younger sister by reading Cosmopolitan magazine and having sex with a pushy, pressuring boyfriend. Arrangements to stay with my grandmother quickly lapsed as I went from one abusive relationship to another. My ex pressured me into performing sex acts on camera to make money for “us”, but he’d helped me pack up my things and move them from my parents’ house when no one else would, so how could I say no?

Wolves feasted on me in a world I wasn’t prepared for because my parents took my wellness for granted.

Throughout my life the most empowering act I’ve realized I’m capable of is walking away. Walking away is hard. Walking away is painful. Walking away is trying to have dignity and strength, in spite of being unlovable, impure, manipulative, and worthy of reproach and contempt. I’m both old enough to fend for myself, and young and stupid enough to not be worthy of dignity and strength, in my parents’ eyes.

My daughter was photographed and distributed in a vulnerable situation, crying and nude. My mother has called me crazy and mocked me when I was compromised in similar positions. My love for my daughter is uncomplicated affection; it hurts me to know that she has already been used as a prop for someone else’s weaponized shame and guilt. It all comes back to me, because whether or not I engage, I’m the epicenter of ALL that is impure, manipulative, and worthy of reproach and contempt. I deserve it, and I can’t be forgiven until I pay for it.

I don’t want my daughter, or any of my children, to pay for it. I want them to grow up confident, secure, and whole. I don’t want them to comply when they are subjected to guilt, and shame, and exposure because they were inconvenient and unpredictable to a trusted adult in their lives.

I can do my job. I can be a trusted adult and act in my children’s best interests. We are here, today, because you mixed up actions and reactions. Leaving was a reaction to the way you deal with children, and maybe also the parents you still view as children.

I can forgive the past. I can’t abide patterns. I love you, and grieve you, but through my pain, I want to love my daughter, and show her that she is pure, well-intentioned, and worthy of love and grace. She’s four, after all. She’s new. She’s sinless.

How dare you make her feel like she’s not. How dare you frame my family’s reaction to your action as a catalyst. How dare you frame me, once again for an audience, as impure, manipulative, and worthy of reproach and contempt?