Acceptance, page 35
Despite the urging to the contrary, I decided to tell my mom how I felt. Six months after I got married, I flew to Minneapolis, rehearsed, and then told her, “Your hoarding has definitely placed a big wedge in our relationship.” Immediately, I added a caveat: “And I know it’s an illness.”
“Well, I think they put it in the diagnostic manual so they can charge for it,” my mom started. I was ready for her to deny being sick; that was part of the disorder. She claimed that doctors had been out to get her and that I’d only gone to foster care “to get out my angries” on strangers. That, too, I was prepared for.
I brought up the emails I’d found, the harmful things she said.
“Well, you were drinking,” she replied, insisting I’d accepted shots from the men at the hostel. She had made this a question of fact—had I been drinking or not?—a question that would consume me for six months of research through old emails and journals, even though I knew it didn’t matter.
“I don’t understand why it’s really relevant.”
“Well, you said you had a good, stiff drink to kind of steel you for what was ahead.” She denied holding me responsible, but she said I’d “willingly participated.” She said she was sorry I felt blamed and told me I’d expected performing oral sex in a kitchen to be “sweet and nice and gentle.”
All through the conversation, I pleaded with her: Why couldn’t she let me off the hook? Wasn’t my rapist the easiest scapegoat in the world? He was a nameless, faceless stranger half the world away, the stereotype of a monster who preyed on her daughter. Yet again and again, she turned to my supposed drinking and to the fact that I did not object vehemently, to the idea that I had, in fact, consented. It didn’t matter what this grown man did or that the crime had the elements of ritual (like the perfectly accented commands from porn). All that mattered was what I had done: drank (or not), decided to comply, opened my mouth.
In that way, it was the same old story, where outside forces did not matter, only my own actions. No wonder that all these years later, I was still telling my therapist about the rape that “a good person, a moral person, would die before letting that happen.” Of course my mom could not absolve me: if this one thing wasn’t my fault, then other things might not be my fault either. That would contradict the story that we both believed in, that I’d once endorsed more than anyone: that I was the master of my fate, that I was the one in control.
* * *
—
In the years after I graduated from college, it made me squirm to watch the gospel of “grit” make its way into the mainstream. In a viral TED talk, the psychologist Angela Duckworth proselytized that youth in crisis needed mental toughness. From the way she talked about it, grit was more important than food, shelter, or safety. Others seemed to agree: in 2015, when a cover-up of contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, was exposed, behavioral scientists flocked to the city. Combating the effects of lead poisoning required unrealistic efforts, like funding for maternal health care, pediatric nutrition, and early-childhood education. Instead, The New Yorker reported, before many homes even had safe drinking water, behavioral scientists were on the ground figuring out how to teach children “a growth mindset.”
This doctrine was supposed to be for young people’s own good. Society’s constant problems—poverty, racism, violence—seemed intractable. Others, like inequality, were only becoming worse. Even in a country as rich as America, there seemed to be simply no hope of all youth having a fair chance. I recognized the emphasis on “grit” as a final throwing up of hands. Kids too young to speak would be held responsible for their own problems. It didn’t matter how they were wronged, or how preventable the harm; their job was to contain the damage, making the blast zone smaller by absorbing all the impact.
When flagrant affronts drew the ire of society—like migrant children separated from their families and detained in tent cities, oil fields, and a converted Walmart—I found myself numb. Maybe it’s for the better, I thought. Maybe the adversity will make them stronger. The doctrine of “anything bad can be alchemized into something good” had been so drilled into me that it seemed to apply even in this extreme situation. I was horrified by the logic I’d internalized.
The whole song and dance of resilience chipped away at my humanity. It required a profound lack of empathy. It erased any pain, no matter how great, as long as it resulted in productivity. And when I was not productive—when I cried for hours every night for months, when I screamed when people came up behind me, when I never felt at ease, even in my home with my partner—it made me feel like a failure. I told Byron I wished I had not lived, that the world would be better without me: “What have I even done with my life?” He teased me for not starting a charity. I took this as a serious critique.
I was supposed to smile in Harvard Yard, not sob in bathroom stalls. I was supposed to be happy and grateful for all I’d been given. I was supposed to exemplify post-traumatic growth, not post-traumatic stress disorder. When people asked me, “Was it worth it?”—did an Ivy League diploma compensate for the ways I’d been mistreated?—I was supposed to respond, unequivocally, “Yes.” All the other lives that could have been mine—lost to incarceration, addiction, lethal violence—were supposed to make my success shine in bright relief. Yet these alternative fates weighed on me. It didn’t make me feel better that my generation was poorer than their parents, largely because of the crushing student loans I’d avoided. The suspicion that I would have gotten put into the justice system instead of the mental health system if I were Black or Latina gave me no relief, to put it mildly. It did not console me that I had worked hard: in hindsight, my adolescence felt like buying every lottery ticket I could afford.
* * *
—
as much as I struggled with attitudes toward overcoming and resilience, society also changed in very welcome ways as I went through my twenties. The Me Too movement meant my mom no longer had a monopoly on my understanding of what had happened in Budapest. Thanks to reality television, people understood that “hoarding” didn’t just mean my mom had a lot of stuff. Generation Z embraced the word “queer”—the label I needed when I knew I wasn’t straight—and ushered in a new era of body positivity. Cultural awareness around trans identities exploded, and the terminology became infinitely less jarring than phrases like “sex change,” “transsexual,” and “sexual reassignment surgery,” which I’d grown up using. Discussing Michelle no longer required an informational lecture. For years, I had avoided talking about Michelle at all, ashamed of the mistakes I’d made in discussing her in the past, and because I didn’t want people to think I was blaming her transition for the pain she caused. I wonder, all the time, how things would be different if I’d been born even a decade later.
Meanwhile, the progress made by activists has been countered by anti-trans legislation that specifically targets children, who are easier to police and control. Texas began investigating gender-affirming care as abuse; Florida proposed mandating that schools disclose any “nonconforming” identities to parents. Advocates of these measures frame them as issues of “parental rights”—once again placing the preferences of adults above the needs of children. These laws weaponize the very systems that are supposed to protect kids, turning our society’s most vulnerable into pawns of the culture war.
The consequences of anti-trans discrimination are dire. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found that 40 percent of transgender respondents had attempted suicide—nearly ten times the rate of the general population. Nearly one third of the trans respondents experienced homelessness; almost half reported having experienced at least one sexual assault. Many of the most devastating aspects of my experience are par for the course for trans kids, who need not just awareness but protection.
As I struggled in my midtwenties, I wondered if I had “survivor’s guilt”—the persistent questioning “Why me?” of someone who makes it out of a situation that others don’t escape. But the more I saw of our increasingly unequal world, the more it seemed like “thinking person’s guilt.” The deal I’d struck made me feel sick. My role in the system was to smile and to show that the status quo was not that bad, because some people—including me—supposedly transcended.
* * *
—
After I told my mom her hoarding affected me, I’d promised myself I wouldn’t contact her first. I was no longer willing to let her call the shots and pretend everything was okay. But four months later, on Mother’s Day, I broke down. Her texts resumed, but she stopped saying she was proud of me or that she loved me. I ached like a child to return to her good graces.
Ten months after our talk, just after I turned twenty-seven, she wrote me, “It’s forty-seven degrees and a star-filled sky in New York.” She added the star emoji. The sweetness of her words made me think of myself staring at the sky, hoping for a better life—not to be treated like she was treating me.
Byron held me as I dialed. With each ring, I wanted to hang up, but that would only make it harder. My mom picked up as she was walking into Hobby Lobby. I said, sniffling, that we couldn’t have a relationship while she denied the things she’d done that had hurt me and held me responsible for the rape.
“The what?” she asked.
“The assault.”
“Oh.” Cash registers clicked behind her. I was ready for my mom to apologize, for her to hear me, and finally realize what I’d been saying since I was a child. My mom sighed. “I just feel like you are an endless well of mea culpa. I just don’t know what I can say to make you think that I don’t think it’s your fault.”
“You can say, ‘It’s not your fault.’ ”
She wouldn’t say it. Items beeped in the background as they scanned. Four beeps, five, six. I knew I’d done the right thing.
I said “I love you” again and again, as if all of the “I love yous” I had left had to be compressed into one fifteen-minute conversation, although my mom didn’t seem to register what was happening. She probably thought I was premenstrual.
When I clarified that she shouldn’t call me again, she said: “Look, the hoarding is not your responsibility, except for the hole in my heart. And I don’t blame you for the assault.”
Except for the hole in my heart. Who was the parent here? Whose heart got to have holes? And “I don’t blame you” was a world away from “It’s not your fault.”
“I love you,” I said, one more time, my eyelashes matted together with tears. “Goodbye.” My hand shook as I pressed the button to hang up.
Without my mom, I waited for my life to fall apart. I expected a void to open inside of me that would torment me for the rest of my life. But I realized that I’d already experienced my mom as an absence. I’d already suffered so much when she’d taken her love for me, and her faith in me—as true as it was—and used it as a weapon.
Sometimes I lie in bed and ache, wishing for a parent who loved me regardless of what I achieved. I think of my mom’s idiosyncratic truisms—the way she’d finish a task and say, “Good enough for government work!”—her generosity and strength, the ways she’s a remarkable human, someone who made the best out of bad situations and carved her own version of happiness out of her disorder.
But I never miss the way she treated me.
* * *
—
My exposure therapist told me that the purpose of my treatment was to accept what happened. Not accept it in the sense of the final stage of grief—that would come later, if ever—but merely to acknowledge reality. To do that, I combed through all the details (touch, smell, taste, thoughts, bodily sensations) until a coherent story emerged. That was the same goal I had while writing this book, which consumed seven years of my twenties.
One big part of the process was tracking down the man from Budapest who raped me. People told me I had to make peace with everything I’d never know, but through the years, I was haunted by the fact that he knew my name, but I didn’t know his. The hostel had since closed, the owner impossible to find. With the help of an investigator, I looked through hundreds of photos taken on the premises and posted online, wondering if I would even recognize his face. After a few weeks, when the cause seemed hopeless, the investigator tracked down a former hostel employee on Instagram; she identified my rapist from the picture I couldn’t remember taking. I learned that he was forty-two or forty-three when he attacked me, and he wasn’t Serbian. Growing up during the war was a lie. Perhaps most chilling was the time stamp on the photograph. It was taken at least two hours after I entered the hostel to get my things, a time I have no memory of. Together, these facts painted a very different picture of what happened than either the story my mom told or the one that I’d clung to. I wanted so badly to believe in human goodness, and to minimize the situation, that I’d justified what he did. But the more I learned about this person, the more I realized that believing in the good of humanity means acknowledging that some people are bad.
The sad and enraging things I found in my research mostly did not surprise me, but again and again, I was shocked by the acts of kindness. When I called Jane and asked if she understood what happened to me in Budapest, she replied, “Oh my God, Emi, I should have known.” She swore it was okay to be mad at her. But I wasn’t. We had been teenagers constrained by different norms. After our conversation we started Facebook messaging again constantly, picking up where we’d left off.
Even imperfect people changed my life for the better. As a girl, Ingrid had dreamed of attending Interlochen, so she advocated hard for me to go. The more time I spent with Harvard people, the more I respected Dave and Jan for opening their home to me. By the time we spoke years later, they’d fostered many other children and become adoptive parents. Dave asked me what my time was like with them, acting like he expected frankness. “It was important,” I replied, telling the truth. I gained new empathy for Annette and forgave her imperfections for good when my oldest nephew came back into my life. He was a nineteen-year-old community college student, realizing for the first time how my mom had impacted his dad, and moving out on his own. I was terrified for him. Every time we spoke, I couldn’t sleep. Even though his circumstances were better than mine had been, I worried about every detail of his life: Would he get a bachelor’s degree? Would his job include health insurance? What if he got injured or had a mental health crisis? For years, Annette had had those fears about me. Without her, I would not have made it.
Each bit of information I learned gave me a piece of myself back. It helped me create a story independent from the one I’d believed, the one where the trouble started with me. When I was in a dark place, I got an unexpected email from the man from the embassy in Budapest. A month earlier, I’d written him and received a notification that began “I have completed my time . . .” and said the address would no longer be monitored.
“Of course I remember you,” he wrote. “How could I forget?” He said he could tell that something was seriously wrong when I came in; he even noted how little I had with me. His description of the day was so clear that I could see the framed photos of President Obama and Secretary Clinton on the wall. His witnessing was a gift I’d struggled to give myself.
“I remember that you were shattered but not destroyed, if that makes sense,” he told me. “I had the feeling you would find some way to salvage a life for yourself.”
My salvaged life, I thought in wonder.
I had spent my young adulthood desperate for redemption, striving to make everything that happened “for the best.” It would only be a good story, I believed, if it had the happiest ending. I had to take tragedy and twist it into triumph. Otherwise, I would be pathetic, if not forever broken. But the man’s email revealed a third option: I was allowed to be affected. I was allowed to be changed.
With that understanding, I built scaffolding to support myself. The year I turned twenty-eight, my insurance paid out fifty thousand dollars for therapy and acupuncture, plus chiropractic and physical therapy to treat chronic physical pain. Without guilt, I warned people that I screamed when approached from behind. When I couldn’t sleep, Byron tucked me back in, handing me a plush penguin and telling me a story about a family full of mischievous birds.
Instead of making a life that would redeem the past—an impossible feat—I sought out a life that I could live with. For the first time, I felt lucky for the little things: to wake up in the morning in my own bed, to eat breakfast, to do my work. It was no longer so important to me to achieve something great, because I was happy to be alive, which had seemed impossible and tenuous. I became grateful for the passing of time, each milestone that brings me away from then, into now: my marriage, buying an apartment, changing jobs, each new baby penguin, one day a child of our own, for whom I swear I will not make the same mistakes, though I know I’ll fall short in some regard.
On my wall, I have a poster that always reminds me of when I was growing up. A girl stares out the window at a city while a plane crosses in front of the moon. Every time I see it, I say a prayer of gratitude to my younger self for delivering me here, into adulthood, where I can make my own peace with what I learned along the way.
Author’s Note
Memory is the primary source of the material in this book, supplemented by interviews, emails, journal entries, and medical records. Dialogue has been reconstructed, to the best of my recollection and with the help of documentation where available. Some names have been changed and certain identifying characteristics have been omitted—for example, to protect the privacy of people who were minors at the time.
Acknowledgments
