issue eighteen: alethia and me

An author describes the loss of her family.

I have a daughter named Alethia and long story short: I saved her from an abusive man, her stepfather. I feared when she was first born that I was going to have to put her up for adoption. I didn’t have what it takes to take care of a child. I was an alcoholic and I blacked out constantly. I was famous in college, but completely lonely; I often spent nights crying myself to sleep. When I got pregnant with Alethia, I stopped drinking, but I could not bring myself to face the reality of the man who I slept with: he was not going to be a father and he certainly was not going to be a partner to me.

I think that maybe I felt so alone because I never thought I could ask anybody for help. My mother was abusive, which I discovered in therapy is why I chose Alethia’s stepfather to partner with for some time. My therapists posited that I chose him because I was trying to recreate a memory from my childhood. It is odd that memory works like that; one seeks out the repetition of great works as though they are paintings rather than massive embodied experiences. I didn’t even ask my therapists for help during crisis moments. I didn’t want to disturb anyone.

I spent weeks begging for my partner’s attention, chasing after him, and then I spent years trying to disentangle myself from his apathetic possessiveness. In those years, Alethia grew big and strong. She started walking at two years old, started reading at four years old, and started proper homeschooling when she was seven. I took care of the homeschooling while my partner picked fights over the dishes, the quality of my homeschooling, and my wardrobe.

Alethia grew up in a big, sunny house─bigger than my childhood home─but there was never enough room for any of us. Far from it: we spent nearly every day battling over the available space. At her current age of eleven years old, she might read this and think something different, as she used to tell me that the natural landscapes in our town of New Paltz gave her a different perspective on the confines of our home. To put it her way, she said that “the forests are like memory keepers too”. 

I tried to tell myself that in that house for the three of us, I couldn’t look for myself in the bottom of a bottle of Ciroc. That was wrong. My regretful past experiences seemed to chase after me like fireflies in summer. I felt my eyes drawn to every single mistake and blemish as though I were criticizing my own teenage pimply face. My curly hair stood up from being rubbed on my pillows all night and never lost its frizz. The gaps in my teeth never closed. And I never went to the dentist. I never sold a single novel. I didn’t even make it to the publishing house. I grew up in a sandstorm-like house that punished individual achievements and pride with silent disapproval. We put cooperation over any single-minded pursuit such as fame.

Nothing was ever enough for me. The college fame, the constant socializing, and the sleepy, sunny house only brought out my stormy mood at what I’d experienced in my childhood. While he criticized the way I did the dishes, I struck back with how he’d lashed out at Alethia for not doing her homework or for leaving the lights on in a room. The lights went off in that house forever for us in 2009, during a storm.