Leash

As a child, I knew my father’s capacity for violence when my mother was away, and I knew that she spent all the long night alone with him, and I was afraid for her. I would feel a tremor moving through the wall and push two fingers into my mouth to stop-up any sound, afraid for myself too.


Between them there were no words. Only ever animal noise—the sounds of a cat forced into a box.


In the mornings, I would run to my mother, and she would put her arms out, low and stiff to stop me from coming too close, and there was some comfort, as a child, in believing this was not a rejection of me as her daughter, but a protection of her own body.


As an adult, I often feel as if I am the only one who is making an argument for the importance of nuance, for the importance of the complexities and contradictions that rough out the loose shape of something that could exist, skin-to-skin, with truth.


Eventually, I came to understand that my father’s ready fury and my mother’s thin control of it, lived at the heart of her pleasure, that his greatest—perhaps only—appeal was as her bully on a leash, the threat of him clipped to a little gold chain, the leather loop loose around her wrist.


Now, I have to ask: how much forgiveness can a person’s fear grant? I ask this all the time, for myself and on behalf of others who have been, like me, complicit, and whom I hope may still be forgiven.