Broken Boys

Sometimes when Mark and I would wax poetic about the freedom we had as kids, how you could be gone on your bike for hours and nobody worried where you were as long as you were home for dinner, our kids would be envious. Often they would say, “I wish I lived back then,” and I would explain that those good old days were sometimes countered with especially awful days. Physical punishment was the norm then, and my brothers on many occasions would be hit across the backside with my Dad’s belt. I can remember their pleading, their I’m-sorry-I’ll-never-do-it-again, and ultimately their cries throughout the house. Those memories all these years later have not lost their power.

As those things go as you get older, the stories took on a life of their own. I don’t know why because I think for all involved it was traumatizing. Mark had his own stories but there was one in particular that I never could shake. His mom had made a cake and the next day, as it was sitting on the counter, he asked his dad if he could have a piece. He told him no and so he did what every kid does. He went outside, found his mom, and asked her if he could have a piece of cake. She said yes and as he stood in the kitchen eating it his dad walked in. As soon as he saw Mark he slapped him so hard across the face the cake flew out of his mouth. “When I tell you no it means no,” he said and walked out of the room. There were other stories far worse than that, but that one still rattles me. Getting slapped across the face is very much about rage, but it’s also about humiliation and who does that to a kid for eating a piece of cake?

On the weekend before Mark died, as we were out walking one night, he said to me, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be an adult and realize that in the house you grew up in the kids were the prey?” I will always be without words to describe the pain and confusion I saw in his face at that moment.

Mark was born prematurely at 3.5# in 1954. The necessity of skin-to-skin contact or bonding like there is now was unheard of in those days whether you were a full-term infant or not. There was only a tiny baby fighting for life under fluorescent lights with a lot of wires hooked up to him. When his parents talked of that time it was never about the crushing worry you would expect the parent of any premature baby to have, but more that their decisions saved him. I don’t know. That may be true or maybe they got lucky and this infant made it when he probably shouldn’t have. It was a long time into my therapy before I talked about Mark being a preemie. My therapist dove deep into that information and said that the essential need of every newborn did not happen to him until months later when he was released from the hospital. By then it was likely too late and that forming a bond with me must have felt terrifying to him because he had no idea what to make of it.

I know he could tell me things he couldn’t tell anyone else. I know he trusted me. I also know that when he went to a few therapy sessions he never went there. After he died I was so mad at him for that, for not talking about the trauma he and his sister lived through, and how I blamed myself for all of it. How I should have forced the issue, how I treated it like it was “his” problem but his problem was very much our problem. Over and over I have brought this up in therapy, how it has wracked me with guilt until my therapist said to me, “It is one thing to go to a therapist for anxiety and depression or grief. It’s an entirely different thing to go for shame.” What Mark was ashamed of was not going to see the light of day if he could help it.

Then one morning he left the house and died by his own making because that’s how you kill shame once and for all. If I could beg anyone reading about my experiences these past few years, it would be to call a professional, to pull every painful thing out of the closet and from underneath the bed where The Memory Monsters sleep every night waiting to snatch your ankle if you dare brush past them. Because little boys whose souls were broken by abuse grow up to be broken men, and the bravest thing one can do is to tell every horrible detail to a licensed counselor and believe them when they look you in the eye and says, “None of it was your fault.”

None of it.

Then learn how to forgive yourself for the years of self-loathing, and by all means, enjoy a piece of cake.

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