Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction by Elizabeth Vargas

Author:Elizabeth Vargas
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2019-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

There Was a Little Girl, Who Had a Little Curl, Right in the Middle of Her Forehead

My mother and father were young when I was born and, as they will be the first to tell you, relatively clueless about parenting. I was their first child, and I was a handful. I had colic, and I cried nonstop. It was the era of Dr. Spock, whose advice to mothers and fathers was received like Holy Scripture. If your baby cries, he counseled, leave her be; soon enough she’ll cry herself to sleep.

My overwhelmed parents listened to Dr. Spock and left me in my crib to wail for hours, while they worried in the next room. By the time I was a year old I was soothing myself by rocking the crib, back and forth, for hours every night. There are many toddlers who do this. I did it until I was eight years old. It was the only way I knew to make myself feel better.

When I was four my father, who was a captain in the U.S. Army, received orders to move to Okinawa. It was in the middle of the huge troop buildup in the Vietnam War, nearly two thousand miles from my dad’s new post. The base was crowded, and there were no houses available. Rather than leave my mother; my three-year-old brother, Chris; and me behind in the States, my dad looked for a home off base, “on the economy,” as those in the military call it. That way, we could all stay together. We packed our bags and got our vaccines and boarded the long flight for Japan.

We arrived in November 1966 to an unseasonable chill and a steady rain. My dad scraped together $2,500 to buy a brand-new concrete and cinderblock house on a small street. That house turned out to be a catalogue of terrors and phobias for a young child. The concrete had not set when we moved in: it was cold and damp. My mother covered the floors of our closets and lined our drawers with tinfoil to keep the mildew out of our clothes and shoes. The steady, relentless rain turned the alleys around our house into streams and the fields into marshes. Our sodden little house didn’t stand a chance. Water poured in everywhere. Our ceilings began dripping in dozens of places. We scattered all of our pots and pans around on the floor to catch the rainwater, plinking and plonking all over the house, a symphony of waterworks.

We didn’t have a telephone, so we went to our neighbor’s to call the Japanese man who had built the house.

“It’s raining in the house!” my mother wailed.

That proved to be too long a sentence for the builder’s few words of English.

“Rain, yes,” he said, in a tone that implied that it was unremarkable for there to be rain. Clearly the idea that water was coming into the house had not made it across the language barrier.

After a lot of back and

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