I Just Haven't Met You Yet by Tracy Strauss

Author:Tracy Strauss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510742932
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2019-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

The more I reckoned with my history, the more I came into conflict with my mother.

When my mother visited, we fought in front of Hannah, who sat in her kitty bed, her tail waving its crooked end, which pointed inward, as if to the soul-breaking events of her past.

“I don’t understand,” my mother said, her voice rising, “where your anger toward me comes from. I didn’t do anything. Your father was the one—” She suspended the end of her thought.

“You were sitting in the next room when it happened,” I said. “You didn’t stop him.”

“I didn’t know!” she said. “You never said anything.”

I had no response.

“As I’ve said before, I’m sorry it happened,” she said.

“Anyone can say they’re sorry ‘it’ happened,” I said. “You never say you’re sorry for your part.”

“My part?” she said. “I didn’t abuse you. If I had known what was going on I would’ve done something, but you never said anything, no one from outside ever said ‘something looks wrong between Tracy and her father,’ no one ever told me—” She stopped mid-sentence, crossed her arms, and held her elbows with her fingertips.

If she had known? I thought to myself. She’d previously said she had.

I studied my mother: Her hair looked brassy-brittle under my halogen lamplight. Her blue eyes appeared swollen behind her glasses.

She spoke as if she were in a trance: “I had panic attacks when your brother was five. I had trouble swallowing meals.” She said it in monotone, as if she were reading a grocery list. “I had trouble breathing while driving the car with you two in it. I’m sure as kids you and Russell picked up on that vulnerability. I thought I was crazy, but really it was that your father was controlling my mind, telling me that my perceptions were wrong. He manipulated me.”

For the first time, I saw my mother’s frailty. When exactly had she become this way? I didn’t want to see that this had always been the way she was. Many times, in my early teens and twenties, if I expressed some minor discontent with something my mother had said or done, she became annoyed: “You and your brother expect me to be perfect,” she often said. “You don’t allow me to be human.” I didn’t expect my mother to be infallible. In fact, I felt she was the one who always needed me to be. But in truth, for my whole life I’d idealized her, because I couldn’t bear to face the fact that she’d failed me. Now, seeing her in this light, I felt shock and frustration, and grief.

“I’m sorry for all that you went through,” I said. “But you were my mother.”

“How could you be raped,” she said, “and not make a noise?”

“Are you saying you don’t believe me?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I already said I believe you.”

I wasn’t sure I believed her: Why was there this debate?

“Why,” she continued, “did I not hear a scuffle?”

“I left my body,” I said, grasping at therapy jargon to more easily explain a coping mechanism I didn’t think my mother would accept.

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