CoDA Files: The Adult Child

When I was nine years old, I drew a picture of my mother and the man who would become my stepfather having sex.  I used Crayola crayons and a sheet of white paper.  I drew his penis large and pink and pointy, and positioned it in the center of all those peach-colored limbs, a dagger coming down on my mother with her eyes popping out of her skull, her mouth hinged open so wide her cheeks and chin never made it to the page.  I double-traced all the lines, pressing firmly into the paper so that even someone who was blind could run a hand across the back and know what it was about.

They used to lock us out of the house, leaving us to cast our lines in the canal or invite the neighbor kids over for a game of kick the can, which is what we were playing when we heard the moaning.  It sounded like how Hurricane Andrew had sounded from inside my mom's work friend's house where we'd waited out the storm the summer before.  Not lonely or even angry or upset, but deep and long and edged with the sky and ocean and all that is too big to be fully seen.  We could hear their groaning even over the noisy din of the air conditioning unit, which sat on the ground beneath the master bedroom's window and was always running, on account of how cold he liked to keep the house.  I remember how none of us said what we knew, how despite knowing what we would find, we jumped like kangaroos outside the window.  We stood on tiptoe and pressed our noses to the glass and strained our necks to see between the bent mini blinds.

Later, after they'd dressed and he'd had a cigarette and his martini, I called him and my mom outside to where I stood on the grass beside the dock beneath a calm Florida sun.  When they were close enough, I whipped out the drawing from behind my back like it was a knife, driving it into their hands. 

If you'd asked me then why I'd drawn it, why I'd shown them, I would have told you I wanted to hurt them, but I wouldn't have been able to adequately explain how my drawing could be capable of that.  I may have gotten as close as saying I wanted to show them that I too could trespass, that I could violate their privacy and disregard their boundaries and their needs the way they'd disregarded mine.  I wanted to prove that I hadn't lost all my power, that I wasn't as small and insignificant as I seemed, that I should not be taken for granted.  And that I could see them for what they were; I was no fool.

They held that drawing of them with the waxy, popped-out eyes and gaping black-hole mouths bigger than their necks, and laughed.  They laughed and laughed, even as I hid my growing disbelief and helplessness behind a glare. 

My mistake was in thinking that I was showing them something ugly about themselves that they wished to conceal.  I thought I could manipulate them with their shame.  But I'd misjudged the situation.  They weren't ashamed.  They were so far from feeling guilt, they didn't even relate to the grotesque caricatures I'd depicted.  I'd thought I was holding up a magic mirror, that like the mirror in Snow White's fairytale, I could show the truth, and it would be received as if it were a weapon.  I didn't understand that the drawing was a mirror for my insides, that I'd just revealed myself.

When they laughed, I knew I had lost.  He would continue putting it in my mother, and she would continue driving to his house in the middle of the night, disappearing inside as we lay sleeping in the van beneath the yellow glare of a streetlight.

I'm writing this now because no less than three times yesterday did I run across variations of the maxim that we don't always get what we want or feel we deserve.  And because lately I have been wrestling the codependent in me.  When she wins, I morph into an adult child, one who pouts and thinks mean, unfair things, one who would sink a few biting words into your ear if you dared defy her.

When I was a child, before my parents divorced (and a bit afterwards too), I threw tantrums.  To this day, I have never seen a child throw a tantrum with the same level of passion and commitment I did.  When I hurled myself onto the ground, I did it with the fervor of a Justin Bieber fan groping the stage.  I hugged the earth (or checkered supermarket floor or hot asphalt parking lot or restaurant carpet) and kicked with the force of an Olympic swimmer and the grace of an enraged grizzly bear.  I howled like a dog caught in a trap.  I screamed demands and on occasion bit and scratched.

Usually at some point just before this epic scene, I would threaten my mother.  I would brush my unruly blond hair out of my face, cross my arms, and with the hardness of a rock tell her I was going to run away.  Sometimes I'd go to my room and pack.  A couple of times I even made it down the block after my mother waved goodbye to me at the front door, but I always chickened out with the reality of my situation, which was not that I loved my mother or would be lonely, but that I wouldn't be able to take care of myself.  When I wasn't threatening to leave, I would threaten other things.  I'd swear off food, hoping my mother cared enough about me that she'd give in to me before I starved to death.  I'd tell her I wasn't going to school or that I wasn't going to get dressed or that I was going to break something she cared about.  My need to control was profound.

Sometimes the fit itself made everything better because my mother would gather me to herself like I was a wounded yet dangerous animal and hold me tight against her chest until all the fight had left my arms and legs, until her perfume and the soft skin of her neck and the gradually slowing thump of our hearts was all that remained between us.

There are things we grow out of.  Namely, pants and shoes.  But unless we make a conscious effort to change our perceptions, responses, and behaviors, we don't actually grow into adults.

My most memorable adult temper tantrum took place when I was twenty years old.  I had locked myself in a bathroom to keep my girlfriend from reaching me.  Picture it: darkness because the light was off, the sprawl of a skinny 5'2" body on the floor, legs and arms flailing, fists punching the linoleum, an angry voice shouting itself hoarse on the daggers of words rising and falling: "I hate you!  I hate you! I hate you!"  And then, because she needed leverage and she'd long ago learned that threatening to run away was useless, she grabbed a bottle of aspirin and held it like it was a bag she'd packed, like she could take it if she had to and never come back.

Now, years later, in moments when I look at that scene, instead of always seeing it through the same funnel of sadness I used to when the thought of suicide was still as close as a medicine cabinet, I think to myself,  HOLY FUCK, I was actually going to kill myself because my girlfriend kissed someone else, and it's so absurd that I nearly laugh.  I look at that girl on the bathroom floor, and while I feel compassion for her and her pain, I also see what she's doing--she's having a fucking temper tantrum.  That is, in fact, what I was doing.  Because I didn't like what someone else did, and I didn't like how I felt.  It came down to this: I didn't like that things weren't going my way.  And I was going to do something about it, by God.  I was going to kill myself.  THAT would get me what I wanted.

But I didn't kill myself.  Because I knew deep down that ending my life wouldn't get me what I wanted, which I wouldn't have been able to tell you at the time but which I now know was to be loved.

I would like to say I don't throw fits anymore, but that would be a lie.  These days, when things aren't going my way or I'm feeling neglected or misunderstood or powerless, I am still prone to tantrums, but in the interest of appearing mature, I keep most of the flailing and yelling on the inside.  I have more awareness than I did when I was a kid, and that can sometimes prevent a fit, and I have more tools because I have gone to therapy and I go to 12-step meetings.  But every now and then, I feel myself slipping, my hands groping for a crown and a scepter, my mouth contriving manipulations.  In those tremulous moments when I can feel myself about to say anything, do anything, to have just a bit of power, I am grateful to have the serenity prayer, words spoken at the start and finish of every meeting, a reminder that I am not alone, that I am not powerless, and that sometimes the one watching over me denied my wants not because she didn't love me, but because she did.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.