dear [not just YA] author
21 Jul 2009 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouI've always figured eventually I'd explain the reasons why I'd post about city/street, and a bit of how I ended up there if that might help others comprehend, but first, this segue is overdue. It's for all those authors who write for a teenage audience, or have teenage protagonists, because your genre has a lot to answer for. Not that this is your fault, personally, but it is a responsibility you bear, I think. And it's one you need to at least be aware of, if you aren't already, so if you choose to disregard you do so intentionally.
It's a little like deciding that in your book, all Hispanics are maids or plumbers: if you're going to play to the stereotypes, at least be able to look me in the face when we meet and say, yes, I'm aware of the issues surrounding using ethnic characters as lower-class background only; my use of that was intentional. Whether this can alleviate the larger issue would be contextual, based on the book you wrote, but it's still better than you giving me a pop-eyed look and proclaiming you had no idea! that anyone would be offended to see all Hispanics in your book are lazy, drunken, ill-educated part-timers.
This is more related to the issues mentioned in part III than in part I or part II. The first two parts mostly did a lot of implying. So here goes.
I grew up in the generation of the After School Special, before there was a specific "young adult" section in the bookstore or library. Not to say there weren't books that suited teen and pre-teen quite well; it was just that you had to do a little digging either in the 'older kids' areas or selective perusing through the 'adult' (read: mainstream regular) fiction. I recall two basic classes of books about teenagers, roughly: the adventure books — often SFF, historical (such as Kipling's works), or mysteries in the school of Nancy Drew — and the wackier distopian-fiction so big in the 60s, of which Lord of the Flies might be a forerunner.
The other class of books seemed to be geared towards an adult audience but with teenage protagonists, and often the tone was — I'd apply this now, though I didn't then, obviously — a bit more exploitative. Kids on drugs! Girls being promiscuous! Go Ask Alice and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden are two classics of those overly heavy ham-handed companions to the After School Special. Even when reading that type in middle school, I wasn't so stupid as to miss the strong sense that I was reading something written to make adults feel better.
So here's what I learned from the age of 8 through the end of high school, thanks to that nebulous genre that got its start around my middle school years and has since grown into the juggernaut known as the YA world. The assumptions and patterns, from what I can tell, remain strong in mainstream fiction and entertainment, which means even if some few are writing otherwise, there's still a fair bit to go. Thus, here's the kid logic that I'd ask you please consider the next time you set fingers to keyboard to create a teenaged-protagonist.
I'm not asking you to fix the world. I'm just saying that if you want to keep it broken for a share of your readers, at least be aware you are.
1. Abused kids have parents without jobs, who slept on the sofa.
Classic scene from book or TV show: kid comes home, Dad's on the sofa asleep. Dad wakes up, yells at kid, hits kid, and kid flees to room or to neighbors or whatever. Somewhere in there, backstory is that Dad's been laid-off and has taken to sleeping on the sofa during the day. Why? I never got that, as a kid. Adults have beds; that's where they sleep, like anyone. Sleeping on the sofa was bizarre.
My dad didn't get laid-off; my dad was a workaholic. My mother stayed home (and ran a business from the home) while I was little, taught part-time while I was in grade school, and went back to work full-time when I entered middle school. The only time a parent slept on a sofa in my house was if Dad fell asleep while watching his alumna play their big rival and the score wasn't close enough to keep his interest.
Obviously, for abuse to be happening, a parent had to be laid off and prone to sleeping during the day. My parents didn't, and thus I couldn't relate to those abused kids — because they were abused, and I wasn't.
2. Abused kids were always embarrassed to bring friends over, because their parents would be drunk or high.
Nope. Not once was I ever embarrassed about bringing friends home, for fear of how my parents would react — hell, I even brought home friends with mohawks and studded jackets and didn't think twice about that. My parents were articulate, well-educated, charming (in the case of my mother) and professorially-intimidating (in the case of my father) but if I'd ever walked through the door and found either of them falling-down-drunk, I think I would've checked for cameras.
Obviously, a big part of being in an abusive family was that parents embarrassed their kids by being useless, shiftless, drunkards, and since my parents weren't, clearly I wasn't abused.
3. Abused kids were perfect angels away from their family, and everyone liked them, and there were always scenes of friends' parents feeling angry at the parents for treating 'such a good kid' so badly.
Couldn't relate to that, either. I rarely visited friends' houses, because their environments felt alien to me, for reason I couldn't put a finger on. I'd talk to other friends' parents and then shut up abruptly, afraid I'd crossed a line, and they'd realize that actually, no, I wasn't a good kid. I wasn't even likeable. The majority of my life, my mother had been telling me that I was completely unloveable, and the only reason my own family put up with me was because they were legally obligated to do so. I wasn't naive enough to think this would all go away just by being elsewhere, and in fact, was terrified everyone else would find out my mother was right.
Nope, I was quite certain that in fact the parents were tolerating me, maybe out of pity, or maybe they were too stupid to realize and I had them hoodwinked, but nobody's stupid forever. Therefore, since no one was raving about how I was an amazing and awesome kid to the contrary of what I heard at home, obviously... I wasn't abused.
4. Abused kids in books and TV worked hard, really really hard, and when the parents yelled at them, it was always either from a misunderstanding or for something totally not the kid's fault (or even within the kid's control).
Again, nope. I was an absolute hellion in school, from about 1st grade on. I remember turning over a kid's desk in 1st grade when he pissed me off; I cheated outrageously in 2nd grade and rationalized it as the teacher said you had to turn in a paper with your name on it — she never said it had to be your paper that had your name on it, which seemed perfect to me because then I had more time to read. I yelled back at my 4th grade and 5th grade teachers. (Oddly, I don't recall getting into any trouble in 6th grade, mostly b/c the teachers then kept me way too busy.)
In 7th grade I bounced back and forth (literally, quarter by quarter!) between 'advanced' classes and remedial. I was too distractable to keep up in the advanced classes, while the remedial classes were often hands-on, enough of a change for me to enjoy the work and get it done... and just as I got bored, I'd be switched back into the advanced class to be re-surrounded by peers fully aware I'd been switched out only six weeks before for being Not Good Enough. I was almost held back in 7th grade, and again in 8th grade, and both times it took my parents in full-on shouting matches with the school principal (I learned, years later) before the school agreed to advance me.
In 9th grade I settled down, somewhat, but then I became a jock and who cares about the rest. I never smoked, drank, or did drugs, but I learned to forge my mother's signature so perfectly even she thought it was her signature, and as far as the school knew, I was sick — or at a doctor's appt — for about three days out of every four by my junior year. If I didn't have the car, I walked off-campus and caught the bus to my favorite museum or park. I did not get straight A's. I didn't really much come close. I was, on paper, a slightly below-average student who had twelve years of "you're not working up to your full potential" yammered at me, almost daily.
So... yeah, clearly when my parents got really mad at me, and I promised to work harder, it never happened, and so they were probably justified in throwing hot coffee in my face for back-talking. Or taking away the birthday gift they'd given me only a week before, and giving it to my sister instead. Or for smacking me. Or for catching me by the arm and squeezing so hard I got bruises. Because abused kids did really well in school, so that everyone — including this young reader — could see that the parents had no reason to treat their kids like that. But, obviously, I couldn't be abused, because my parents had lots of reasons, right?
5. Kids who lived in abusive houses weren't usually poor, but were definitely working-class, and their houses were always messy, and their parents cussed, a lot.
Again, obviously I couldn't be abused. My parents were college-educated, with five degrees between them, and had both taught at some of the most prestigious universities on the eastern seaboard. My father's parents may have been blue-collar, but my dad was a military officer, and most of my parents' friends were as well educated and cosmopolitan and charming as my parents could be. My mother cussed maybe once or twice that I recall, as a child, and both times she was on the phone with a friend and didn't realize I was listening — after which I got the lecture of those being 'adult words' and Not For Your Use.
As for the house? It might get a little cluttered, sometimes, but we had a lot of really nice stuff, and the house was never filthy. Even if my mother had to beat my head in with the vacuum cleaner because I'd done my chores haphazardly, that just meant if the house was dirty in some way it was my fault, not my parents', so clearly, still not abused. In the books and on TV shows, the kids were always working hard to try and clean the house despite the parents not caring, but that's not how it was in my house — I'd do anything to get out of vacuuming, because I could never seem to do it right and it always ended up with my mother yelling at me about how if the house looked like a pigsty it was going to be my fault, that she worked so hard for us to have a nice life and I was the one messing it all up, so... clearly, she had every right to hit me, and that meant it wasn't abuse.
6. The pattern was always very simple, and clear: Dad hit Mom, and then sometimes Mom would get really angry and hit the kids, OR, Dad hit Mom, and then Dad hit the kids.
In those books and shows, Mom didn't hit Dad, and Mom didn't just hit the kids without Dad doing hitting as well, and Mom didn't just hit only one kid and cherish the other kid. Obviously, whatever was going on in my house wasn't abuse, because what I lived with wasn't in a single book or on television — and that meant that every time Mom got mad and things got worse, that the label of 'bad family' couldn't be applied, so I applied the only thing that was left: 'bad kid'.
Slight tangent: looking back, I don't actually recall any stories in which the abusive family was a minority family. It was pretty much always an anglo-saxon family, if one that fit more comfortably into an income segment my maternal grandmother only somewhat affectionately called 'cracker'. The one or two times I can recall the focus being on a black family, the story had a single mother whose boyfriend was abusive, and invariably she'd learn from well-meaning neighbors or intervening (always white) teachers what her so-called boyfriend had been doing, she'd confront the children in tears and promise not to let that happen, because she'd learned her lesson about working two jobs to make ends meet and leaving them alone. Which, looking back, was probably meant to warp and punish single mothers (of any race) more than mangle my impressions of what made for a 'good' or 'bad' family, but still, not with the relating.
7. Abusive parents might be regular or might be mean, but then one drink and they'd start yelling for no reason and hitting everything in sight.
My parents were actually more relaxed after a drink, since they mostly drank when they came home from work and would sit in the den and talk about their day, while each had a glass of wine. On the weekends with adult friends visiting, they might have a beer or two. Out to dinner, they might have a drink or two each.
(This isn't counting the last three years of HS, when my father stopped drinking and my mother took up the co-dependent mantle and began drinking heavily, herself. By that time, regardless, the patterns were solidly set, and if my mother was drinking and became angry, I never made the connection, because I'd never had to, before then.)
But, nope, no Jekyll-and-Hyde routine here. Who my parents were, sober, was pretty much the same as who they were after a glass of wine or a beer — neither are massive drinkers, really, so 'drunken parent' wasn't within my mental scope. And thus, obviously, I couldn't be living in an abusive household.
8. Abused kids got hurt. A lot, and really badly. Like, trip-to-hospital bad. Cigarette-burn-bad. Broken-bone-bad. Thrown-down-stairs-bad.
(Though the one time I did get thrown down the stairs, that did cause a sudden revelation that maybe this wasn't okay for parents to do to kids, but then Mom probably yelled something about how horrible my grades were or how lazy I was about chores, and that just reminded me that in my case, clearly, the line was drawn a bit farther out — if the kid was really bad, then the kid shouldn't complain when really bad things happen.)
The only broken bones I've ever had were three fractured ribs from a horrible car accident, as a senior in HS. Never had a cast, never been burned, though I suspect in hindsight there were at least three times my mother did give me a contusion, but we never had the hospital emergency room visit with someone official looking dubious as to whether I really fell out of a window or walked into a door or whatever other stupid reasons mean parents gave in books or on TV. Then again, my mother didn't like her coffee extra-hot, so all the times she threw it at me, I got more damage from the mug than from the hot liquid, and most of the time — seeing how we usually lived somewhere hot and humid — it was an iced drink, not a hot drink. Only abused kids got scalding-hot drinks thrown at them.
I was thrown, slammed into things, hit with telephones and vacuum cleaners and mugs and books, shoved, clawed, gripped hard enough to bruise, had fingers and arms twisted, hair pulled, neck clawed, face and arms scratched, slapped, even nearly strangled a few times. But I never had a broken bone and I never got burned enough to need bandages and I never had stitches, so from everything I saw in books and TV, it was pretty clear that I wasn't abused.
9. If one of the parents was military, it was usually Dad, and if Dad was military, he was all military-precision and don't-backtalk-me tyranny and ran the house with an iron fist and hit anyone who got out of line, and that was military-family-abuse.
I think the most either parent ever demanded of such formalities from me, or my sister, was that we try to use "sir" and "ma'am" with our grandparents because it made them happy, but that if we forgot, our parents would rise quickly to our defense that within family, informality is okay. (But my father always used "sir" and "ma'am" with his parents and his in-laws, which even as a kid I thought was really cool; to me, it said those people mattered to my father that he'd give them the same respect he gave his commanding officers, and is also part of the reason I didn't work harder to "sir" and "ma'am" anyone in my near or extended family, as a tiny private rebellion of my own.)
My grandmother could be quite blistering if you made a bed while visiting and didn't make hospital corners, but most of the time my own folks were willing to settle for me at least pulling the covers up and tucking the pillows nicely — a demand they pretty much dropped by the time I hit HS, anyway. Inspection? At home? The one time (as an adult) I mentioned it to Dad, he said he didn't want that at home; he dealt with it at work, and that's where it'd stay. Mom, raised in military family with a bit more formality than ours, felt the same. No, the military was not to blame and was obviously not a reliable pattern for explaining what went on in our house, because Dad was not the usual book-or-TV career officer.
In fact, my parents went out of their way to avoid any military colleagues who showed those tyrannical traits. Again, not a story that fit what I lived with, and that was abuse, so my life obviously wasn't.
10. A parent who was mean to his/her kids was almost always also mean to adults, and in general nobody would like them.
I think I realized this pattern somewhere in early HS, reading a book for English class, or something. By that point I was self-aware enough to get that there was more going on than what I'd seen/measured up til then, and this realization was a hugely depressing moment for me... because everyone liked my mother. Everyone. She could charm paint off a wall if she sets her mind to it, and most of the time, she doesn't need to set her mind to it, because she just does it as naturally as anyone else does breathing.
Even then, I wasn't surprised in the least when — on the rare occasions I ever let slip word or even hint about what life was like — adults would just assume off the bat that it was my recalcitrance, my attitude, my difficulty, and that (here we go again) if I'd just "be a better kid" then everything would be okay, would be happy. Because someone as cool and funny and intelligent as my mother couldn't possibly be just plain mean, and in books and on TV, abusive parents were equally mean to pretty much everyone, or at least just only kind of liked. They weren't popular, and my mom was popular — hell, most of my friends liked her more than they liked me.
This isn't to say my friends were totally blind, since my mom did slip every now and then, but it was always in a kind of snide way, enough that it could be brushed off. Though if I did any reflexive brushing-off by my HS years, I rarely noticed it. I was well beyond questioning much, by then.
Like doing the MBTI (Meyers-Briggs) which just became more fodder for the yelling: my father the INTJ, and me, the ENTJ, and my mother, the ENFP, and my sister, the INFP. You couldn't have better lines drawn if you wrote fiction: "you're just like your father, and you're just as impossible to love." There it was in the book, even (a text I later learned was discredited for its extreme slant against the NT style): that NTs are cruel, cold, unlikeable, too-intellectual, often unfeeling, extremely insensitive, and will hurt everyone who loves them and — as my mom would extrapolate — NTs are doomed to end up alllllllll alone.
Well, who was I to argue with what was there in black-and-white, by someone with a psychoanalysis degree? That was an expert saying those things. Who was I to rebut? I'd taken the test and been revealed as an NT, so... yeah, more proof I was A Bad Person. That was just how it was, and the sooner I reconciled to living my life that way, the sooner I'd, well, not be happy, but maybe less miserable. Lower the standards, as it were.
I mention all that so you're aware of the backstory for when my best friend took the test, and my mother was explaining the results to her. I can't even recall my friend's type, only that my mother contrasted for illustration, my friend's type to mine: "you're fortunate, because your type is very good with people, and always welcome, sensitive to other people's feelings, not at all like NTs, who are quite cruel and unfeeling." I barely even noticed it, because it was one more jab in the daily litany of such. It was, what it was.
Later that evening, when it was the two of us alone, my friend expressed outrage that my own mother would say that — and while I was in the room, even!
I recall being somewhat taken aback by this fury at my mother, and a bit uncomfortable, too. Yeah, so I didn't really like hearing that I was cold and cruel and unloveable, but it wasn't like I could argue with it, because that's what it meant to be an NT, and that's what I was. My friend remained disgruntled and pissed, and by that point, seemed annoyed with me, as well, and I couldn't figure out why (and didn't really want to try, at that, in that way we all shy away instinctively from major fault lines). I just remember having to do a bit of a tap dance through several topics before she let me change the subject, though for a long time after that she seemed to watch me with a peculiar expression, sometimes.
That was the only time I can ever remember someone not liking my mother, for any reason. All my friends were practically infatuated with her; if they weren't, they sure never let on to me. So, not only was it clearly a situation where things weren't abusive, but this also leads into another reason I knew my household didn't match what I saw in books and TV.
11. When abusive parents get mad and yell and hit, they're always lying while they're yelling.
Ever seen that famous scene in Mommie Dearest, the one about the wire hangers? Joan Crawford discovers her adopted daughter hanging up clothes on wire hangers, goes into a rage, and beats her daughter while screaming, "no wire hangers! no wire hangers!" (If you didn't know, now you do.)
That's what I mean by lying: the constant element in books and TV was that when the abusive parent got mad enough to hit, it was for some trumped-up reason that the kid couldn't have, wouldn't have, known or predicted. I remember watching that scene in HS and my first thought was, "well, that's clearly abuse, because there's no way that girl could've known that wire hangers weren't allowed." Because if she had known, by that logic, then she deserved whatever she got.
I mean, my mother must've told me once if she told me a thousand times to vacuum just so and couldn't I tell that I'd missed a spot? Or that when she said to hand over something to my sister even if I wasn't done with it yet, that this meant I shouldn't backtalk or complain but just hand it over and don't ask for it again later, or else — so it's not like Mom was lying when she got mad as she told me again that I shouldn't do X or Y.
It was true, she'd warned me, and I forgot and did it or did it on purpose or did it and hoped I could get away with it, and when I didn't... well, whatever I got, I deserved. Because she wasn't lying; it wasn't some last-minute trumped-up excuse. Well, usually. Sometimes it was just that I didn't extrapolate well enough to see that when she said "do this" that she also meant "and don't do that," so, again, not with the lying-while-yelling.
And that's why I was both surprised and uncomfortable when my friend got mad on my behalf: because my mother wasn't lying. She didn't lie to me; she'd made that clear from the very beginning, as far back as I could remember. She told me things that hurt, but she prefaced it with "I'm telling you this because I love you," and "I'm telling you this because no one else ever will, but you need to know it," and "I'm telling you this because you're out of touch with reality and don't realize how you appear to other people."
For a friend to be so angry that I'd be called cold and cruel just confused me, at the same time it made me withdraw a little from our friendship — because obviously my friend didn't know me as well as she thought she did, if she couldn't see truth for what it was. The only sane conclusion (if sane there be, in such a life) was to pull back a little, because if my friend didn't know it then, eventually she would, and then where would I be? So I had to cool down on the friendship before she figured out my mother was right, keep that friend at a distance in hopes I could fake it a little longer.
Because the belief that my mother told the truth meant that I knew when I dealt with other people, the only one lying was me.
But I didn't see that going on in any books or TV, so clearly, I couldn't claim I was abused.
12a. Parents are either abusive and horrible, or they're nice. They can't be both.
Part of this is the constraints of how much page space you've got, and how much screen time you've got — and besides, the drama of pitching a fit and pitching kids out windows is just so much more riveting than the times in-between when everything's lovely, right? But when all the books and shows have the same basic pattern and go through the same basic displays, it becomes an overwhelming message: parents who are sometimes cool and then sometimes cruel are not abusive, because if they were abusive, they'd be like that all the time.
There were stretches when everything was fine, or at least my mom was too distracted to bother much with me. Most of the time, we could go a month or two before another blow-up, and in between I could pretend like things were great. I had no idea what would set things off, other than knowing it'd be me who set it off, so in some ways I lived on eggshells in a back part of my brain, just like that rat in the unpredictable maze. (By the time I was in HS, actually, that tension on my part, alone, was sometimes enough to set things off, because my mom would react to my anticipation. Although I note that by that point, we had alcohol oiling the way, which complexifies things.)
But in abusive families in books and on TV, every time the kid comes home, the parent's on them about something. There's a stability to it, and sometimes the kids were written/acted as though they were expecting it. I could see them bracing for it — while the one thing Mommie Dearest did get right (for me, at least) was the look of shock on the girl's face when Crawford flies into a rage. Sheer, unadulterated shock, because she had no idea she'd just stepped on a land mine. But other than that movie, the land mines were portrayed as regular events, close enough together that I almost felt pity for those fictional kids, because at least I had good times, too.
And a bit of self-hatred at the same time, as well, because when I had bad times... those were my fault, anyway. I envied those fictional kids for having the assurance of knowing this was just how their parents were, and that it made no difference what the kid said or did. Big Ben's gonna chime when it chimes, and parents are gonna hit when they hit, and that's abuse. So, clearly, my family wasn't abusive.
12b. Kids who are abused don't like their parents. They fear them, they endeavor to please them, but they don't actually like their parents.
Thing is, I did like my mother, as a child — if a kind of uneasy liking, in that life was unpredictable — but if we were out and about, or people were visiting, or it was an easy-going day, I liked her a great deal. So I feel like this has to be said, rather than leave anyone with the impression that my childhood has left me an embittered person who loathes the parental units. I don't.
No, for all I went though, I still like, and respect, both my father and my mother, as human beings. I'll focus on my mother since she's getting the brunt of it here, and state it for the record that I'd want to know her even if I weren't related to her. She's funny, witty, a little goofy sometimes, incredibly bright and amazingly creative, always has eighteen different projects going and is always up for more; she's very much the life of the party and someone who enjoys doing things and seeing things and learning and experiencing.
She's educated and cosmopolitan but retains enough of her Southern upbringing that she doesn't intimidate people but sets them at ease, and she can find something in common with anyone, from the recent immigrant who worked as the night janitor when she stayed in the hospital to the multiple-honored Hungarian diplomat to the US who was a good family friend. She's equally at home at the Met for international opera or at a five-star restaurant with oyster forks as she is at a corner dive in suburban Macon GA that serves up barbecue with paper towels by a woman with a beehive.
She's liberal and progressive and has always believed — not just lip service said, but truly believed — that gays deserve every right as straights even back when I was a kid and being gay was still a mental illness in the DSM. She marched for women's rights and for desegregation, and has always been a proponent of diversity in all forms, and raised me to believe a single person can always make a difference, and a very small difference is better than none. (She sobbed all the way through Obama's acceptance speech, not surprising for a woman who drove four hours to see MLK.) She always told me, you can marry someone shorter than you, younger than you, a different color or culture or religion than you, or who makes less than you, or you can choose to not marry at all: as long as you're with someone you love, the rest is negotiable. Maybe even irrelevant.
My mother said a lot of things that hurt, and that even now — after we've made our peace and are pretty good friends with stronger boundaries — those scars remain, but the one thing she never, ever said was that I was stupid. Never. She always, always emphasized that I was wicked smart, though the tests that proved this were also the likely source of her insistence that I was mentally ill. How else do you explain someone so smart, doing everything so wrong? (Note that I wasn't physically hyperactive, and ADHD wasn't quite on the horizon, so any doctors and therapists concluded I was like that because I wanted to be.) Which means I was raised with the confidence that even if I was crazy, I was still able to run rings around anyone I'd meet. Maybe those rings would be a little lop-sided, but hey, still rings!
Both my parents had/have a lot of really amazing things about them. I can't think of a single year of my life in which they didn't do something, if not several somethings, that made me very proud of them, and proud to be their child. The fact that I couldn't live up to that, myself, was a source of disappointment to me and them, and the cause of a lot of the swirling anger and hurt. But that was my shortcoming, I knew, and just the way it was.
Kids in books and on TV were abused. That was obvious from script and narrative, and a big sign was that they were never conflicted about whether they liked their parents as independent, distinct human beings outside of the family obligations. Their parents were obviously bad, and the kids didn't like them. Mine weren't, and I did, so obviously, those kids were abused. I wasn't.
13. Teachers (or guidance counselors) can identify, seem to like better, and reach out to, kids with abusive families.
Every book and show, there was at least one adult figure — almost always a teacher — who saw the kid daily and said, something's not right. That teacher would either be extra-special friends with the kid, or spend extra time with the kid, or maybe even intervene, up to and including the After School Special, Touched-by-Whatever, kinda Disneyfied ending.
See, right there, I knew I wasn't abused, because my teachers couldn't stand me. In 1st grade, when I turned over the classmate's desk? The teacher made me stand on one leg in front of the class for the entire morning, as punishment even after I apologized to the entire class. In 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade: every year, I had a teacher who'd single me out for ridicule, for whatever cruel reasons of their own (and by 4th and 5th grades I was down to yelling back at them in defiance, unwilling to put up with it yet again). I think my 6th grade teacher liked me, or at least tolerated me; my 7th grade teachers didn't seem to know what to do with me, and same for my 8th grade teachers. I annoyed most of my teachers in 9th grade — except for my science teacher who I learned to avoid even though I liked him, because I couldn't seem to do well on his tests and I knew he'd dislike me if I hung around too much.
In 10th grade, I met a teacher who did keep me sane and in one piece, and did open his door to me even when that meant I was sitting in his class during my lunch break. (I also had a huge crush on him, but to his credit, he was always gentlemanly, and always treated me like an equal, and I'd say I soaked it up.) And finally, a teacher in my senior year who, I suspect, knew more than he let on, because despite being brusque and ruling the school like a bantam rooster, he was always kind to me.
But no one ever actually said anything outright, and besides, by the time I was 16, I wasn't so stupid I was going to say anything myself. I'd had enough people — teachers, counselors, preachers, neighbors, and so on — pointing out that if I just worked harder, tried better, then bad things wouldn't happen. What was some johnny-come-lately teacher going to do to offset years of that training?
And most definitely, not a single teacher ever said a word to me about the bruises on my arms or the scratches on my face or even the bruises around my neck. No more than the friends who had to have seen plenty themselves, or the teammates or coaches I spent so many hours with every day. I know the signs showed up, because I could see them on me, but eventually I accepted that these were invisible to everyone else.
No, my experience with teachers was that they, almost even more than my own parents, were the enemies... and since in books and on TV, there's always at least one teacher who genuinely likes the kid and feels sympathy for the kid being abused, well, there you go. I wasn't innocent, and I wasn't liked, and I wasn't wanted, so... I wasn't abused.
14. A parent is always bigger and stronger than the kid being hit, and the book or show makes it real clear that this is part of why it's so bad, because the kid is outranked and outflanked (cf military abuse).
This was a subtle one that didn't sink in until I was maybe in college, but when it did, it was like, oh, yeah, well, of course! That makes sense. (You know the conclusion by now, so I'll let you sing the round in eight-part harmony on your own.)
Starting in my 1st year of HS, I was one of those kids who always came in last on those stupid annual Presidential fitness whatever things. I read books and I cycled (pretty long distances, actually, for someone only 13), but that was it. By the end of my freshman year in HS and a whole lotta time in a competitive sport, I could leg-press triple my own weight, could run three miles without getting out of breath, three hundred situps and three hundred pushups were nothing — and I was only about two inches shorter than my mother and maybe about twenty pounds less... and even at that, there was a much larger percentage of muscle in my 20-lbs-less than there was in my mother's 20-lbs-more.
To the outside observer, yeah, I should've been able to pick my mother up and toss her against the wall with only a slight bit of effort. Which is rather stupid to assume, since my sport was so definitely not a contact sport, and the only real fights I'd ever been in were, well, with my mom, and of those fights, I'd had ten years and lost every single one. Just because I could run three miles and not get winded didn't mean I could suddenly block every punch and dodge quick enough to avoid the claws. It just meant I could take even more, really, and the older I got and the stronger I got, the more she dished out. Alcohol was in the mix by then, and things were coming to a head on a semi-regular basis; all the time I spent at practice meant I was gone from 8am to 9pm or later. When things exploded, not only was I emotionally bare to the usual words, I was physically wiped-out post-practice, and all I could ever do was just hang on, try to defend myself and that just made it worse.
But! I wasn't considerably smaller or lighter or weaker. It didn't help that a few times my father counseled me to try and not make things worse, because Mom would only call the cops — on me! — and tell them I was the aggressor, and, well... Dad would shrug, leaving the rest unsaid. I'm covered in bruises and scratches and looking like, well, I just got the crap strangled out of me, and my mother's slightly winded but otherwise just plain steaming, not really injured — but it's me that's the athlete, and that means if there's violence, it's my fault, because only strong people do the hitting. Only weak people get hit.
And I knew for a fact that I wasn't weak... and yet I also knew I was, because I could never defend myself. But everything around me, from family words to books to movies to television said that abuse happens when the strong pick on the weak. If I wasn't the weak one, but I was the one getting hit, that didn't compute. Well, it did: the only logical answer was that whatever was happening in my house wasn't the same. I wasn't abused.
15. Sometimes in books and on TV, parents would say mean things, but they always took it back right away.
This one had me the most baffled. A parent would suddenly snap at the child, the child would recoil in confusion and hurt, and the parent (almost always the mother) would stop, look shocked, and then get all apologetic and go on and on about how Mommy's having a bad day, and didn't mean that, and sometimes we say things we don't mean.
Hunh. My mother always meant every word she said, and if I cried about it, she'd repeat it, just so it was perfectly clear and that I didn't miss a detail. If she hadn't meant it, she'd apologize — that's what books and TV (and even my own parents) told me was how the world worked. You screw up, you apologize; the lack of apology meant my mother's actions were not a mistake... so I wasn't not-abused, either.
In general, I was mostly confused, but falling more in the area of "I can't be abused, because..." and thus bolstered with these reasons thanks to books and TV, the only alternative was to accept that everything that happened to me, happened to me because I was A Bad Kid.
16. Abused kids are innocent victims. They cower and take it, and they don't fight back.
If I hadn't blown that one completely by adolescence, by the time I was 13 this last pop-culture lesson was the nail in my psychological coffin. I've never been one to take things lying down — a slight drawback of being taught to be independent, to think and speak for yourself, by a mother who means well... until you use those skills in an argument. Whoops. If I wasn't protesting, I was wriggling out of her hold, or complaining that it hurt, or crying, which usually just made her even madder. ("I'll give you something to cry about" is only a joke in the dark, morbid sense.)
Becoming an athlete, though, meant I did have some basic strength, though few skills and never any kind of emotional strength in the face of anger — someone else's anger (even to this day) will leave me almost completely helpless in terror. Sheer instinct sets in, and that's what I fought with, but fighting at all meant — if you go by books and television — that I had lost my right to say I was innocent. I was now part of the problem. If I was sitting down when Mom came at me, I'd plant a foot in her stomach to keep her off, shove her back so I could scramble away. If she grabbed me, I let my hands fly out and hit whatever they hit, in hopes it'd force her back, long enough that I could get away.
In books and tv shows, the kids cower, they cry, they might put their hands over their heads, but they don't kick and scream back and try to punch their way free so they can run for the bedroom and barricade themselves in, or bolt out the front door with Dad's car keys in their hands. They're victims and victims don't hit back. For ten years or more, all I'd been able to do was take it, and the taller and stronger I got (along with the usual independence-urge that comes with puberty), the less I was interested in taking much of anything. I couldn't stop it, I couldn't predict it, and I knew every single time that doing anything would just make it ten times worse — but I just couldn't keep taking it. For my own self-respect and my own integrity, I had to try and defend.
That was when I kissed any last illusion of eventual rescue/end goodbye: I wasn't one of those helpless, hapless victims any more. I was part of it, in some twisted way. I yelled back, I fought back, I hit back. It never did any good, and it never stopped anything, but the one thing it did end was any last ability to relate to those kids in books and television. Sure, they were abused, but me? No, I wasn't innocent at all. Not anymore, and thus, I obviously wasn't abused.
And that leads me up to the culmination of the day I realized that there was something inherently broken, some kind of disconnect, between everything in the books and on television and in movies, compared to my middle-class, relatively mainstream, superficially happy existence and the random explosions of violence after any audience had left for the night. I was in college, at a friend's apartment, and the television was on, and that's when I realized this last rule.
17. In the books and movies, you can't have a happy ending if you're missing one crucial ingredient.
Time and again I'd seen this scene, and it always precipitates the final resolution (or may prompt the cathartic finale and then the denouement, but it's in there). It was one of those corny shows like 'Touched by' or whatever that show was with Michael Landon, you know the kind of quasi-after-school-special where every episode is A Very Special Episode, blah blah blah. I don't even know why I was watching it, only that near the end, we see the abused kid with the teacher who'd befriended him. In walks some kind of official-looking person, with clipboard or notepad or whatever, and the teacher turns to the kid and says, "okay, now tell her what you told me."
See, in books and movies, the kid is always rescued: maybe some neighbors take him in, or she goes to live with a foster family who loves her and feeds her and makes her wear pink, or long-lost relatives show up, or maybe even the parents break down and admit they're horrible and promise to get help and everyone goes into therapy. The last version always closes with the kid promising the intervening person — be that an angel, or a teacher, or some travelling no-name who randomly turns big and green — that really, it's going to be all better, now. Just like some kinda little trooper who forgives his parents even after they threw him out a window and broke both his legs and starved him and all those other Really Bad Things that mark the kid as Really Abused.
I was used to that, and I was used to ignoring any possible wish-fulfillment for me in that, because, y'see, the entire show or story had reinforced in fifteen different ways that I wasn't really abused. Maybe hit a few times, but not abused, not like that — and since the premise wasn't mine, neither was the happy ending.
But that moment, seeing that scenario for the nth time and hearing that line, and I realized: every single time, that's how it works. Someone out there believes the kid, and after that, everything becomes happy and good. That made sense, until I realized what was wrong with this picture, and how the truth was that the entire show, every book, every story, every movie, were all lies. Nothing but lies.
Because for that kid to be believed, the kid had to speak up.
It's right there, in that single, simple, line: tell her what you told me. The kid told someone what was going on, told someone what his parents did, and it seemed to me the implication was clear: the kid first, then, had to believe it was wrong. Or else why open his mouth at all, why complain when it wouldn't change anything, when that's the way the world just is?
In that split-second, I knew for a fact that this kid on television had never once been abused, not in this story. Because if he had, he would've believed not that the situation was wrong, but that this is just the way the world is.
He would believe that everything his parents have done and said was his fault. He would believe that every time his parents say they wish he'd never been born that they're not lying. He would believe that when they throw him out the front door and lock it behind him that they really don't want him to come back because they can't stand a child as bad as him. He would believe that every time they take something away from him or break a promise or change their minds, it's because he's no good. He would believe he doesn't deserve any better than that and should instead feel grateful for what he does get.
He sure as hell doesn't go around complaining to other people, he doesn't expose his shame to the world and break the world's illusion that his family works so hard to present, that he's a good kid and they're happy, because the fact that he's bad is their private, shared, shame, and he's lucky they put up with him, when no one else will. He sure as hell doesn't go blabbing to someone else, because what good does that do? Either it'll get back to his parents how ungrateful he is, and prove even more solidly that he's a bad kid, or it'll just be opening him up to yet another adult so patiently explaining that if he just tried harder, everything would be fine, because it can be tough being a kid but his parents obviously love him and he just needs to be a better kid for them.
That is what you get when you open your mouth and tell someone.
So you don't. Freaking. Open. Your. Mouth.
And if you remain silent in the face of everything that happens to you, day after day after day, that is when you're truly a victim of abuse.
That's all I ask, authors. If you're going to write that backstory, just once, consider writing it without the stereotypes and without the after-school-special assumptions about education and class and race and addiction that are rampant in so many stories.
It has been a long time since I've read anything with a teenaged protagonist while looking to see myself in that protagonist — those days are long past. But I also know the world is not really much of a better place than it was when I was looking for answers for questions I couldn't yet voice. There are still, on any given day, two thousand or more children who may be reading your story, measuring themselves against your words. They'll be wondering if this time, once again, they're going to come up short, with the conclusion that yet again, they're not really abused, and all the pain in their life must be because they deserve it.
Their parents are telling them that, their teachers and neighbors and pastors and friends may be telling them that — or may be saying it by dint of not saying anything at all, and far as they can see, all that's left is in print and on film. Don't be one more voice telling them that to be Really Abused that they have to suffer in these precise ways. Don't be one more voice telling them that they're only abused if they have broken bones or a laid-off parent or there's alcohol in the mix. Don't be one more voice telling them that they're not really abused, or that they're not abused enough to warrant the happy ending. Because they are, and they do.
If no one ever listens to anything I write here, no one takes anything away from any words I put pixel to screen, let this be at least that one exception. Every kid, every person, deserves a chance at a happy ending, and every kid, every person, should have the chance to see themselves in a story's possibilities, at least once. Maybe you'll decide after all that you'd rather write a kid who's abused with lies and drunkenness and massive scenes in public, and to set aside the complexities of abuse when the kid isn't perfect, isn't small and weak, isn't a top student, isn't outgoing, isn't loved by teachers, isn't angelic, and isn't innocent. If that's so, and you'd rather go the easy path, then I'd at least ask that you do so intentionally.
That way, when we meet face to face, you'll at least know the options, and will be able to say with clear conscience that it served the story better to write the stock villain and the after-school special. You'll be able to say your choices were intentional. And then you'll be braced for the fact that I'll walk away without a word. Because you, clearly, could not be bothered to have words for me or mine, just like so many before you, and thus I will waste no more on you.
The writers of this world are dreamers, and if there is anyone who needs a dream — deserves a dream, even — it's those children living in warzones that pass for family. Please, at least once, spare a bit of your dreams for them, too.
It's a little like deciding that in your book, all Hispanics are maids or plumbers: if you're going to play to the stereotypes, at least be able to look me in the face when we meet and say, yes, I'm aware of the issues surrounding using ethnic characters as lower-class background only; my use of that was intentional. Whether this can alleviate the larger issue would be contextual, based on the book you wrote, but it's still better than you giving me a pop-eyed look and proclaiming you had no idea! that anyone would be offended to see all Hispanics in your book are lazy, drunken, ill-educated part-timers.
This is more related to the issues mentioned in part III than in part I or part II. The first two parts mostly did a lot of implying. So here goes.
I grew up in the generation of the After School Special, before there was a specific "young adult" section in the bookstore or library. Not to say there weren't books that suited teen and pre-teen quite well; it was just that you had to do a little digging either in the 'older kids' areas or selective perusing through the 'adult' (read: mainstream regular) fiction. I recall two basic classes of books about teenagers, roughly: the adventure books — often SFF, historical (such as Kipling's works), or mysteries in the school of Nancy Drew — and the wackier distopian-fiction so big in the 60s, of which Lord of the Flies might be a forerunner.
The other class of books seemed to be geared towards an adult audience but with teenage protagonists, and often the tone was — I'd apply this now, though I didn't then, obviously — a bit more exploitative. Kids on drugs! Girls being promiscuous! Go Ask Alice and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden are two classics of those overly heavy ham-handed companions to the After School Special. Even when reading that type in middle school, I wasn't so stupid as to miss the strong sense that I was reading something written to make adults feel better.
So here's what I learned from the age of 8 through the end of high school, thanks to that nebulous genre that got its start around my middle school years and has since grown into the juggernaut known as the YA world. The assumptions and patterns, from what I can tell, remain strong in mainstream fiction and entertainment, which means even if some few are writing otherwise, there's still a fair bit to go. Thus, here's the kid logic that I'd ask you please consider the next time you set fingers to keyboard to create a teenaged-protagonist.
I'm not asking you to fix the world. I'm just saying that if you want to keep it broken for a share of your readers, at least be aware you are.
1. Abused kids have parents without jobs, who slept on the sofa.
Classic scene from book or TV show: kid comes home, Dad's on the sofa asleep. Dad wakes up, yells at kid, hits kid, and kid flees to room or to neighbors or whatever. Somewhere in there, backstory is that Dad's been laid-off and has taken to sleeping on the sofa during the day. Why? I never got that, as a kid. Adults have beds; that's where they sleep, like anyone. Sleeping on the sofa was bizarre.
My dad didn't get laid-off; my dad was a workaholic. My mother stayed home (and ran a business from the home) while I was little, taught part-time while I was in grade school, and went back to work full-time when I entered middle school. The only time a parent slept on a sofa in my house was if Dad fell asleep while watching his alumna play their big rival and the score wasn't close enough to keep his interest.
Obviously, for abuse to be happening, a parent had to be laid off and prone to sleeping during the day. My parents didn't, and thus I couldn't relate to those abused kids — because they were abused, and I wasn't.
2. Abused kids were always embarrassed to bring friends over, because their parents would be drunk or high.
Nope. Not once was I ever embarrassed about bringing friends home, for fear of how my parents would react — hell, I even brought home friends with mohawks and studded jackets and didn't think twice about that. My parents were articulate, well-educated, charming (in the case of my mother) and professorially-intimidating (in the case of my father) but if I'd ever walked through the door and found either of them falling-down-drunk, I think I would've checked for cameras.
Obviously, a big part of being in an abusive family was that parents embarrassed their kids by being useless, shiftless, drunkards, and since my parents weren't, clearly I wasn't abused.
3. Abused kids were perfect angels away from their family, and everyone liked them, and there were always scenes of friends' parents feeling angry at the parents for treating 'such a good kid' so badly.
Couldn't relate to that, either. I rarely visited friends' houses, because their environments felt alien to me, for reason I couldn't put a finger on. I'd talk to other friends' parents and then shut up abruptly, afraid I'd crossed a line, and they'd realize that actually, no, I wasn't a good kid. I wasn't even likeable. The majority of my life, my mother had been telling me that I was completely unloveable, and the only reason my own family put up with me was because they were legally obligated to do so. I wasn't naive enough to think this would all go away just by being elsewhere, and in fact, was terrified everyone else would find out my mother was right.
Nope, I was quite certain that in fact the parents were tolerating me, maybe out of pity, or maybe they were too stupid to realize and I had them hoodwinked, but nobody's stupid forever. Therefore, since no one was raving about how I was an amazing and awesome kid to the contrary of what I heard at home, obviously... I wasn't abused.
4. Abused kids in books and TV worked hard, really really hard, and when the parents yelled at them, it was always either from a misunderstanding or for something totally not the kid's fault (or even within the kid's control).
Again, nope. I was an absolute hellion in school, from about 1st grade on. I remember turning over a kid's desk in 1st grade when he pissed me off; I cheated outrageously in 2nd grade and rationalized it as the teacher said you had to turn in a paper with your name on it — she never said it had to be your paper that had your name on it, which seemed perfect to me because then I had more time to read. I yelled back at my 4th grade and 5th grade teachers. (Oddly, I don't recall getting into any trouble in 6th grade, mostly b/c the teachers then kept me way too busy.)
In 7th grade I bounced back and forth (literally, quarter by quarter!) between 'advanced' classes and remedial. I was too distractable to keep up in the advanced classes, while the remedial classes were often hands-on, enough of a change for me to enjoy the work and get it done... and just as I got bored, I'd be switched back into the advanced class to be re-surrounded by peers fully aware I'd been switched out only six weeks before for being Not Good Enough. I was almost held back in 7th grade, and again in 8th grade, and both times it took my parents in full-on shouting matches with the school principal (I learned, years later) before the school agreed to advance me.
In 9th grade I settled down, somewhat, but then I became a jock and who cares about the rest. I never smoked, drank, or did drugs, but I learned to forge my mother's signature so perfectly even she thought it was her signature, and as far as the school knew, I was sick — or at a doctor's appt — for about three days out of every four by my junior year. If I didn't have the car, I walked off-campus and caught the bus to my favorite museum or park. I did not get straight A's. I didn't really much come close. I was, on paper, a slightly below-average student who had twelve years of "you're not working up to your full potential" yammered at me, almost daily.
So... yeah, clearly when my parents got really mad at me, and I promised to work harder, it never happened, and so they were probably justified in throwing hot coffee in my face for back-talking. Or taking away the birthday gift they'd given me only a week before, and giving it to my sister instead. Or for smacking me. Or for catching me by the arm and squeezing so hard I got bruises. Because abused kids did really well in school, so that everyone — including this young reader — could see that the parents had no reason to treat their kids like that. But, obviously, I couldn't be abused, because my parents had lots of reasons, right?
5. Kids who lived in abusive houses weren't usually poor, but were definitely working-class, and their houses were always messy, and their parents cussed, a lot.
Again, obviously I couldn't be abused. My parents were college-educated, with five degrees between them, and had both taught at some of the most prestigious universities on the eastern seaboard. My father's parents may have been blue-collar, but my dad was a military officer, and most of my parents' friends were as well educated and cosmopolitan and charming as my parents could be. My mother cussed maybe once or twice that I recall, as a child, and both times she was on the phone with a friend and didn't realize I was listening — after which I got the lecture of those being 'adult words' and Not For Your Use.
As for the house? It might get a little cluttered, sometimes, but we had a lot of really nice stuff, and the house was never filthy. Even if my mother had to beat my head in with the vacuum cleaner because I'd done my chores haphazardly, that just meant if the house was dirty in some way it was my fault, not my parents', so clearly, still not abused. In the books and on TV shows, the kids were always working hard to try and clean the house despite the parents not caring, but that's not how it was in my house — I'd do anything to get out of vacuuming, because I could never seem to do it right and it always ended up with my mother yelling at me about how if the house looked like a pigsty it was going to be my fault, that she worked so hard for us to have a nice life and I was the one messing it all up, so... clearly, she had every right to hit me, and that meant it wasn't abuse.
6. The pattern was always very simple, and clear: Dad hit Mom, and then sometimes Mom would get really angry and hit the kids, OR, Dad hit Mom, and then Dad hit the kids.
In those books and shows, Mom didn't hit Dad, and Mom didn't just hit the kids without Dad doing hitting as well, and Mom didn't just hit only one kid and cherish the other kid. Obviously, whatever was going on in my house wasn't abuse, because what I lived with wasn't in a single book or on television — and that meant that every time Mom got mad and things got worse, that the label of 'bad family' couldn't be applied, so I applied the only thing that was left: 'bad kid'.
Slight tangent: looking back, I don't actually recall any stories in which the abusive family was a minority family. It was pretty much always an anglo-saxon family, if one that fit more comfortably into an income segment my maternal grandmother only somewhat affectionately called 'cracker'. The one or two times I can recall the focus being on a black family, the story had a single mother whose boyfriend was abusive, and invariably she'd learn from well-meaning neighbors or intervening (always white) teachers what her so-called boyfriend had been doing, she'd confront the children in tears and promise not to let that happen, because she'd learned her lesson about working two jobs to make ends meet and leaving them alone. Which, looking back, was probably meant to warp and punish single mothers (of any race) more than mangle my impressions of what made for a 'good' or 'bad' family, but still, not with the relating.
7. Abusive parents might be regular or might be mean, but then one drink and they'd start yelling for no reason and hitting everything in sight.
My parents were actually more relaxed after a drink, since they mostly drank when they came home from work and would sit in the den and talk about their day, while each had a glass of wine. On the weekends with adult friends visiting, they might have a beer or two. Out to dinner, they might have a drink or two each.
(This isn't counting the last three years of HS, when my father stopped drinking and my mother took up the co-dependent mantle and began drinking heavily, herself. By that time, regardless, the patterns were solidly set, and if my mother was drinking and became angry, I never made the connection, because I'd never had to, before then.)
But, nope, no Jekyll-and-Hyde routine here. Who my parents were, sober, was pretty much the same as who they were after a glass of wine or a beer — neither are massive drinkers, really, so 'drunken parent' wasn't within my mental scope. And thus, obviously, I couldn't be living in an abusive household.
8. Abused kids got hurt. A lot, and really badly. Like, trip-to-hospital bad. Cigarette-burn-bad. Broken-bone-bad. Thrown-down-stairs-bad.
(Though the one time I did get thrown down the stairs, that did cause a sudden revelation that maybe this wasn't okay for parents to do to kids, but then Mom probably yelled something about how horrible my grades were or how lazy I was about chores, and that just reminded me that in my case, clearly, the line was drawn a bit farther out — if the kid was really bad, then the kid shouldn't complain when really bad things happen.)
The only broken bones I've ever had were three fractured ribs from a horrible car accident, as a senior in HS. Never had a cast, never been burned, though I suspect in hindsight there were at least three times my mother did give me a contusion, but we never had the hospital emergency room visit with someone official looking dubious as to whether I really fell out of a window or walked into a door or whatever other stupid reasons mean parents gave in books or on TV. Then again, my mother didn't like her coffee extra-hot, so all the times she threw it at me, I got more damage from the mug than from the hot liquid, and most of the time — seeing how we usually lived somewhere hot and humid — it was an iced drink, not a hot drink. Only abused kids got scalding-hot drinks thrown at them.
I was thrown, slammed into things, hit with telephones and vacuum cleaners and mugs and books, shoved, clawed, gripped hard enough to bruise, had fingers and arms twisted, hair pulled, neck clawed, face and arms scratched, slapped, even nearly strangled a few times. But I never had a broken bone and I never got burned enough to need bandages and I never had stitches, so from everything I saw in books and TV, it was pretty clear that I wasn't abused.
9. If one of the parents was military, it was usually Dad, and if Dad was military, he was all military-precision and don't-backtalk-me tyranny and ran the house with an iron fist and hit anyone who got out of line, and that was military-family-abuse.
I think the most either parent ever demanded of such formalities from me, or my sister, was that we try to use "sir" and "ma'am" with our grandparents because it made them happy, but that if we forgot, our parents would rise quickly to our defense that within family, informality is okay. (But my father always used "sir" and "ma'am" with his parents and his in-laws, which even as a kid I thought was really cool; to me, it said those people mattered to my father that he'd give them the same respect he gave his commanding officers, and is also part of the reason I didn't work harder to "sir" and "ma'am" anyone in my near or extended family, as a tiny private rebellion of my own.)
My grandmother could be quite blistering if you made a bed while visiting and didn't make hospital corners, but most of the time my own folks were willing to settle for me at least pulling the covers up and tucking the pillows nicely — a demand they pretty much dropped by the time I hit HS, anyway. Inspection? At home? The one time (as an adult) I mentioned it to Dad, he said he didn't want that at home; he dealt with it at work, and that's where it'd stay. Mom, raised in military family with a bit more formality than ours, felt the same. No, the military was not to blame and was obviously not a reliable pattern for explaining what went on in our house, because Dad was not the usual book-or-TV career officer.
In fact, my parents went out of their way to avoid any military colleagues who showed those tyrannical traits. Again, not a story that fit what I lived with, and that was abuse, so my life obviously wasn't.
10. A parent who was mean to his/her kids was almost always also mean to adults, and in general nobody would like them.
I think I realized this pattern somewhere in early HS, reading a book for English class, or something. By that point I was self-aware enough to get that there was more going on than what I'd seen/measured up til then, and this realization was a hugely depressing moment for me... because everyone liked my mother. Everyone. She could charm paint off a wall if she sets her mind to it, and most of the time, she doesn't need to set her mind to it, because she just does it as naturally as anyone else does breathing.
Even then, I wasn't surprised in the least when — on the rare occasions I ever let slip word or even hint about what life was like — adults would just assume off the bat that it was my recalcitrance, my attitude, my difficulty, and that (here we go again) if I'd just "be a better kid" then everything would be okay, would be happy. Because someone as cool and funny and intelligent as my mother couldn't possibly be just plain mean, and in books and on TV, abusive parents were equally mean to pretty much everyone, or at least just only kind of liked. They weren't popular, and my mom was popular — hell, most of my friends liked her more than they liked me.
This isn't to say my friends were totally blind, since my mom did slip every now and then, but it was always in a kind of snide way, enough that it could be brushed off. Though if I did any reflexive brushing-off by my HS years, I rarely noticed it. I was well beyond questioning much, by then.
Like doing the MBTI (Meyers-Briggs) which just became more fodder for the yelling: my father the INTJ, and me, the ENTJ, and my mother, the ENFP, and my sister, the INFP. You couldn't have better lines drawn if you wrote fiction: "you're just like your father, and you're just as impossible to love." There it was in the book, even (a text I later learned was discredited for its extreme slant against the NT style): that NTs are cruel, cold, unlikeable, too-intellectual, often unfeeling, extremely insensitive, and will hurt everyone who loves them and — as my mom would extrapolate — NTs are doomed to end up alllllllll alone.
Well, who was I to argue with what was there in black-and-white, by someone with a psychoanalysis degree? That was an expert saying those things. Who was I to rebut? I'd taken the test and been revealed as an NT, so... yeah, more proof I was A Bad Person. That was just how it was, and the sooner I reconciled to living my life that way, the sooner I'd, well, not be happy, but maybe less miserable. Lower the standards, as it were.
I mention all that so you're aware of the backstory for when my best friend took the test, and my mother was explaining the results to her. I can't even recall my friend's type, only that my mother contrasted for illustration, my friend's type to mine: "you're fortunate, because your type is very good with people, and always welcome, sensitive to other people's feelings, not at all like NTs, who are quite cruel and unfeeling." I barely even noticed it, because it was one more jab in the daily litany of such. It was, what it was.
Later that evening, when it was the two of us alone, my friend expressed outrage that my own mother would say that — and while I was in the room, even!
I recall being somewhat taken aback by this fury at my mother, and a bit uncomfortable, too. Yeah, so I didn't really like hearing that I was cold and cruel and unloveable, but it wasn't like I could argue with it, because that's what it meant to be an NT, and that's what I was. My friend remained disgruntled and pissed, and by that point, seemed annoyed with me, as well, and I couldn't figure out why (and didn't really want to try, at that, in that way we all shy away instinctively from major fault lines). I just remember having to do a bit of a tap dance through several topics before she let me change the subject, though for a long time after that she seemed to watch me with a peculiar expression, sometimes.
That was the only time I can ever remember someone not liking my mother, for any reason. All my friends were practically infatuated with her; if they weren't, they sure never let on to me. So, not only was it clearly a situation where things weren't abusive, but this also leads into another reason I knew my household didn't match what I saw in books and TV.
11. When abusive parents get mad and yell and hit, they're always lying while they're yelling.
Ever seen that famous scene in Mommie Dearest, the one about the wire hangers? Joan Crawford discovers her adopted daughter hanging up clothes on wire hangers, goes into a rage, and beats her daughter while screaming, "no wire hangers! no wire hangers!" (If you didn't know, now you do.)
That's what I mean by lying: the constant element in books and TV was that when the abusive parent got mad enough to hit, it was for some trumped-up reason that the kid couldn't have, wouldn't have, known or predicted. I remember watching that scene in HS and my first thought was, "well, that's clearly abuse, because there's no way that girl could've known that wire hangers weren't allowed." Because if she had known, by that logic, then she deserved whatever she got.
I mean, my mother must've told me once if she told me a thousand times to vacuum just so and couldn't I tell that I'd missed a spot? Or that when she said to hand over something to my sister even if I wasn't done with it yet, that this meant I shouldn't backtalk or complain but just hand it over and don't ask for it again later, or else — so it's not like Mom was lying when she got mad as she told me again that I shouldn't do X or Y.
It was true, she'd warned me, and I forgot and did it or did it on purpose or did it and hoped I could get away with it, and when I didn't... well, whatever I got, I deserved. Because she wasn't lying; it wasn't some last-minute trumped-up excuse. Well, usually. Sometimes it was just that I didn't extrapolate well enough to see that when she said "do this" that she also meant "and don't do that," so, again, not with the lying-while-yelling.
And that's why I was both surprised and uncomfortable when my friend got mad on my behalf: because my mother wasn't lying. She didn't lie to me; she'd made that clear from the very beginning, as far back as I could remember. She told me things that hurt, but she prefaced it with "I'm telling you this because I love you," and "I'm telling you this because no one else ever will, but you need to know it," and "I'm telling you this because you're out of touch with reality and don't realize how you appear to other people."
For a friend to be so angry that I'd be called cold and cruel just confused me, at the same time it made me withdraw a little from our friendship — because obviously my friend didn't know me as well as she thought she did, if she couldn't see truth for what it was. The only sane conclusion (if sane there be, in such a life) was to pull back a little, because if my friend didn't know it then, eventually she would, and then where would I be? So I had to cool down on the friendship before she figured out my mother was right, keep that friend at a distance in hopes I could fake it a little longer.
Because the belief that my mother told the truth meant that I knew when I dealt with other people, the only one lying was me.
But I didn't see that going on in any books or TV, so clearly, I couldn't claim I was abused.
12a. Parents are either abusive and horrible, or they're nice. They can't be both.
Part of this is the constraints of how much page space you've got, and how much screen time you've got — and besides, the drama of pitching a fit and pitching kids out windows is just so much more riveting than the times in-between when everything's lovely, right? But when all the books and shows have the same basic pattern and go through the same basic displays, it becomes an overwhelming message: parents who are sometimes cool and then sometimes cruel are not abusive, because if they were abusive, they'd be like that all the time.
There were stretches when everything was fine, or at least my mom was too distracted to bother much with me. Most of the time, we could go a month or two before another blow-up, and in between I could pretend like things were great. I had no idea what would set things off, other than knowing it'd be me who set it off, so in some ways I lived on eggshells in a back part of my brain, just like that rat in the unpredictable maze. (By the time I was in HS, actually, that tension on my part, alone, was sometimes enough to set things off, because my mom would react to my anticipation. Although I note that by that point, we had alcohol oiling the way, which complexifies things.)
But in abusive families in books and on TV, every time the kid comes home, the parent's on them about something. There's a stability to it, and sometimes the kids were written/acted as though they were expecting it. I could see them bracing for it — while the one thing Mommie Dearest did get right (for me, at least) was the look of shock on the girl's face when Crawford flies into a rage. Sheer, unadulterated shock, because she had no idea she'd just stepped on a land mine. But other than that movie, the land mines were portrayed as regular events, close enough together that I almost felt pity for those fictional kids, because at least I had good times, too.
And a bit of self-hatred at the same time, as well, because when I had bad times... those were my fault, anyway. I envied those fictional kids for having the assurance of knowing this was just how their parents were, and that it made no difference what the kid said or did. Big Ben's gonna chime when it chimes, and parents are gonna hit when they hit, and that's abuse. So, clearly, my family wasn't abusive.
12b. Kids who are abused don't like their parents. They fear them, they endeavor to please them, but they don't actually like their parents.
Thing is, I did like my mother, as a child — if a kind of uneasy liking, in that life was unpredictable — but if we were out and about, or people were visiting, or it was an easy-going day, I liked her a great deal. So I feel like this has to be said, rather than leave anyone with the impression that my childhood has left me an embittered person who loathes the parental units. I don't.
No, for all I went though, I still like, and respect, both my father and my mother, as human beings. I'll focus on my mother since she's getting the brunt of it here, and state it for the record that I'd want to know her even if I weren't related to her. She's funny, witty, a little goofy sometimes, incredibly bright and amazingly creative, always has eighteen different projects going and is always up for more; she's very much the life of the party and someone who enjoys doing things and seeing things and learning and experiencing.
She's educated and cosmopolitan but retains enough of her Southern upbringing that she doesn't intimidate people but sets them at ease, and she can find something in common with anyone, from the recent immigrant who worked as the night janitor when she stayed in the hospital to the multiple-honored Hungarian diplomat to the US who was a good family friend. She's equally at home at the Met for international opera or at a five-star restaurant with oyster forks as she is at a corner dive in suburban Macon GA that serves up barbecue with paper towels by a woman with a beehive.
She's liberal and progressive and has always believed — not just lip service said, but truly believed — that gays deserve every right as straights even back when I was a kid and being gay was still a mental illness in the DSM. She marched for women's rights and for desegregation, and has always been a proponent of diversity in all forms, and raised me to believe a single person can always make a difference, and a very small difference is better than none. (She sobbed all the way through Obama's acceptance speech, not surprising for a woman who drove four hours to see MLK.) She always told me, you can marry someone shorter than you, younger than you, a different color or culture or religion than you, or who makes less than you, or you can choose to not marry at all: as long as you're with someone you love, the rest is negotiable. Maybe even irrelevant.
My mother said a lot of things that hurt, and that even now — after we've made our peace and are pretty good friends with stronger boundaries — those scars remain, but the one thing she never, ever said was that I was stupid. Never. She always, always emphasized that I was wicked smart, though the tests that proved this were also the likely source of her insistence that I was mentally ill. How else do you explain someone so smart, doing everything so wrong? (Note that I wasn't physically hyperactive, and ADHD wasn't quite on the horizon, so any doctors and therapists concluded I was like that because I wanted to be.) Which means I was raised with the confidence that even if I was crazy, I was still able to run rings around anyone I'd meet. Maybe those rings would be a little lop-sided, but hey, still rings!
Both my parents had/have a lot of really amazing things about them. I can't think of a single year of my life in which they didn't do something, if not several somethings, that made me very proud of them, and proud to be their child. The fact that I couldn't live up to that, myself, was a source of disappointment to me and them, and the cause of a lot of the swirling anger and hurt. But that was my shortcoming, I knew, and just the way it was.
Kids in books and on TV were abused. That was obvious from script and narrative, and a big sign was that they were never conflicted about whether they liked their parents as independent, distinct human beings outside of the family obligations. Their parents were obviously bad, and the kids didn't like them. Mine weren't, and I did, so obviously, those kids were abused. I wasn't.
13. Teachers (or guidance counselors) can identify, seem to like better, and reach out to, kids with abusive families.
Every book and show, there was at least one adult figure — almost always a teacher — who saw the kid daily and said, something's not right. That teacher would either be extra-special friends with the kid, or spend extra time with the kid, or maybe even intervene, up to and including the After School Special, Touched-by-Whatever, kinda Disneyfied ending.
See, right there, I knew I wasn't abused, because my teachers couldn't stand me. In 1st grade, when I turned over the classmate's desk? The teacher made me stand on one leg in front of the class for the entire morning, as punishment even after I apologized to the entire class. In 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade: every year, I had a teacher who'd single me out for ridicule, for whatever cruel reasons of their own (and by 4th and 5th grades I was down to yelling back at them in defiance, unwilling to put up with it yet again). I think my 6th grade teacher liked me, or at least tolerated me; my 7th grade teachers didn't seem to know what to do with me, and same for my 8th grade teachers. I annoyed most of my teachers in 9th grade — except for my science teacher who I learned to avoid even though I liked him, because I couldn't seem to do well on his tests and I knew he'd dislike me if I hung around too much.
In 10th grade, I met a teacher who did keep me sane and in one piece, and did open his door to me even when that meant I was sitting in his class during my lunch break. (I also had a huge crush on him, but to his credit, he was always gentlemanly, and always treated me like an equal, and I'd say I soaked it up.) And finally, a teacher in my senior year who, I suspect, knew more than he let on, because despite being brusque and ruling the school like a bantam rooster, he was always kind to me.
But no one ever actually said anything outright, and besides, by the time I was 16, I wasn't so stupid I was going to say anything myself. I'd had enough people — teachers, counselors, preachers, neighbors, and so on — pointing out that if I just worked harder, tried better, then bad things wouldn't happen. What was some johnny-come-lately teacher going to do to offset years of that training?
And most definitely, not a single teacher ever said a word to me about the bruises on my arms or the scratches on my face or even the bruises around my neck. No more than the friends who had to have seen plenty themselves, or the teammates or coaches I spent so many hours with every day. I know the signs showed up, because I could see them on me, but eventually I accepted that these were invisible to everyone else.
No, my experience with teachers was that they, almost even more than my own parents, were the enemies... and since in books and on TV, there's always at least one teacher who genuinely likes the kid and feels sympathy for the kid being abused, well, there you go. I wasn't innocent, and I wasn't liked, and I wasn't wanted, so... I wasn't abused.
14. A parent is always bigger and stronger than the kid being hit, and the book or show makes it real clear that this is part of why it's so bad, because the kid is outranked and outflanked (cf military abuse).
This was a subtle one that didn't sink in until I was maybe in college, but when it did, it was like, oh, yeah, well, of course! That makes sense. (You know the conclusion by now, so I'll let you sing the round in eight-part harmony on your own.)
Starting in my 1st year of HS, I was one of those kids who always came in last on those stupid annual Presidential fitness whatever things. I read books and I cycled (pretty long distances, actually, for someone only 13), but that was it. By the end of my freshman year in HS and a whole lotta time in a competitive sport, I could leg-press triple my own weight, could run three miles without getting out of breath, three hundred situps and three hundred pushups were nothing — and I was only about two inches shorter than my mother and maybe about twenty pounds less... and even at that, there was a much larger percentage of muscle in my 20-lbs-less than there was in my mother's 20-lbs-more.
To the outside observer, yeah, I should've been able to pick my mother up and toss her against the wall with only a slight bit of effort. Which is rather stupid to assume, since my sport was so definitely not a contact sport, and the only real fights I'd ever been in were, well, with my mom, and of those fights, I'd had ten years and lost every single one. Just because I could run three miles and not get winded didn't mean I could suddenly block every punch and dodge quick enough to avoid the claws. It just meant I could take even more, really, and the older I got and the stronger I got, the more she dished out. Alcohol was in the mix by then, and things were coming to a head on a semi-regular basis; all the time I spent at practice meant I was gone from 8am to 9pm or later. When things exploded, not only was I emotionally bare to the usual words, I was physically wiped-out post-practice, and all I could ever do was just hang on, try to defend myself and that just made it worse.
But! I wasn't considerably smaller or lighter or weaker. It didn't help that a few times my father counseled me to try and not make things worse, because Mom would only call the cops — on me! — and tell them I was the aggressor, and, well... Dad would shrug, leaving the rest unsaid. I'm covered in bruises and scratches and looking like, well, I just got the crap strangled out of me, and my mother's slightly winded but otherwise just plain steaming, not really injured — but it's me that's the athlete, and that means if there's violence, it's my fault, because only strong people do the hitting. Only weak people get hit.
And I knew for a fact that I wasn't weak... and yet I also knew I was, because I could never defend myself. But everything around me, from family words to books to movies to television said that abuse happens when the strong pick on the weak. If I wasn't the weak one, but I was the one getting hit, that didn't compute. Well, it did: the only logical answer was that whatever was happening in my house wasn't the same. I wasn't abused.
15. Sometimes in books and on TV, parents would say mean things, but they always took it back right away.
This one had me the most baffled. A parent would suddenly snap at the child, the child would recoil in confusion and hurt, and the parent (almost always the mother) would stop, look shocked, and then get all apologetic and go on and on about how Mommy's having a bad day, and didn't mean that, and sometimes we say things we don't mean.
Hunh. My mother always meant every word she said, and if I cried about it, she'd repeat it, just so it was perfectly clear and that I didn't miss a detail. If she hadn't meant it, she'd apologize — that's what books and TV (and even my own parents) told me was how the world worked. You screw up, you apologize; the lack of apology meant my mother's actions were not a mistake... so I wasn't not-abused, either.
In general, I was mostly confused, but falling more in the area of "I can't be abused, because..." and thus bolstered with these reasons thanks to books and TV, the only alternative was to accept that everything that happened to me, happened to me because I was A Bad Kid.
16. Abused kids are innocent victims. They cower and take it, and they don't fight back.
If I hadn't blown that one completely by adolescence, by the time I was 13 this last pop-culture lesson was the nail in my psychological coffin. I've never been one to take things lying down — a slight drawback of being taught to be independent, to think and speak for yourself, by a mother who means well... until you use those skills in an argument. Whoops. If I wasn't protesting, I was wriggling out of her hold, or complaining that it hurt, or crying, which usually just made her even madder. ("I'll give you something to cry about" is only a joke in the dark, morbid sense.)
Becoming an athlete, though, meant I did have some basic strength, though few skills and never any kind of emotional strength in the face of anger — someone else's anger (even to this day) will leave me almost completely helpless in terror. Sheer instinct sets in, and that's what I fought with, but fighting at all meant — if you go by books and television — that I had lost my right to say I was innocent. I was now part of the problem. If I was sitting down when Mom came at me, I'd plant a foot in her stomach to keep her off, shove her back so I could scramble away. If she grabbed me, I let my hands fly out and hit whatever they hit, in hopes it'd force her back, long enough that I could get away.
In books and tv shows, the kids cower, they cry, they might put their hands over their heads, but they don't kick and scream back and try to punch their way free so they can run for the bedroom and barricade themselves in, or bolt out the front door with Dad's car keys in their hands. They're victims and victims don't hit back. For ten years or more, all I'd been able to do was take it, and the taller and stronger I got (along with the usual independence-urge that comes with puberty), the less I was interested in taking much of anything. I couldn't stop it, I couldn't predict it, and I knew every single time that doing anything would just make it ten times worse — but I just couldn't keep taking it. For my own self-respect and my own integrity, I had to try and defend.
That was when I kissed any last illusion of eventual rescue/end goodbye: I wasn't one of those helpless, hapless victims any more. I was part of it, in some twisted way. I yelled back, I fought back, I hit back. It never did any good, and it never stopped anything, but the one thing it did end was any last ability to relate to those kids in books and television. Sure, they were abused, but me? No, I wasn't innocent at all. Not anymore, and thus, I obviously wasn't abused.
And that leads me up to the culmination of the day I realized that there was something inherently broken, some kind of disconnect, between everything in the books and on television and in movies, compared to my middle-class, relatively mainstream, superficially happy existence and the random explosions of violence after any audience had left for the night. I was in college, at a friend's apartment, and the television was on, and that's when I realized this last rule.
17. In the books and movies, you can't have a happy ending if you're missing one crucial ingredient.
Time and again I'd seen this scene, and it always precipitates the final resolution (or may prompt the cathartic finale and then the denouement, but it's in there). It was one of those corny shows like 'Touched by' or whatever that show was with Michael Landon, you know the kind of quasi-after-school-special where every episode is A Very Special Episode, blah blah blah. I don't even know why I was watching it, only that near the end, we see the abused kid with the teacher who'd befriended him. In walks some kind of official-looking person, with clipboard or notepad or whatever, and the teacher turns to the kid and says, "okay, now tell her what you told me."
See, in books and movies, the kid is always rescued: maybe some neighbors take him in, or she goes to live with a foster family who loves her and feeds her and makes her wear pink, or long-lost relatives show up, or maybe even the parents break down and admit they're horrible and promise to get help and everyone goes into therapy. The last version always closes with the kid promising the intervening person — be that an angel, or a teacher, or some travelling no-name who randomly turns big and green — that really, it's going to be all better, now. Just like some kinda little trooper who forgives his parents even after they threw him out a window and broke both his legs and starved him and all those other Really Bad Things that mark the kid as Really Abused.
I was used to that, and I was used to ignoring any possible wish-fulfillment for me in that, because, y'see, the entire show or story had reinforced in fifteen different ways that I wasn't really abused. Maybe hit a few times, but not abused, not like that — and since the premise wasn't mine, neither was the happy ending.
But that moment, seeing that scenario for the nth time and hearing that line, and I realized: every single time, that's how it works. Someone out there believes the kid, and after that, everything becomes happy and good. That made sense, until I realized what was wrong with this picture, and how the truth was that the entire show, every book, every story, every movie, were all lies. Nothing but lies.
Because for that kid to be believed, the kid had to speak up.
It's right there, in that single, simple, line: tell her what you told me. The kid told someone what was going on, told someone what his parents did, and it seemed to me the implication was clear: the kid first, then, had to believe it was wrong. Or else why open his mouth at all, why complain when it wouldn't change anything, when that's the way the world just is?
In that split-second, I knew for a fact that this kid on television had never once been abused, not in this story. Because if he had, he would've believed not that the situation was wrong, but that this is just the way the world is.
He would believe that everything his parents have done and said was his fault. He would believe that every time his parents say they wish he'd never been born that they're not lying. He would believe that when they throw him out the front door and lock it behind him that they really don't want him to come back because they can't stand a child as bad as him. He would believe that every time they take something away from him or break a promise or change their minds, it's because he's no good. He would believe he doesn't deserve any better than that and should instead feel grateful for what he does get.
He sure as hell doesn't go around complaining to other people, he doesn't expose his shame to the world and break the world's illusion that his family works so hard to present, that he's a good kid and they're happy, because the fact that he's bad is their private, shared, shame, and he's lucky they put up with him, when no one else will. He sure as hell doesn't go blabbing to someone else, because what good does that do? Either it'll get back to his parents how ungrateful he is, and prove even more solidly that he's a bad kid, or it'll just be opening him up to yet another adult so patiently explaining that if he just tried harder, everything would be fine, because it can be tough being a kid but his parents obviously love him and he just needs to be a better kid for them.
That is what you get when you open your mouth and tell someone.
So you don't. Freaking. Open. Your. Mouth.
And if you remain silent in the face of everything that happens to you, day after day after day, that is when you're truly a victim of abuse.
That's all I ask, authors. If you're going to write that backstory, just once, consider writing it without the stereotypes and without the after-school-special assumptions about education and class and race and addiction that are rampant in so many stories.
It has been a long time since I've read anything with a teenaged protagonist while looking to see myself in that protagonist — those days are long past. But I also know the world is not really much of a better place than it was when I was looking for answers for questions I couldn't yet voice. There are still, on any given day, two thousand or more children who may be reading your story, measuring themselves against your words. They'll be wondering if this time, once again, they're going to come up short, with the conclusion that yet again, they're not really abused, and all the pain in their life must be because they deserve it.
Their parents are telling them that, their teachers and neighbors and pastors and friends may be telling them that — or may be saying it by dint of not saying anything at all, and far as they can see, all that's left is in print and on film. Don't be one more voice telling them that to be Really Abused that they have to suffer in these precise ways. Don't be one more voice telling them that they're only abused if they have broken bones or a laid-off parent or there's alcohol in the mix. Don't be one more voice telling them that they're not really abused, or that they're not abused enough to warrant the happy ending. Because they are, and they do.
If no one ever listens to anything I write here, no one takes anything away from any words I put pixel to screen, let this be at least that one exception. Every kid, every person, deserves a chance at a happy ending, and every kid, every person, should have the chance to see themselves in a story's possibilities, at least once. Maybe you'll decide after all that you'd rather write a kid who's abused with lies and drunkenness and massive scenes in public, and to set aside the complexities of abuse when the kid isn't perfect, isn't small and weak, isn't a top student, isn't outgoing, isn't loved by teachers, isn't angelic, and isn't innocent. If that's so, and you'd rather go the easy path, then I'd at least ask that you do so intentionally.
That way, when we meet face to face, you'll at least know the options, and will be able to say with clear conscience that it served the story better to write the stock villain and the after-school special. You'll be able to say your choices were intentional. And then you'll be braced for the fact that I'll walk away without a word. Because you, clearly, could not be bothered to have words for me or mine, just like so many before you, and thus I will waste no more on you.
The writers of this world are dreamers, and if there is anyone who needs a dream — deserves a dream, even — it's those children living in warzones that pass for family. Please, at least once, spare a bit of your dreams for them, too.
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Date: 6 Apr 2010 05:54 am (UTC)