Walking the Line

One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.

– Kahlil Gibran

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine I keep my eyes wide open all the time I keep the ends out for the tie that binds Because you're mine, I walk the line

– Johnny Cash

I used to be somebody’s mother.

In the ruins of childhood, my mother stood on the ramparts and recited the mantra that she wished I had never been born. I managed to assemble a version of motherhood that I could perform. I created over eight years of magical instances for my son to inhabit: spontaneous picnics on the misty walk home from shopping, painting pictures at the big wooden table that was hung in a makeshift gallery in the staircase, reading books together each night, sitting up against the pillows on his childhood bed. Before he could read, he rehearsed the lines of stories from memory, holding picture books in his small hands.

“Mr. Gumpy has a boat and his house is by a river!”

We read The Book of Nonsense together and laughed out loud at the drawings and the magical songs and rhymes.

I stuck glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of his childhood bedrooms. Each time we moved, which was at least once a year, I carefully removed them while he was asleep and put them up in the new room before he went to bed.

*

When my son was little, I escaped from his father. He was a violent man.

We met outside a bar where I was smoking a cigarette. He found me there; he was wearing a long black wool coat. He walked me partway home. We made alcohol-induced snow angels on the way, feeling the vertical line of our existence.

One night, I watched him scale the retaining wall alongside the river that ran through the heart of the city. Intoxicated, he screamed out into the echoing cavern of space. I was drawn— terrified but drawn. He wore an olive, felt trilby hat as if he had just walked out of a 1920s speakeasy.

He introduced me to The Velvet Underground. The lyrics captured all my restless feelings, beautiful songs about ugly things. I could be his mirror, the wind, the rain, and the sunset. He stopped using cocaine.

Things would have gone better if I had concentrated on being my own mirror, seeing the night in my own mind, but I hadn’t learned that yet. I could have just put down my own hands.

Instead, I was blindly drawn to his charm and personality, his orchestrations of mysterious patterns in the universe. He gave me a book and inscribed it with the words: To my fairy princess. He was twenty-seven. I was seventeen—lithe limbs and body, long red hair, and green eyes.

*

A few months later, I had an unplanned pregnancy. Sitting on the edge of the bath in his one-room apartment, we watched the clear blue line appear. We promised to stay together. I worried I was recreating my childhood, following the script of my parents’ turbulent marriage. I buried the worry along with other sinking fears.

When I was two months pregnant, we moved away from the city where my father lived. It was the dead of winter. One of my two suitcases was lost on the way, silently falling out of the back of his pickup truck into the snow. Half of me disappeared.

Inside the suitcase was a photograph of my mother and father, taken after my father had a passport photo done. He had dark hair, serious eyes. She was wearing her dark blue raincoat, her hair platinum blonde. You can see from her smudged mascara that she had been crying right before the picture was taken; my father was leaving England on a trip to the United States. My photograph was the only proof that my parents loved each other.

*

We moved into a rundown, second-floor apartment in the industrial corridor of a northern city. For a view, there was a factory across the street.

The magic did not last. The light went out in him as he became a dark and brooding shadow hunched over a desk in a study behind a closed door. The smell of stale smoke filled the room and turned the walls yellow.

There were rats in the apartment. They lived behind the walls. You could hear them at night, scratching and scurrying. I was terrified of them. One night, my son’s father left a line of popcorn across the kitchen floor to entice them. My fear about this amused him. In the morning, the popcorn was gone. The rats were stealthy creatures. I worried about diseases they might have carried from the sewers. I called the landlord who sent a man in a red plaid shirt to put a sticky board in the cupboard under the sink. In the night, I woke to a repetitive thrashing sound. In the kitchen was a large black rat, its coarse coat shining with grease, the sticky trap stuck to its back. The rat turned and twisted in contortions on the cracked linoleum floor. I climbed onto a table and began to scream as my son’s father tried to manage the thrashing animal with a broom. I was screaming for him to spare its life, but he did not. He picked up the stove and dropped it squarely on top of the rat. A woosh of bright red blood burst out across the floor. All went silent; all movement stopped.  

*

The apartment was a grim place with cracked windows that let in drafts of winter air. Ice formed fractal patterns and intricate symmetries over the glass panes so you could not see out. It appeared magical as if I was living in the turrets of a frozen, fairytale palace. The illusion ended there, in the space of make-believe that my mind was conjuring to escape the present. I stood at the window, scraping away the ice with my fingernail, thinking of how to get out.

I felt a swishing inside me, a tiny kick.

*

I can’t remember the exact reason why I dropped the engagement ring down the sink. It went down silently, without a sound. When he found out, he called me a dumb, goddamned woman. He lay on his back on the floor and unscrewed the pipes until water rushed out with the tinkling sound of the silver ring. He put the ring back inside its velvet box and hid it away.

*

I quickly learned to understand the trajectories of his moods, how the flights of mania would eventually descend into depression. I built a watchtower along the borderland between normal and delusion. When I left the watchtower, I put myself in danger.

The first time he hit me, I was in the kitchen making chicken curry. I had spoken back to him. I was seven months pregnant. I received a hard slap across the cheek.

The summer days became a hazy blur as if I’d been drugged and could not quite wake up. I walked along a thin line of a tightrope—wanting to leave, thinking I should stay; wanting to stay, thinking I should leave.

*

After we brought the baby home from the hospital, I watched my son’s father kill a cat through the dining room window. I remember now we were in another house. He dealt a swift blow to her head with a hammer. Her name was Anna. She was suffering from feline leukemia. The cat fell limp to the grass. My baby was sleeping in the other room. I walked into the room and placed my hand over his heart just above his baby rib cage. I knew I would need to protect my son from his father. I knew I’d have to do that. Standing next to the crib, I knew I’d be dragging my son out of wretched places and brittle moments. I knew his father was going to ruin all things good, just as all things good must have been ruined for him.

*

The time that follows is divided into four linear periods, although each one is an iteration—a recurrence—of the last, like a musical score on a set of staves, braced and barred together, vertically aligned. Each contains well-worn themes: sorrow and sacrifice, regret and remorse, the dignity of wrath.

In the first, my son’s father hurts me.

The rages grew more frequent and came out of nowhere. One time, he pulled me by my hair and dragged me across a room with a dirty carpet. He got upset when we were putting together a baby stroller. It’s another version of me that I see: the young girl with long red hair.

On my nineteenth birthday, he chose to ignore the day. There was no reason, just another way to hurt me. I told him it was my birthday.

“Don’t you see your own psychological tyranny?” he asked. “You’re so fucking selfish.”

He had a gift for twisting things in ways that made me question my own sanity and perception.

He left the apartment in a rage, the door slamming like in the childhood house.

A few hours later, I heard his footsteps on the landing. I was pacing in bare feet over the carpet, my son cradled in my arms over my right shoulder. I always held my left hand up to protect his neck.

His voice was loud and slurring. He threw a half-dead bouquet of red roses onto the table by the door, the kind you’d see at the gas station, withered beneath the plastic.

“There” he slurred. “Don’t say that I forgot your fucking birthday.”

I ran from the room with the baby.

*

One night, he pushed me backwards onto a bed. His arm went back like a wing as he raised his hand to me. Time stood still. He stared at me, eyes black and dead. I watched as he weighed his choices available at that moment.

Strangely, I doubted his resolve, so I whispered, “Do it.”

In the space of one breath, his hand tightened into a fist just before he punched it hard into the bridge of my nose. Bright stars across dark space, then tears tinged with bright red blood.

I wore a pair of oversized sunglasses for the next few days. I looked like a fly.

*

In the second, the father hurts the child.

It started with outbursts of frustration at the baby, him raising his voice and telling me to make the baby stop crying.

We didn't make it together for long. I had to leave when my son was less than a year old. The problems and violence in the relationship were intractable. I felt a mixture of heartbreak and fear. However, I couldn't completely sever ties because of a court-ordered visitation schedule: every other weekend and one night per week. The courts emphasize the importance of children maintaining a relationship with both parents.

He had his own addictions and inner demons to fight. The struggle to overcome his opioid addiction was ongoing; he subdued the cravings in his body with alcohol. As a father, he could only express his emotions as anger, now directed at his own child for simply being a child.

The harm often took the form of dark and sinister spanking rituals, as this was the way he’d been brought up.

“For Christ’s sake Sarah! He needs to learn the goddamned lesson.”

The spankings took place behind closed doors when my son went with his father for the weekend. My son told me about them when he came home.

“I had macaroni and cheese. I had a spanking.”

“Daddy got angry because I didn’t play with the train the right way.”

I nurtured him and held him close. At home with me, I tried to do my best even though I was struggling myself, balancing being a single parent with working and going to school. But the weekends with his father always came around.

I remember sitting on the stoop outside the house waiting for the pick-up. At times, I felt more like an older sister than a mother because, in many ways, I was just a kid myself. The wait always made me feel sick to my stomach. He was always late, sometimes smelling like booze and cigarettes. When the car drove away with my son in the backseat, I opened a beer right away, having made my mother’s discovery that alcohol provides a rapid anesthetic.

I attempted to distance myself, contemplated leaving, but apprehension set in as I feared depriving my son of the chance to know his own father. To no avail, I turned to the courts, hoping for a resolution. A stupid part of me was still in love with him and dreamed only of happier times. I held onto the belief that he could change, I could change. We could be a family.

The gaslighting started—shimmering realities and distortions of the truth. He made cruel and untrue accusations about my mental state and my capacity to be a mother. He put a lot of energy into trying to poison my son against me.

“You can not use the word mother. Under this roof, you may only call her the evil one.”

*

In the third iteration, the child hurts himself.

I watched my son try out the traits of his father as he worked through the fallout of his own traumatic childhood. It happened slowly at first, but then the overlay became more evident. It started with rages and mood swings, the accompanying chaotic flow of his thoughts, brilliant but fragmented and outside the lines of logic. At times, I noticed myself holding my breath when he was talking. He explained mysterious mercurial conjectures of the planets; he drew diagrams of the oscillating voltages of brain wavelength frequencies across the wall of his apartment. It was hard to hold the two opposing feelings of fascination and dread. I searched for a metronome inside me to manage my anxiety.

I struggled as he got older because he resembled his father in both features and temperament. I had to consciously remind myself that they were different people. But sometimes, I heard the same voice, the same accusations and blame, as if I were in a rehearsal. I questioned whether everything was my fault. Perhaps I was unstable. The refrain, “Your mother is crazy,” was stuck in my head.

I raised my son in my grief, in the aftermath of the sudden deaths of my mother and brother, father and sister. We were a small family of two.

I held on to him for dear life.

As an adult, like his father, my son periodically cycled in and out of days of mania then descended into periods of major depressive episodes. Some of those ended in suicidal ideations. I wore an imaginary ancestral amulet to protect him, a belief that my love would keep him safe.

He carries a heavy burden, a generational dysfunction, passed forward through the blood, arising from centuries of trauma numbed with one substance or another, mired in wrath and guilt.

On my side, growing up in England was cursed by all that makes life hard—a workaholic and unfaithful father, an alcoholic and agoraphobic mother, a scapegoated brother who died tragically young, and a sister who did not survive.

His father grew up in the corn belt, wide earth across the plain where he chisel-plowed the flat fields, following the line of the horizon. He was the product of generations of farmers and nothing but endless work. He came from the line of folk who pushed a frontier because they were restless, avoiding the warm hearth of a community at all costs.

*

When he was in his mid-twenties, my son went through a rough breakup.

I went to check on him every day after work as I was always worried sick. One night, when I got to his apartment, he said he was going out to drink. He asked me to go along, so I went, not because I wanted to but because I was afraid and didn't want to leave him alone. I made the choice of a coward.

Days before, I witnessed him walk out in front of a car as if he was sleepwalking. The brakes cut the air with a screech. He was testing fate.

We went to a rough bar across the street. He started drinking whiskey. I tensely sipped on a beer. I knew the night would end badly. He started playing Johnny Cash songs on the jukebox, singing along loudly to them.

“I keep my eyes wide open all the time; I keep the ends out for the tie that binds.”

Then, in that instance, a convergence occurred where fragments of different moments in time coalesce, aligning flawlessly. You suddenly find yourself immersed in a scene from the past overlapping with the present. The memory unfolds in vivid detail just before the moment takes a sharp turn, leading to a point of no return, the dead man’s bend on a winding road.

He ordered another double.

I detached and watched from a safer distance.

I time-traveled back to childhood, to my mother drinking and singing along to Neil Diamond songs on the record player before the tide of her mood would reverse and things would go to the bad place. I went back to watching her singing on stage in smoke-filled bars before she couldn’t leave the house much.

When we returned to my son’s apartment, he immediately looked for his phone to check for a missed call from the girl. But the phone wasn’t even charged, so he flew into a rage. He picked up a metal folding chair and hurled it across the room. The chair collided with a flatscreen television, shattering its screen into a spiderweb of fractured lines. He smashed it to the floor, then jumped on it as if it was an indoor trampoline. I took slow, measured steps backward, feeling for my phone in my coat pocket. I could see from the wild look in his eyes that he was just getting started. He opened the back door and stood on the landing at the top of the steep basement stairs. He was frozen like a statue. The only movement was his mind turning as he stared into the darkness. He started throwing his belongings into the dark, damp void. Armfuls of crumpled clothes and blankets went down first without a sound. I called 911. There was no relief in the silence of the soft things, so he began to find heavier and louder objects from the kitchen: pots and pans, stacks of plates, artwork from the walls. He started throwing anything he could pick up until his face lit up as his eyes fell on some cans of paint by the door. He picked one up and tossed it down the stairs. A woosh of brilliant lime green paint flew into the air in slow motion. All went silent; all movement stopped.

I knew he was thinking of how to throw himself next.

The police arrived. The police left.

My son assured them in a calm and lucid voice that everything was alright.

“I’m very sorry. I just damaged my own belongings. No one was hurt here.” He appealed to their desire for a peaceful conclusion to the evening. 

The rough patch went on for longer than usual. Heartbroken and filled with despair, my son wanted to take his own life. When I went to visit him, I found him lying in his bed under heavy blankets as if he had polio. Once, I found three X-Acto knives lined up on a counter in the kitchen. I took them and hid them in the back of my car.

One afternoon, I saw he had written a to-do list and put it on a bulletin board. Number one read: “Stop wanting to die.” I wanted to cry, but I held back tears to be strong. I wanted to be strong in the face of the demons, the untreated mental illness and the self-medicating habits I felt were holding him. I called therapists. I left Post-it notes with telephone numbers of crisis hotlines and suicide prevention lines. I reached out to his friends and others I didn't even know to allay the terror that I felt. I committed every codependent infraction in the book. I was supposed to establish boundaries between his choices and mine, but the thought of leaving him alone was terrifying. I had a deep internal conflict about how to proceed in every moment.

I prayed for his protection. I tried to build a wall around him, a fortress where he would be forever safe and unharmed.

Once, I took both his hands and made him promise to me that he wouldn’t take his own life. As I did this, I sobbed softly. I was weak and selfish, even though I wanted to be the opposite. In my fear, I blended his pain with my own. His eyes, always so blue and bright, looked back at me with an equal measure of fear and emptiness. I knew I had asked the unaskable. It was his life to live; his life to end.

A few days later, he called me from his cellphone. He had left work and walked about forty blocks across the city to an abandoned industrial area in the direction of the nearest firearms store. It was closed. He called me from the top of a vacant building.

“I need you to come and get me now or I’m going to jump.”

I ran to my car and drove to where I thought he might be. He wouldn’t tell me his exact location, so I drove west from the place where he worked. As I drove, I called 911 and delivered an incomprehensible cry for help. The dispatcher was kind. I drove recklessly as if I were in a dream, running every other red light. My son answered the phone and stayed on the line with me.

I parked my car next to a vacant, empty field bordered by concrete buildings and metal fences topped with barbed wire. High weeds and wild grasses obscured the view. It was Sunday.

Suddenly, a blur of bright green rushed toward the car. It was my son, wearing a green shirt. The detail was imprinted in case I needed to tell the police what he was wearing. He pulled open the car door and jumped in. He fell into me like a small child. I held him there, held him close as sobs wracked through us.

A rap on the window startled us. A tall figure stood there, blocking the light. He knocked again. I saw that the man had arrived in a gold pickup truck. I lowered the window.

“Do you need help?” he asked in a slow and deliberate southern drawl. His face was weathered and lined, eyes pale and worn.

For a moment, I thought he was a police officer but then realized that was improbable as he was wearing a cowboy hat and a silvery shirt.

“We’re ok, thanks,” my son said, since I was speechless by that point.

We watched him stroll away.

I knew in my bones that he was an angel of death, arriving to escort my son had he taken his life.

“I couldn’t actually jump because I was being attacked by a seagull,” my son explained, a beautiful smile forming across his face.

We were crying and laughing at the same time when the squad car pulled up. My son was admitted to the nearest psychiatric hospital. I drove home, finally able to exhale, but numb and practically catatonic.

The next morning, my phone rang. He was out, in high spirits, speaking rapidly in quick-fire gasps about the non-therapeutic quality of institutional white paint.

“How could anyone heal in a place like that!”

His father signed him out that morning. They went to play tennis together.

*

In the fourth, the child hurts the mother.

Years later, in a blow-up with my son, time rippled before collapsing, falling in on us like an avalanche. It was a new yet ancient reality, the repetition of a tragic recursive storyline.

On a Friday night, I had too much to drink. We argued in my kitchen.

“Where is my mother?” he screamed.

I stood on the ramparts, like my mother, screaming bitter words in a slurred voice from a bitter place deep inside me. Trauma from the past was dragged up like the raising of a shipwreck. I started to throw things, tumbler glasses, pictures in frames. Glass shattered everywhere.

“I don’t know who you are! You’re crazy! You have turned into your mother!”

The end and the beginning of a circle were connected.

In a hysterical state, I was dragged to the ground and mangled through a hundred-year-old wooden swinging door as if I was a bag of hospital laundry. There was no melody. All four scores drowned out the others. Voices were lost in a cacophony.

I tried to hide under the shadow of a raven’s wing.

Across the expanse of time and space, there was a moment of completion—a full circle was drawn. An enormous chunk of ice, once firmly lodged within its dam, was finally dislodged. There was a tiny ripple of transformation.

*

I used to be somebody’s mother. But we don’t speak anymore. It’s the most profound anguish I have ever endured. Reminders of my son flood my mind: glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, a green teddy bear. I stop mid-reel because it hurts.

They say that when you’re a parent, you see your children at all ages at once, all parts of them in a single frame. In the grownup, you see the baby you once rocked to sleep; you see the child from their beginnings, their first moments of elated joy, play, and curiosity. The happy memories are your lifeline when destiny arcs in a cruel direction.

I reached the end of my reserves; I exhausted all my resources. 

I have been exiled to another realm of existence. My mother greets me there.

*

After the blowup with my son, I knew I had to heal my relationship with my mother. Lines had become crisscrossed and intertwined. She died from cancer when I was 13, after many tragic years of drinking her life away. She also drank away my childhood, the belief I was worthy of ever being loved or feeling safe, and any semblance of motherhood I could ever reference.

The path toward any future relationship with my son was predicated on an arc of forgiveness, an opening of my heart to him, myself, and my mother. I realized I could never be my son’s mother until I accepted I was my mother's daughter in all its complexity. I had to commune with her to heal us both. But the path was littered with resentments and pain.

In childhood, days repeated themselves in bitter fights between my mother and father. Time was lost in chaotic and frightening scenes. My mother threw things that broke and shattered: glass bowls, pictures, wine bottles, plates of food. The house shook with the slamming of doors. I hid in the cupboard under the stairs. I was terrified, fear curdling in my throat, tears pricking at my eyes. I was often hit and slapped, then condemned for my existence.

“I wish you had never been born!”

I can see all parts of me—an infant crying for comfort; a girl living in the shadows of childhood trauma and abuse. I see myself always running.

My sleepwalking started when I was small. I was stuck in a rehearsal. I still have to keep my bedroom doors tightly closed.

But I have to undo all the hurt. Without some semblance of acceptance, I remain abandoned in the past that continuously recreates itself in the present. I want more to pass forward than a story with a tragic storyline.

I’m the daughter of Amy Chatten, a woman I hated for most of my life. She’s my mother. You can see the resemblance in my pretty green eyes. I have inherited a lot from her: a short temper and a quick wit, an attachment to honesty and saying things as they are. I’ve inherited her love of sketching—lines drawn and kept clear, but only on paper.

I’ve inherited her height and overall structure of being tiny. I think I have my mother’s bony ankles. I’ve inherited her love of the song. I’ve inherited her love of a drink, too, but I try to not cross the line.

It takes a lot of courage to imagine that things could be different, but in my imagination of an alternate scene, a tiny door opens that I walk through.

*

I finally grasped the hardest lesson of all: the art of letting go. I have to fight to let go almost as hard as I have to fight to hold on. It’s a lesson I continuously learn. If I am fortunate, I can accept my own darkness, the night in my own mind.

I let go of the water I have been clutching in my hands, letting go of what was impossible to hold in the first place. I imagine the water returning to sea. I try to catch myself when I am drawn toward the undertow. It’s almost impossible, but I learn to validate my own existence for myself; I draw a line of sacred light around me.

I keep the ends out for the tie that binds.