The Private Sphere

It was late on a Wednesday night in April 1998. I am adjusting the rearview mirror on my father’s white Toyota Camry, attempting to back out of my parent’s oddly shaped driveway. I have the driver’s side window rolled down and the smell of orange blossoms from the groves a few blocks away is rushing in. Just as I put the car into reverse and begin the gently depress the gas pedal, I see my mother come running out of the house and lie herself down behind the rear wheels of the car.

“You are going to have to run me over if you want to leave!” she screams loudly. She is clad in a long powder blue cotton nightgown and is waving her arms and legs about as if she is trying to make a snow angel in invisible snow.

I was seventeen years old and had logged ten years of experience dealing with my parents’ blow outs and my mother’s mental and physical abuse. When I was younger, I would feel terrified and trapped: I would close and lock (if possible) the door to my room when rumblings of a bad night started. I would put on the headphones to my Walkman and fall asleep to Guns N’ Roses or Bon Jovi, the rock drowning out the sound of my parents fighting. Sometimes my mother would get access to my room anyway, waking me up to scream at me, which would lead to the unparalleled experience of me falling asleep while she yelled at me, and then being woken back up so I could better pay attention to what she was yelling at me about.

I got my driver’s license the minute I turned 16. When I started driving, the realization struck me: I could leave the house any time I wanted. I could leave any time I wanted! I could save myself! And after that, when my parents started getting into it or my mother started tearing into me, I threw some overnight clothes in a bag and started for the door. By this point in my adolescence my close friends were aware of what my mother was like. To their credit, my friends and their parents were kind enough to answer a late night phone call (back when such a call was ringing to a land line and waking up a whole house), open their doors to me, and let me stay over on school nights or weekends, whatever the situation called for.

My mother, apparently disappointed that I was finding a way to protect myself, was evolving her approach. Hence, laying down behind the wheels of the car to keep me from leaving.

I put the car back in park and pulled the keys out of the ignition. I grabbed my backpack out of the back seat and slammed the driver’s door. I walked over to where she laid on the ground, looking down at her as I slung my backpack over one shoulder.

“Fine. I’ll walk.”

I threw the keys on the ground and started off in a jog down the driveway. I didn’t turn around to see if she was following me until I was a half block away. I looked down the dark corridor of our rural dead-end street as I continued to walk backwards, noting no indications she was coming after me by foot or by car.

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For a period of three years, I lived in a 700 square foot, one bedroom, one bath apartment with three other people: my future ex-husband, my future ex-mother-in-law, and my future ex-brother-in-law. The lease, which was in my name alone, indicated only one person was supposed to be living there. Aside from the three people not on the lease, I also had my dog there, a small shih tzu/pug mix, who was also not technically allowed on the property. My future-ex and I slept in the bedroom and the other two slept in the living room: mom on the couch or EZ chair, brother on the floor under the desk which held his computer.

We kept these living arrangements for so long because I was financially very limited in my resources. I kept waiting for my ex to get a job back after his back surgery, but he never did. I was in the process of changing careers and transitioning genders. Between these factors and the financial impact of moving the two of us across the country from Arizona at the drop of a hat for the emergency back surgery, finding the means to land a new apartment seemed difficult.

But what also kept us there was mom and brother: if we didn’t let them stay with us, they would have nowhere to go, I was told.(I later learned, from speaking to other in-laws at holiday parties and weddings in future years, that they had offered help and she had still insisted on staying with us.) I felt terrible and couldn’t imagine making them leave.

In order to walk the dog (which was typically my responsibility alone), I had to wrap the dog in a blanket or sheet, carry the dog to the car, drive the car to a nearby park, and then walk the dog. Late, early, raining, sunny, or snowing, there I was.

And, perhaps worst of all, all four of us shared one bathroom. This resulted, as other people who have had similar arrangements can likely attest, in me taking occasional trips to local gas stations to use their facilities when nature called. I guess I could have shit in the back yard, but there was no private yard–it was a communal green space–and so that would have brought its own set of consequences.

I did a majority of the housework, with mom helping too. She and I were also the only ones working full-time jobs while doing all the housework, a pattern which would continue until I left my husband seven years later.

When people asked me about my life then, I can no longer remember how I used to explain it. I have a tendency to emphasize the silver lining of any situation, and this was no different.

That apartment had one door leading into it and very few windows, other than the sliding glass doors which opened out back onto the shared green space I wasn’t yet willing to shit in. We never had visitors, of course, because there would literally have been no where for them to sit. Because of the dog, we had to keep the blinds and shades closed all the time, as I was paranoid the landlord would see the dog and kick us out.

I used to try and explain to my ex-husband that when I would lay in bed at night in that apartment, I would often feel this weight on my chest.

“Like you’re having a heart attack?” he would ask.

“No. Just this constant, light but firm pressure. Unrelenting. Not enough to make me unable to breathe, but enough to make breathing seem to take more work than it should.”

It would take me years to realize that sensation was the anxiety bourne from being trapped in a prison of my own making.

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During the junior and senior years of my undergraduate education, I thought I was going to be an English professor. As I took the GREs and prepared to apply to graduate school, I began to consider what my specialty or focus was going to be.

I knew it was going to be American Literature written before 1900: the professor I had idolized my entire undergraduate career had introduced me to the genre as a freshman and I had become hooked. But I needed a focus or project more specifically than that, something I would start working on when I was admitted to a PhD program.

Stories from that time period in American history were often rife with discussion of and references to the robust communities and communal bonds necessary to be successful and thrive. Religious and government institutions played a prominent part in ensuring communities remained adhered together. This resulted in contrasts between life in the public sphere, where people were enveloped by their community, and life in the private sphere, which was much more secluded.

There were instances in this literature where the normally supportive, healthy public sphere became literally toxic, like during a flu pandemic. And there were stories in which people, typically young women, were made prisoners in their own homes, in part because social norms kept their suffering out of the public eye (Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper being a prime example of this idea).

The toxicity of a public drinking fountain during a disease epidemic seemed obvious to me. But that someone had been considering the snares that await us in private spaces filled me with emotion: one of the emotions being relieved that I was not the only one who had ever felt like I was a convict escaping prison simply by walking out the front door of a house I lived in.

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Basil and I were visiting with my Aunt Terry this past weekend when the subject of my previous marriage came up. I don’t know what the exact topic was, but I took time to express displeasure at whatever we were talking about.

“I was at your first wedding,” my Aunt Terry reminded me. “You seemed happy.”

Not wishing to discuss the topic further, I changed the subject.

When we were driving back to our hotel room later, Basil mentioned this exchange, adding, “People do not understand what he put you through.”

I nodded, sighing, “Such is the nature of the human condition.”

My first marriage often reminds me of my relationship with my mother: I would need a dozen hours to disclose the details to any person not intimately familiar with the situation to try to make them understand just what I went through. Even when I do take the time to try and explain some basic details, most listeners approach the subject with their own experiences of what a marriage is like or what a relationship with a parent is like. If you haven’t experienced some kind of dysfunction in your own private sphere, empathizing with or even imaging it in someone else’s life becomes a lot more challenging.

I want to say it takes extraordinary empathy to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and then imagine things happening to you that you wouldn’t wish upon an enemy. But then I think it is like reading a book: when someone explains something horrendous to you, can you not at the very least imagine them as a character in a novel, a protagonist who needs cheering on?