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I AM WORKING OF A MEMOIR ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF GROWING UP WITH CHEATING PARENTS
This is an excerpt from one of my drafts
One of the themes I am working with is how children of infidelity often ‘know’ that something is wrong in their family, before they actually know about the affair.
I welcome any comments, about the excerpt or your own experience with finding out about your parents’ affair below.
HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN SOMETHING IS WRONG?
You can smell a fire or hear an intruder or see a basketball wheeling toward your face, touch the point of a safety pin or taste rancid meat.
But what if your five senses tell you that everything is fine?
What if the only thing warning you is the throbbing in your gut?
Would you believe yourself?
What if you were only eight years old?
I sat watching television, slumped down on the brown tweed couch, so that my bare feet touched the orange shag carpet of our family room. It was twilight in early November in the suburbs of New England, and the waning sun left faint shadows of the curtain lines on the nubby rug. The only other light in the room was the television. Television in the 1970s did not come with a remote, or with hundreds of channels, or a crystal clear picture. The light bounced and flitted off the walls and my face with the movement of the sitcom characters on the screen. Perhaps if I had the luxury of a remote I would have changed the channel to something that would have distracted me from myself. But I let both the babble of the sitcom and the repetitive laugh tracks take over the room because I was not really watching. I was deep inside of myself as I slapped the thick elastic waistband of my navy blue polyester pants against my eight-year-old belly button. Once, twice, over and over, to match the throbbing that I could not yet understand. These are so tight, I thought.
Why is my belly so big?
Outside of my television bubble I was aware of my mother in the kitchen browning hamburger for dinner, of my father opening and closing the back door as he returned from work, and of my six-year-old sister rattling through the upstairs hallway with her collection of plastic dinosaurs and racing cars.
What I did not know was that recently my mother had begun an extra-marital affair with another man. I did not know how our family would slowly unwind, each of us retreating to our own corners to weather a storm that we would not discuss or even acknowledge for almost ten years. But I did know that something was wrong. I have been searching for years for a way to describe how I knew, some piece of concrete proof to show others, or even myself, that my gut was correct. But I have none. I can only describe how I felt that night.
As a little girl one of my favourite activities was to look through pictures of myself as a baby and toddler. My mom kept shoeboxes full of old photos to some day put into albums, a string of smiles and laughs. A friend and I dressed up in my mom’s old pointy heels and circle skirts, from the dress-up box she had created for us. My baby sister squeezing my finger while swaddled in her car seat. The April Fool’s Day that we frosted a brick “cake” and convinced my dad it was dessert until he tried to cut into it. They were the happy memories that dominate photos. Rarely do we gather people together at funerals, or after an epic family feud, or even after the first honest conversation in years. These are memories, sadly, that we keep for ourselves, even as they may demonstrate the most real parts of our families.
These photos reminded me of concrete moments of being a family, and gave me a sense of being encircled, loved, and protected. The story that they told me was one of a contented family which would not cease, which would hold onto me and keep me safe. What I felt that night in the blotchy television light was solitary, as if the family circle had shattered and now I was alone to sort out why and how to proceed. I had no evidence for this outside of the feeling in my body. Which is probably why I turned on myself.
My pants felt tight, and my large body did not match the lithe frame of my friends. I was not fat of course, just not rail thin. Now women in the United States are accustomed to believing that any body that cannot be described as rail thin is simply too large and should be changed. But this was 1979 and I was only eight and I had no idea of the trap I was falling into. All I wanted was a solution to how I felt inside.
As I sat, not watching tv in the growing darkness, I knew that something was wrong and since I didn’t yet know what was really wrong, I assumed the problem must be me. It must be my body. This made me furious but also gave me hope.