I lie alone on the grass after long interval workouts, staring up at the sky wondering if I can just turn my body into stardust, grateful for the exhaustion, to turn the anxiety into motion, to have something to do with it.
On a quiet morning run, while preparing for Junior Nationals, a couple weeks after Pac-10 Championships, where I placed sixth, nestled in at the back of the pack, I feel a sudden sharp pain in my knee, as if someone fired a nail beneath my kneecap. I pull up short thinking it’s a minor pain, the kind of thing that arrives suddenly and just as suddenly disappears. I try to walk it off. But each time I try to jog it out or ignore it, the pain returns, an electric shock going up my leg. I limp back to the field house.
The trainer advises me to take a week off, which I do, sweaty and anxious and roiling with nowhere to put it all. It feels like being trapped with all that energy, that fuel to run twelve to fifteen miles a day, a claustrophobic feeling, all fumes and nerves.
I try to run after a week off, but the pain is still there. After an X-ray and an MRI, the sports specialist at Stanford Medical Center tells me my season is done, that the cartilage in my knee is worn down from the awkward stride created by my flat left foot. There is a palpable resignation in his voice. “Surgery is rarely successful on distance runners. The slightest problem gets magnified by all the miles.” He gives me a summer rehab schedule of physical therapy, weights, and swim workouts, but I know my running career is probably over.
I can’t sleep. My appetite is gone. I have trouble focusing. It feels like my heart is going to leap out of my chest on each one of its thirty-eight beats per minute through a body whittled down to 4 percent body fat. I just want to run. I would trade twenty years of life for another year of training. That is my bargain. My way out. To become more horse than rider.
So I’m not prepared when I get the call. I’m not ready for it. I’m stretching in my dorm room when the phone rings and a polite woman asks me my name and explains she’s calling to tell me my mother has checked herself into their facility. I’m not prepared for the polite voice, the instructions, the details about the treatment facility where she will be staying for the foreseeable future.
She is safe and unable to harm herself. She is in excellent care. She is going to undergo treatment and it’s important that my brother and I visit her soon because she will need our support. There are so many questions: Is this some kind of nervous breakdown? Is she in a loony bin? Has she finally just lost it?
I’m simply not prepared.
There is a particular week for family visits, the voice tells me, and we should mark the week on our calendars because it’s “an important part of her recovery.” She needs to know that we support her, that her needs are important, that her feelings are real, that her struggles, her pain, her life are important to us, that we are thinking about her and ready to take care of her in whatever way she needs, because she’s been through so much.
I hang up the phone and try to feel bad. I know I’m supposed to. I know she’s severely depressed and in need of more from me. I know I’m supposed to take care of her, that this is what is required of the son she raised. But I don’t know why she’s going somewhere so far away. I don’t know what led up to it. I only know that every time I think of the trip I’m supposed to take to the treatment facility in Arizona, or of the abusive man she married, or of the million ways in which I must pretend to be the person she wants me to be, I don’t feel anything but the sense of an oncoming storm. I can’t sleep. I can’t study. I can hardly focus my eyes from the exhaustion most days. And I’m suddenly so angry I could scream.
* * *
THE MAN HAD on a blue shirt. He had a black beard. He wore small wire-frame glasses. He had a soft face, a kind face. He was sitting in the circle of family members who’d come to watch the “family share.” His job, like everyone else’s in the group, was to reflect upon what he’d heard when the two people had finished speaking to each other while sitting in the two wooden chairs placed three feet apart in the center of the circle. Our turn came and I spoke to Mom for about ten minutes. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I tried to be honest, truly honest about how inconsequential I felt as a child, how she did not show interest in my well-being, that my life was not my own, that my body was not my own, that I was made to do things I did not want to do, to play a role I did not want to play, that it was always clear to me that my needs weren’t important, whether those needs were for sympathy or love or food or basic safety, I always felt like my only job was to take care of her and beyond that to go on and do something in the world that would reflect well on her. It was time now to listen to people “say what they heard” in my statement. An old man said, “It’s time to cut the apron strings, lady.” A woman said, “It sounds like your son feels overwhelmed by your inappropriate demands.” One of the teenagers said, “I think he’s a little mad because he had to take care of you for so long and so he never got to be a kid.” Then the man in the blue shirt spoke. He had a black beard. He wore small wire-frame glasses. He spoke kindly.
“You’re gonna have to accept that your trauma caused him trauma. It’s hard for kids to deal with emotional abuse. You crossed all boundaries. You neglected his needs. You made him your caretaker. I don’t know what to tell you. That’s abuse.”
He spoke quietly, staring at his hands, fumbling with his fingers with his head down. Mom said nothing. She only looked at me with her sad puppy-dog eyes, as if searching for something. I felt the breath leave my body as the words hung in the air.
Somebody said something else. Each in turn, one after the other, but I couldn’t hear it, only the words spoken by the man in the blue shirt, until it got to Tony, who had just finished his own “family share” with her. He shook his head and lifted his hands as if to say, I don’t know what else there is to add.
I looked around the room because I wondered why I couldn’t breathe.
Am I supposed to say something? Am I supposed to answer? The group moved on and it was time for the next share. We all stayed in the circle and I caught Mom looking at me several times as if desperate to communicate something. I looked away. I looked down. I closed my eyes.
Emotional abuse. What does that even mean? We read Oedipus Rex in my classics course at Stanford. The man who wanders the earth blind after gouging his eyes out when he realizes he has married his own mother. I get that. I get that you would need to do something drastic, that the situation would mark you, curse you even. I feel a curse falling over me. Children of neglect. Orphans. Inappropriate demands. Physical boundaries. There is the sense that something is off, something indelible. That I missed it. I missed something essential, something everyone else can see.
I think maybe I can pretend the words weren’t said or I didn’t comprehend them. So many things were said by so many people. Maybe these particular ones can be avoided, just swept up with the detritus of dust from the desert coming in from the open windows.
Tony and I eat quietly in the lunchroom, staring down at our food, surrounded by the low beige walls as if they are closing in on us. “That was pretty fucked-up,” Tony says. I nod and chew, looking down. “Why are we even here?” There’s a tightness in my chest and I don’t have a good answer, just a sense the room is spinning.