She pauses to reflect, regroup, and reveal.
The truth: escaping the murky past is mystifying. Anxiety followed me everywhere, shadowing every move, there at the edges of every planned next step. Running away from trouble, or running toward trouble—the point, I guessed, was that trouble would find me. I developed habits and patterns of thinking, sometime ruts of behaviour to cope. And it was impossible to escape Italian parents who called weekly to complain and carp long-distance. The dismay lived inside me: my nervous stomach. The panic-spiraling thought process that looped through my days and nights. The way I flinched at the loud voices of passersby. I fidgeted with my clothes, pulling my sleeves over my hands, my T-shirt over my lips. Only later did I realize my body language spoke of cloaking and remaining hidden. I did my best to hide from the past, but it found me again and again, in distressing dreams, in messy relationships. When I sat down to write, every story contained conflict with a difficult mother.
Two years into my Victoria life, my friend and roommate, Frances, recommended the university’s free counselling services after I ruined her good mood with another night of lamenting.
Every Sunday morning conversation with my parents drained me. My father grumbled about my mother nonstop. She called and criticized, called and ranted, called and left dreadful messages on the answering machine. The grey days and incessant rain in Victoria took on a Dickensian quality in winter; the sensation spread to summer. I never wanted to go out. I didn’t even want to get out of bed. I needed a job, and there were none.
Rocco called with an invitation to dinner and berated my lack of initiative. “Go downtown to the Employment Centre. If no one has work, grab a broom and start sweeping the floor right there. They’ll see you’re serious about finding work. You better not stay inside. It’s no good living like this. You need to keep busy.”
It didn’t help that the local paper published a cover story stating there were hundreds of positions and not enough students to fill them.
My uncle read the article. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any energy. All my muscles ache all the time, even when I get up in the morning.”
“Eufemia, I’m tell you something important, and you better listen. There is nothing wrong with you. You need a job, okay? That’s all.”
Though suspicious, I made an appointment with the counselling office. Nothing came free, everything had a price. A woman named Kate, with long straight hair and a striking resemblance to Juice Newton welcomed me. She was a doctoral student, working on her practicum. I followed her into a small room where she explained the format: three complimentary sessions, forty-five minutes each, with a possibility they would refer me to someone if after that amount of guidance I still felt in need of assistance. I almost laughed in her face. I’d spent nearly four years with Dr. Salima, right up until the last year of high school when she weaned me off by double-booking newer clients in my appointment time. She wanted me to practice independence and confidence. Losing her sympathetic ear had been a blow.
In point form, I gave Kate my top three concerns from the greatest hits list. In response to her quizzical stare, I rushed through an explanation: my mother’s propensity to attack people was probably the result of being raised in an abusive home back in Italy.
“I don’t subscribe to the theory that violence begets violence. Simply because one is raised in that environment doesn’t mean they have to perpetuate the awful behaviour. That would mean violence is a type of unbroken circle.”
I frowned, wrinkling my forehead. “What if they had no other examples? No good role models?”
“Everyone has a choice.”
“My mother grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War. In a country that was devastated by a dictator. My parents were shoved together like Ken and Barbie dolls. They didn’t have the luxury of choosing to go to school.” I couldn’t veil the annoyance in my voice and sounded pompous as I promoted History 201: The Italian Campaign.
Kate clasped her hands and let them fall onto her lap. She leaned back before she spoke again, her words clipped for emphasis. “Everyone always has a choice.”
I told myself this was typical of the hogwash I could expect from the clueless. I should have known. People mistook my traditional, old-fashioned name for a moniker they thought counterculture flower children folks had bestowed on me. Or they assumed “Italian” meant marble statues, operas, carnival and high culture. My parents’ Italy was a place of small-town suspicion and historic misfortune.
My voice shook. “No they don’t. Marriages get arranged. Lives get destroyed. What choices can those people make?”
She shrugged. She couldn’t help me if I wasn’t willing to listen to her rationale.
In desperation, I kept the next two appointments where Kate continued to advocate agency. I left despondent. I had dropped creative writing but stayed in school, unable to focus on any of my courses. I showed up sporadically for Theatre History, Technology in Education and Latin class. My central nervous system felt plugged into the old Emergency Broadcast System that played on television during my childhood. I kept waiting for instructions—where to go and what to do: If life was a test, I was failing.
The brief dip into psychological aid didn’t diminish any of my anxiety. In every sense, it expanded the stress: My right eye twitched during each appointment. I wondered what that meant in the old-world wisdom my parents tried to impart.
Four months later, after another nudge from Frances, I got a therapist. Doug booked me into several biweekly sessions and suggested I also join group therapy: “Where the real work begins.”
In one group meeting, Doug allowed a graduate student to come in and ask questions. She was studying aspects of shared memory, specifically how two family members could experience the same event and yet remember it differently. I sat on the couch, stone-hearted, irritated with the changed agenda. I disliked this grad-gal. My age, she had her life together, working on a thesis, building a career. I was back in therapy, feeling stuck again. I signed up for group to “come to terms with” my issues, afraid life would never work out. Nothing would change. I would be weeping about the same old scars, the same unhealed wounds forever. One day my parents would die: One day I would be dead. I figured then, definitely, things would have to change. Death, according to an instructor, was an adjustment in the individual’s cosmic address. Did I have to wait that long for the gloom to subside?
The grad student handed out questionnaires. “Don’t record any memory where your head sustained an injury. If you fell and hit your head, or if you were struck by a ball or—”
“Or what?” I prodded. She didn’t need to complete the sentence. This was a room full of people who understood the myriad possibilities of being struck. I checked the paper and decided it was a no-brainer. I couldn’t participate. No answers unless I could write “Shove it” as an answer to each question.
Doug looked over and saw me sitting with my arms folded across my chest, my lips pressed in a line of grim determination.
He cocked his head in query.
I looked away. Hadn’t he paid attention when I spoke? All my memories contained potential head slaps, cuffs and jabs. My face flushed pink. What was the point of this young woman’s research? Substantiating False Memory Syndrome? Did this mean most of my memories wouldn’t be believed? That I would be viewed as untrustworthy? My thoughts clouded with confusion and frustration. I wasn’t interested in being a lab rat, poked and tested to see if I could find my way out of someone’s textbook labyrinth.
After the student had left, Doug asked the group, “How was that? Did you witness how you responded to change? What did you learn?”
“Nothing. If you must know. Absolutely nothing.”
Heads turned to look at me.
I shook my head. “Seriously, what was the point?”
Doug examined his fingernails. “So you should do what makes you comfortable, is that it? Is that why you’re here?”
“I don’t know why I’m here. I know I don’t like having my time wasted.”
I lasted until I couldn’t take the group-therapy-speak anymore. Frequently, palpable friction occurred when members triggered each other, and I recognized the innately human habit of comparison. Occasionally someone would note the toxic impact my mother had and would ask why I didn’t cut off contact. Fatigue weighed me down every time I had to translate the elements of my personal universe: daughter plus duty, the first generation, disconnection from both sides of the family, my lifelong yearning to fit in and longing to belong. At twenty-two, one of the youngest members of the group, I was pouring over the past like a senior who’d messed up every opportunity given. I couldn’t shake off the sense of dread that accompanied me everywhere.
Doug would ask over and over, “Whose script is it?”
And my reply: “Mine,” or “My dad’s,” or “My mother’s” or “I don’t have a clue, tell me.” There were no answers in Doug’s office, merely questions. And I could come up with those on my own, gratis, without handing over the money my father deposited in my bank account.
Years later, when I finally returned to school to complete my studies and concentrate on drafts of my own thesis, a writing mentor asked, “Whose story is it?”
I didn’t hesitate: “Mine. My folks have starring roles.”