Chosen: How Opening My Home Healed My Heart
Autor Sandra Ellen Smithen Limba Engleză Hardback – 10 sep 2026
No child should grow up like Sandi Smith. At age three, she was locked in a closet. By age eight, she was behind the wheel of a car, and by age nine, she was forced to hunt deer for food. She was bartered as a child laborer to pick pinto beans and forced to clean motel rooms by her beautiful, schizophrenic mother and perpetually angry, inventor father. For six months, she lived alone in a trailer, stealing from the local grocery store to eat.
In the rich tradition of The Glass Castle and Educated, Sandi recounts her heart-stopping, nomadic upbringing amid the mountains of Utah, flat farmlands of Idaho, and California sprawl, as her father’s schemes and scams repeatedly failed. She escaped to college as a basketball player and worked her way through law school, rising to head of litigation for Apple and raising two children. Having built a conventional life, she never expected to re-examine the pain of her survivalist past.
A sudden move east and a chance encounter inside the parking garage at the tony, elite Sidwell Friends School forever changed Sandi’s life. She intersected with three young Black men, all football players at Sidwell, on scholarship. Sandi and her family open their home to these young men, and gradually, they share their own stories of hurt and survival with the woman they call “Momma.”
Fearlessly facing the challenges of race, class, prejudice, addiction, and abandonment, Chosen shows us how one determined mother built a family of her choosing and recovered the affirming healing power of love.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781982198251
ISBN-10: 1982198257
Pagini: 320
Ilustrații: b-w handwritten letters in interior; 1x8-pg b&w insert
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 30 mm
Greutate: 0.5 kg
Editura: Simon&Schuster
Colecția Simon & Schuster
ISBN-10: 1982198257
Pagini: 320
Ilustrații: b-w handwritten letters in interior; 1x8-pg b&w insert
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 30 mm
Greutate: 0.5 kg
Editura: Simon&Schuster
Colecția Simon & Schuster
Notă biografică
Sandra Ellen Smith (Sandi) was born in California and grew up across the West. Her harrowing, nomadic childhood included living in a shack without electricity or running water. She put herself through college at University of California Los Angeles and law school at University of Southern California, becoming the director of litigation for Apple Computer in 1998. She raised two biological children and, after moving to the Washington, DC, suburbs, opened her home and her heart to eight more. While in the DC area, she spent years representing domestic abuse survivors and their children, including as a Guardian Ad Litem in the DC Superior Court. She has also been actively involved on the boards of multiple academic, public, and nonprofit institutions. Today, Sandi lives in rural Colorado with her two dogs, Twelve and Thor. She is an attorney in private practice and president of her regional fire board. Her large, loving family visits her often.
Extras
Chapter One one
PERHAPS THE FIRST THING TO know about me is that for three decades, I vehemently did not want children. Being a lawyer by training, I tend to see the world in terms of objective facts and subjective opinions. And if I were rising to give a summation of my life, I’d have to begin with a pair of unimpeachable facts: my parents are two people who should never have had children and, particularly, should never have had children with each other.
I can’t remember a time in my childhood when they were not at each other’s throats. It didn’t matter where we lived: sunny California, where I was born in 1961 in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, or humid New Orleans, snowy Utah, or the flat lands of Idaho, where our first home was a shack without plumbing on a pinto bean farm. Later, we moved into a motel, where I scrubbed toilets, changed beds, bused tables, and worked in the small restaurant kitchen in a barter-style exchange for our room while my mother sat sunning herself by the pool. It didn’t matter whether we had a nicer house or lived in a trailer or whether our front yard had slightly respectable grass or was overflowing with the carcasses of rusting vehicles until it looked like a rattletrap junkyard. The script was always the same, full of sound and fury.
Before I could say my name, I knew I was a bad child. As a toddler, I apparently had systematically unraveled the playpen mesh until I was able to escape through the freshly created gap in the side. My mother, furious at my disavowal of her rules, reacted by throwing the closest thing she had, a cup of scalding coffee, at me. One of the few photos of me as a baby shows me holding on to the sides of my crib. More accurately, it is a photo of my back, wrapped in some kind of makeshift cloth bandage with an angry red burn peeking through from where the hot coffee had singed my skin and scarred my neck. I don’t remember that exact cup of coffee—many others went flying in my direction over the years. But I remember what came next: the closet.
We—my parents, Eugene and Janice Smith, my younger brother, Kevin, and I—had moved to New Orleans, a city so hot and humid that the air itself seemed to hang half-solid with geological layers of moisture. Inside this urban jungle of steam and unruly vegetation, there were the sounds of noisy buses and a large pickup truck with a little merry-go-round strapped to the truck bed that drove by every afternoon, playing jingly music. I would try to pry open the stuck window in our walk-up apartment furnished with gold crushed velvet chairs so that I could listen to the music. Once, either my mother or father took my brother and me for a ride on the circular contraption.
I can still picture the curling flecks of peeling paint on the doorframes and windowsills of our apartment. Some days, I imagined they were colorful bits of candy, and I would pull them off and eat them when no one was looking. Most days, no one was.
I was enrolled in a Catholic school where the nuns did not like the students. They walked around holding rulers in their hands and immediately rapped the students’ knuckles if we did anything wrong. To quiet everyone on the playground, the nuns had a special routine. One of them would blow a whistle, and the children were expected to instantaneously freeze; every limb, every finger, everything had to freeze. One time, I froze so hard, locking my knees and holding my breath, that I fell over. No one realized that I had passed out; instead, they were furious with me for not following the directions.
At home, my primary obligation, aside from being obedient, was to take care of my younger brother. My mother instructed us to sit quietly on the gold upholstered chairs, and sometimes I would fall asleep, which was a punishable offense. Many things were punishable offenses, even saying the wrong thing, and my main punishment was to be locked inside a tiny clothes closet for a very long time. The locking up was for my “own good,” my mother would scream. I needed to go into the closet.
Each turn of the knob and click of the lock was terrifying. The dark was very dark after the bright sunshine. It was impossible to move or turn around; the clothing hanging inside made it feel as if the walls were closing in. I could only fit if I sank to the floor. I remember making myself small, sitting on my butt, drawing my knees up against my chest, inhaling the stale smell of clothing that I could not see, and being absolutely terrified of the darkness enveloping me. As the minutes ticked by, my chest tightened, and I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, as if I were going to die. I remember my brother would crawl or, later, pad over on his two wobbly feet and sit outside so I wouldn’t be alone. We would talk back and forth until someone appeared to unlock the door. Kevin was two and a half years old, while I was five. To this day, unlike me, he remembers nothing about living in New Orleans. I spent years being pushed into closets until I eventually grew bold enough and tall enough to force the door open.
Whatever dream or scheme that my father was chasing in New Orleans must have gone bust, and we returned to California, carting the gold furniture along with us. I cannot recall if we had our own house for part of the time or if we only lived with my grandparents—I do know that by the end, we were living with my grandparents in their home. I spent my days in school, where I loved playing with my friends and hated nap time. Even then, I never felt as if I fit in when I visited my friends at their houses. Their parents were so different; one mom was always giving me food that I liked, something I didn’t have with my mother or even my grandmother. This family had a pool in their backyard, and my friend’s older brother liked to play tricks on us, including making us think that he had drowned, which terrified me. But even though I left these playdates with my heart pounding, I felt empty when I returned home.
At home, my brother was my playmate, but it was not the same. Our mother was very protective of him and mad at me if I kept a toy too long or didn’t “share” enough. “Sharing” in her definition seemed to mean that I would just watch Kevin play with all the toys and never touch them. One of our favorite games that we used to play involved the hose and sprinkler attachment. We were mesmerized by how the water looked when it caught the sunlight and, for a few seconds, appeared to be transformed into little diamonds that flickered and then suddenly disappeared with a splat when the stream hit the ground. Sometimes, I felt like one of those drops—flickering with shiny, colorful love for a moment, and then, splat, it all went dark. Then there came a day when things did go dark, and that darkness cast a shadow for a very long time.
It was sunny out, because in Southern California the days were almost always sunny, and I was looking at rows of boxes because we were moving. We were leaving Downey for somewhere new, Salt Lake City, Utah. I was almost six. To me, “going” was still an abstract word that lacked any more significant meaning. We were standing outside my grandparents’ house and a rental truck was parked in the driveway. My grandmother was outside with me.
My grandmother’s nickname for me was “Butch.” For some inexplicable reason, on that sunny day, she walked me around the side of the truck and showed me the control panel with the buttons that operated the liftgate at the back. She placed a stepladder beside the rental truck so I could reach the two big red buttons, one for up and the other for down. I couldn’t see the back of the truck from my perch on the ladder—only the buttons and the truck’s side. My grandmother told me that I could operate the lift with those two buttons. I felt so grown-up standing there. I was being trusted to do something important; I had been deemed “responsible.” I planted my feet on the top step of the ladder, raised my arm, and my grandmother told me, “Okay, Butch, go ahead and push the top button.” With great pride and a huge smile, I did exactly as I was told.
I heard the lift engage, shuddering into motion and making a clanking noise as it started to rise. And then I heard the screaming. Lots of screaming. By that point in my life, screaming didn’t really unsettle me. My mother screamed all the time—at me, at my father, at her mother—and everyone screamed back at her. So I tuned it out and kept staring at the bright red buttons. Above the din, somehow, I heard my grandmother quietly but urgently say to me—“Butch, press the bottom button, now. On to off.” Once again, I did as I was told. This time, I turned to see my mother flying forward, shrieking at my grandmother and me.
At first, I didn’t understand what she was saying, but I could tell that something terrible had happened. I climbed down from the ladder as my mother ran to the back of the truck. I dashed behind her. As I turned the corner, I saw my brother, who was also screaming. His face was covered in blood, and his ear had been ripped from his head; it was dangling from the side of his face, held on by a thin thread of skin. Now, as I looked, I began to scream. I was afraid Kevin was going to die, that he would be gone from our lives forever.
It took some time for me to piece together what had happened. The lift had been loaded with boxes. While I was sent around to push the button, my father had decided to allow Kevin to stand on the lift and “ride” up with the boxes. But Kevin had slipped, and his head became trapped between the lift and the truck. It was slowly being crushed as the lift rose.
As I ran toward Kevin, my mother grabbed me and yanked me backward. Then she slapped my face. Hard. This time, I understood her perfectly. She was screaming, “You did this. This is your fault. You tried to kill him!” There was pure hatred in her eyes. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even breathe. My father had already scooped up Kevin, and with my mother following, he ran to the car to rush him to the hospital. I sprinted after them and tried to climb into the back seat, but my mother reached around and locked the door. I pulled on the handle frantically. “Get away from him,” my mother screamed. Those were the last words I heard as they sped off without me.
I came to the hospital to pick up Kevin on his discharge day. He had more than eighty-five stitches running across his head, and his skull was wrapped in white bandages. I was worried that, even though the doctors promised that his ear had been saved, he would not be able to hear. At first, Kevin seemed so fragile that I was afraid to touch him or even talk to him. I didn’t want to do anything else to hurt him. I believed this was my fault, and day after day, I cried in bed alone.
We couldn’t move to Utah until Kevin had recovered. While we waited for that day to come, he and I slowly returned to playing in the backyard. This time, when we played our water game, he always held the hose and sprayed the water. I never asked to do it once. Instead, I would stand beside him and watch the water drops glisten in the sun before they disappeared into the ground. I wanted to disappear, too. After that terrible day, my mother frequently and openly blamed me for trying to kill my brother and accused me of wanting to do it again. For years, even my brother believed his accident was my fault and often said so. My entire life became consumed with the epic task of earning back my parents’ and my brother’s trust and love.
Now that I was no longer fit to watch Kevin, my new job, according to my mother, was to protect her from my father, from Grandma, and from everyone else in the world who was out to get her. She would tell me over and over how her father had abused her as a child while her mother defended him and how she had married my father to escape her home, only to discover that he was worse. She told me her children were her life—when she wasn’t saying that she wished I were a boy—and that she would do anything to save us from “this terrible man.” Her words were like an odorless, colorless, tasteless contaminant that seeps into groundwater. With every sip I took, I was drinking in the toxin. I believed her, and I believed I was responsible.
My mother grew up an only child. Her mother was from a Syrian family who had immigrated to the US. My grandmother Edna was a strikingly beautiful woman with dark eyes and dark hair who could cook an incredible range of Middle Eastern dishes and was regarded by almost everyone who knew her as a wonderful person. The exception was her daughter, my mother, who hated her with a passion. Jan Carlson, my grandfather and Edna’s husband, was a musician and a heavy drinker who, by the time I knew him, used to bury his liquor bottles in the garden of his small Culver City home so that no one would know—or at least could measure—how much alcohol he was consuming. Jan could play almost every instrument and had been a bandleader for the pop music crooner Perry Como back in the day; he trained his daughter on the piano, including rapping her hands with a wooden ruler whenever she missed a note. My mother became a concert-level pianist, talented enough to play on the radio and in concert halls until she refused to perform anymore. Her parents’ response was to send her to secretarial school; women, she was told, did not go to college, no matter how much she might have pleaded otherwise.
My grandfather was not a nice guy. I can remember reaching for him once when I was very young, and in response, he grabbed my hand, squeezed hard, and twisted it. It hurt. A lot. The excuse made for his behavior was that he had false teeth in his pocket and was embarrassed by them, and my hand got too close. Being hurt was thus my fault; if I had not reached out to him, he wouldn’t have needed to grab my hand. I tried to stay away from him after that. Whenever he was around, my mother often rolled her eyes as if to say, see, it was just as she had reported: her mother did nothing but support her father. But I still adored my grandmother.
In my mother’s world, however, the dichotomy was simple: loving my grandmother meant that I was conspiring against my mother. Inside of me, there was always an internal tug-of-war, a nagging question of which side I would join. Loving my grandmother made me feel as if I were betraying my mom. The smallest display of affection toward my grandmother was proof to my mother that I was a secret participant in a violent plot to do something horrible to her. The plots changed on a whim, but the victim never did: it was always my mother.
After we left California for Utah, my grandparents came to visit maybe four or five times. I have a few faded snapshots from these trips, but there was almost always conflict, or at least my mother would constantly complain about her parents behind their backs. At some point, I recall that my grandmother accompanied my father to look at something to purchase, possibly a piece of property, perhaps even to assist them financially. My mother’s response was to accuse the two of them of having an affair. She spent days proclaiming that her mother was sleeping with her husband, and every time she said the words, they became more convincing.
Like so many things, though, there was a grain of truth mixed in. My father did have other women. Even perhaps during those months in California when he lived in his in-laws’ home. The image of at least one of these women is boxed up along with our family photos. A snapshot shows a lady with a big, blond, beehive hairdo, looking awfully chummy alongside my father. Much later, when I was older, my mother sent me into my father’s closet on the pretext of looking for something. What I found instead were photos of him naked with other women. In many of the pictures, he is holding his gun. I was eleven years old then, and the glossy prints were horrible and disgusting. But I could never forget seeing them. Only when I was grown did I realize that my mother had probably sent me into that closet with the express purpose of finding them.
After a few months, my brother was well enough for us to complete our move to Utah. My mother was glad to be getting away from the other women. I don’t recall seeing the small moving truck a second time, only a collection of cardboard boxes and green trash bags to carry our things. We piled these stray items into the back and set off in one of my father’s retrofitted contraptions, a big, blue jeep-like vehicle with hard benches for back seats. The route to Salt Lake was, I would come to know, a straight shot northeast on I-15. My father gunned the engine, and we were off, Kevin and me bouncing around on our benches. In five years, I would be the one up front behind the wheel, boosted on a pillow, underage and illegal, navigating the ascents and descents and straightaway flats of I-15 myself for as many hours as whatever north–south trip we were making took.
PERHAPS THE FIRST THING TO know about me is that for three decades, I vehemently did not want children. Being a lawyer by training, I tend to see the world in terms of objective facts and subjective opinions. And if I were rising to give a summation of my life, I’d have to begin with a pair of unimpeachable facts: my parents are two people who should never have had children and, particularly, should never have had children with each other.
I can’t remember a time in my childhood when they were not at each other’s throats. It didn’t matter where we lived: sunny California, where I was born in 1961 in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, or humid New Orleans, snowy Utah, or the flat lands of Idaho, where our first home was a shack without plumbing on a pinto bean farm. Later, we moved into a motel, where I scrubbed toilets, changed beds, bused tables, and worked in the small restaurant kitchen in a barter-style exchange for our room while my mother sat sunning herself by the pool. It didn’t matter whether we had a nicer house or lived in a trailer or whether our front yard had slightly respectable grass or was overflowing with the carcasses of rusting vehicles until it looked like a rattletrap junkyard. The script was always the same, full of sound and fury.
Before I could say my name, I knew I was a bad child. As a toddler, I apparently had systematically unraveled the playpen mesh until I was able to escape through the freshly created gap in the side. My mother, furious at my disavowal of her rules, reacted by throwing the closest thing she had, a cup of scalding coffee, at me. One of the few photos of me as a baby shows me holding on to the sides of my crib. More accurately, it is a photo of my back, wrapped in some kind of makeshift cloth bandage with an angry red burn peeking through from where the hot coffee had singed my skin and scarred my neck. I don’t remember that exact cup of coffee—many others went flying in my direction over the years. But I remember what came next: the closet.
We—my parents, Eugene and Janice Smith, my younger brother, Kevin, and I—had moved to New Orleans, a city so hot and humid that the air itself seemed to hang half-solid with geological layers of moisture. Inside this urban jungle of steam and unruly vegetation, there were the sounds of noisy buses and a large pickup truck with a little merry-go-round strapped to the truck bed that drove by every afternoon, playing jingly music. I would try to pry open the stuck window in our walk-up apartment furnished with gold crushed velvet chairs so that I could listen to the music. Once, either my mother or father took my brother and me for a ride on the circular contraption.
I can still picture the curling flecks of peeling paint on the doorframes and windowsills of our apartment. Some days, I imagined they were colorful bits of candy, and I would pull them off and eat them when no one was looking. Most days, no one was.
I was enrolled in a Catholic school where the nuns did not like the students. They walked around holding rulers in their hands and immediately rapped the students’ knuckles if we did anything wrong. To quiet everyone on the playground, the nuns had a special routine. One of them would blow a whistle, and the children were expected to instantaneously freeze; every limb, every finger, everything had to freeze. One time, I froze so hard, locking my knees and holding my breath, that I fell over. No one realized that I had passed out; instead, they were furious with me for not following the directions.
At home, my primary obligation, aside from being obedient, was to take care of my younger brother. My mother instructed us to sit quietly on the gold upholstered chairs, and sometimes I would fall asleep, which was a punishable offense. Many things were punishable offenses, even saying the wrong thing, and my main punishment was to be locked inside a tiny clothes closet for a very long time. The locking up was for my “own good,” my mother would scream. I needed to go into the closet.
Each turn of the knob and click of the lock was terrifying. The dark was very dark after the bright sunshine. It was impossible to move or turn around; the clothing hanging inside made it feel as if the walls were closing in. I could only fit if I sank to the floor. I remember making myself small, sitting on my butt, drawing my knees up against my chest, inhaling the stale smell of clothing that I could not see, and being absolutely terrified of the darkness enveloping me. As the minutes ticked by, my chest tightened, and I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, as if I were going to die. I remember my brother would crawl or, later, pad over on his two wobbly feet and sit outside so I wouldn’t be alone. We would talk back and forth until someone appeared to unlock the door. Kevin was two and a half years old, while I was five. To this day, unlike me, he remembers nothing about living in New Orleans. I spent years being pushed into closets until I eventually grew bold enough and tall enough to force the door open.
Whatever dream or scheme that my father was chasing in New Orleans must have gone bust, and we returned to California, carting the gold furniture along with us. I cannot recall if we had our own house for part of the time or if we only lived with my grandparents—I do know that by the end, we were living with my grandparents in their home. I spent my days in school, where I loved playing with my friends and hated nap time. Even then, I never felt as if I fit in when I visited my friends at their houses. Their parents were so different; one mom was always giving me food that I liked, something I didn’t have with my mother or even my grandmother. This family had a pool in their backyard, and my friend’s older brother liked to play tricks on us, including making us think that he had drowned, which terrified me. But even though I left these playdates with my heart pounding, I felt empty when I returned home.
At home, my brother was my playmate, but it was not the same. Our mother was very protective of him and mad at me if I kept a toy too long or didn’t “share” enough. “Sharing” in her definition seemed to mean that I would just watch Kevin play with all the toys and never touch them. One of our favorite games that we used to play involved the hose and sprinkler attachment. We were mesmerized by how the water looked when it caught the sunlight and, for a few seconds, appeared to be transformed into little diamonds that flickered and then suddenly disappeared with a splat when the stream hit the ground. Sometimes, I felt like one of those drops—flickering with shiny, colorful love for a moment, and then, splat, it all went dark. Then there came a day when things did go dark, and that darkness cast a shadow for a very long time.
It was sunny out, because in Southern California the days were almost always sunny, and I was looking at rows of boxes because we were moving. We were leaving Downey for somewhere new, Salt Lake City, Utah. I was almost six. To me, “going” was still an abstract word that lacked any more significant meaning. We were standing outside my grandparents’ house and a rental truck was parked in the driveway. My grandmother was outside with me.
My grandmother’s nickname for me was “Butch.” For some inexplicable reason, on that sunny day, she walked me around the side of the truck and showed me the control panel with the buttons that operated the liftgate at the back. She placed a stepladder beside the rental truck so I could reach the two big red buttons, one for up and the other for down. I couldn’t see the back of the truck from my perch on the ladder—only the buttons and the truck’s side. My grandmother told me that I could operate the lift with those two buttons. I felt so grown-up standing there. I was being trusted to do something important; I had been deemed “responsible.” I planted my feet on the top step of the ladder, raised my arm, and my grandmother told me, “Okay, Butch, go ahead and push the top button.” With great pride and a huge smile, I did exactly as I was told.
I heard the lift engage, shuddering into motion and making a clanking noise as it started to rise. And then I heard the screaming. Lots of screaming. By that point in my life, screaming didn’t really unsettle me. My mother screamed all the time—at me, at my father, at her mother—and everyone screamed back at her. So I tuned it out and kept staring at the bright red buttons. Above the din, somehow, I heard my grandmother quietly but urgently say to me—“Butch, press the bottom button, now. On to off.” Once again, I did as I was told. This time, I turned to see my mother flying forward, shrieking at my grandmother and me.
At first, I didn’t understand what she was saying, but I could tell that something terrible had happened. I climbed down from the ladder as my mother ran to the back of the truck. I dashed behind her. As I turned the corner, I saw my brother, who was also screaming. His face was covered in blood, and his ear had been ripped from his head; it was dangling from the side of his face, held on by a thin thread of skin. Now, as I looked, I began to scream. I was afraid Kevin was going to die, that he would be gone from our lives forever.
It took some time for me to piece together what had happened. The lift had been loaded with boxes. While I was sent around to push the button, my father had decided to allow Kevin to stand on the lift and “ride” up with the boxes. But Kevin had slipped, and his head became trapped between the lift and the truck. It was slowly being crushed as the lift rose.
As I ran toward Kevin, my mother grabbed me and yanked me backward. Then she slapped my face. Hard. This time, I understood her perfectly. She was screaming, “You did this. This is your fault. You tried to kill him!” There was pure hatred in her eyes. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even breathe. My father had already scooped up Kevin, and with my mother following, he ran to the car to rush him to the hospital. I sprinted after them and tried to climb into the back seat, but my mother reached around and locked the door. I pulled on the handle frantically. “Get away from him,” my mother screamed. Those were the last words I heard as they sped off without me.
I came to the hospital to pick up Kevin on his discharge day. He had more than eighty-five stitches running across his head, and his skull was wrapped in white bandages. I was worried that, even though the doctors promised that his ear had been saved, he would not be able to hear. At first, Kevin seemed so fragile that I was afraid to touch him or even talk to him. I didn’t want to do anything else to hurt him. I believed this was my fault, and day after day, I cried in bed alone.
We couldn’t move to Utah until Kevin had recovered. While we waited for that day to come, he and I slowly returned to playing in the backyard. This time, when we played our water game, he always held the hose and sprayed the water. I never asked to do it once. Instead, I would stand beside him and watch the water drops glisten in the sun before they disappeared into the ground. I wanted to disappear, too. After that terrible day, my mother frequently and openly blamed me for trying to kill my brother and accused me of wanting to do it again. For years, even my brother believed his accident was my fault and often said so. My entire life became consumed with the epic task of earning back my parents’ and my brother’s trust and love.
Now that I was no longer fit to watch Kevin, my new job, according to my mother, was to protect her from my father, from Grandma, and from everyone else in the world who was out to get her. She would tell me over and over how her father had abused her as a child while her mother defended him and how she had married my father to escape her home, only to discover that he was worse. She told me her children were her life—when she wasn’t saying that she wished I were a boy—and that she would do anything to save us from “this terrible man.” Her words were like an odorless, colorless, tasteless contaminant that seeps into groundwater. With every sip I took, I was drinking in the toxin. I believed her, and I believed I was responsible.
My mother grew up an only child. Her mother was from a Syrian family who had immigrated to the US. My grandmother Edna was a strikingly beautiful woman with dark eyes and dark hair who could cook an incredible range of Middle Eastern dishes and was regarded by almost everyone who knew her as a wonderful person. The exception was her daughter, my mother, who hated her with a passion. Jan Carlson, my grandfather and Edna’s husband, was a musician and a heavy drinker who, by the time I knew him, used to bury his liquor bottles in the garden of his small Culver City home so that no one would know—or at least could measure—how much alcohol he was consuming. Jan could play almost every instrument and had been a bandleader for the pop music crooner Perry Como back in the day; he trained his daughter on the piano, including rapping her hands with a wooden ruler whenever she missed a note. My mother became a concert-level pianist, talented enough to play on the radio and in concert halls until she refused to perform anymore. Her parents’ response was to send her to secretarial school; women, she was told, did not go to college, no matter how much she might have pleaded otherwise.
My grandfather was not a nice guy. I can remember reaching for him once when I was very young, and in response, he grabbed my hand, squeezed hard, and twisted it. It hurt. A lot. The excuse made for his behavior was that he had false teeth in his pocket and was embarrassed by them, and my hand got too close. Being hurt was thus my fault; if I had not reached out to him, he wouldn’t have needed to grab my hand. I tried to stay away from him after that. Whenever he was around, my mother often rolled her eyes as if to say, see, it was just as she had reported: her mother did nothing but support her father. But I still adored my grandmother.
In my mother’s world, however, the dichotomy was simple: loving my grandmother meant that I was conspiring against my mother. Inside of me, there was always an internal tug-of-war, a nagging question of which side I would join. Loving my grandmother made me feel as if I were betraying my mom. The smallest display of affection toward my grandmother was proof to my mother that I was a secret participant in a violent plot to do something horrible to her. The plots changed on a whim, but the victim never did: it was always my mother.
After we left California for Utah, my grandparents came to visit maybe four or five times. I have a few faded snapshots from these trips, but there was almost always conflict, or at least my mother would constantly complain about her parents behind their backs. At some point, I recall that my grandmother accompanied my father to look at something to purchase, possibly a piece of property, perhaps even to assist them financially. My mother’s response was to accuse the two of them of having an affair. She spent days proclaiming that her mother was sleeping with her husband, and every time she said the words, they became more convincing.
Like so many things, though, there was a grain of truth mixed in. My father did have other women. Even perhaps during those months in California when he lived in his in-laws’ home. The image of at least one of these women is boxed up along with our family photos. A snapshot shows a lady with a big, blond, beehive hairdo, looking awfully chummy alongside my father. Much later, when I was older, my mother sent me into my father’s closet on the pretext of looking for something. What I found instead were photos of him naked with other women. In many of the pictures, he is holding his gun. I was eleven years old then, and the glossy prints were horrible and disgusting. But I could never forget seeing them. Only when I was grown did I realize that my mother had probably sent me into that closet with the express purpose of finding them.
After a few months, my brother was well enough for us to complete our move to Utah. My mother was glad to be getting away from the other women. I don’t recall seeing the small moving truck a second time, only a collection of cardboard boxes and green trash bags to carry our things. We piled these stray items into the back and set off in one of my father’s retrofitted contraptions, a big, blue jeep-like vehicle with hard benches for back seats. The route to Salt Lake was, I would come to know, a straight shot northeast on I-15. My father gunned the engine, and we were off, Kevin and me bouncing around on our benches. In five years, I would be the one up front behind the wheel, boosted on a pillow, underage and illegal, navigating the ascents and descents and straightaway flats of I-15 myself for as many hours as whatever north–south trip we were making took.
Descriere
In the tradition of The Glass Castle, a poignant, inspirational memoir of a lonely girl who survived decades of harrowing abuse at home to open her heart and redefine what it is to be a family and a mom.