(Content warning: contains references to violence, suicide, and self harm)
I flinched as the pink plastic cat bank slammed against the floor beside my younger cousin’s head. I closed my eyes as her mother yelled in her face, about what I can’t remember, but I know it was my fault that she was lying on the floor with her mother over her scolding her. I had tattled. While the details of what childhood slight had lead me to tell, or what words barked from my aunt’s mouth, I can’t recall. I only remember standing outside the bedroom feeling immense guilt that I had brought this violence on my cousin. Violence that seemed to exist on the periphery of my childhood in countless ways. Violence that seemed so accepted by everyone around me so that I never questioned its impact until I was an adult with my own family and no desire to let that violence into their lives.
“It’s Ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?” This question, delivered in the typical male voice of a TV announcer, would proceed the news every night while I on the couch next to my pipe smoking grandfather and wondered what kids were out running around in the dark, alone, with their parents not caring where they were. Obviously this happened often enough that the media had decided they needed to intervene and remind parents that they had children and right now may not even know where they were. If I hadn’t been the “good girl” that I was, would my parents have noticed I was gone? My dad with his nose in a book, my mom working to support us, would they have bothered to realize I wasn’t there? That’s what I had my grandmother for, to remember that I existed and to listen to my childhood drama, but maybe other kids weren’t as lucky.
Before I turned nine, my mom had been the typical seventies housewife who was always home, baking, cleaning, sewing, and greeting me when I came in the door after school. There was a peace in the house that had descended after a particularly ugly night when I had locked myself in the bathroom for no reason other than I was a kid and it seemed like fun. But my dad, already dressed in his Air Force uniform, needed to finish getting ready to go on his night shift watching radar in the basement of a building somewhere on the base. The madder he got that I was in the bathroom, the more I did not want to come out. Finally I unlocked the door and faced the last spanking I would ever receive. A spanking that left hand marks on my skin and made my mom grab a bag and threaten to take me and leave. I don’t remember the spanking. Only the screaming aftermath of adults and the belief that I had caused this chaos with my own stupidity. While I would get threatened with a spanking after that night, it never happened again, and other than the SLAM SLAM SLAM of a cabinet door in the kitchen that my mother would fling closed over and over again as she swore when she was angry, things were relatively peaceful until my dad left the Air Force and we moved in with my grandparents.
“Hands on the car! Don’t move!” the cop yelled as he slammed my uncle against the hood of the police car.
“What did he do? Be more careful!” my grandmother yelled at the cops.
“Ma! I didn’t do anything! Get your hands off me!” my uncle Randy yelled.
Wearing my favorite babydoll pajamas, I skipped back and forth over the sidewalk lit by the flashing red and blue lights, taking in the scene of my rebellious uncle’s latest arrest. Once the police car had hauled him away, I would climb into the backseat while my mom drove my grandma to bail him out. “Send Her My Love” by Journey played on the radio and I dreamed that someone was sending me that love. Since my dad had left the Air Force, my mom had been the breadwinner, only her job at the mall, my grandfather’s day job as a janitor, and his night job at the liquor store supporting a household of seven. Suddenly my mom was replaced with my grandma as my caregiver and the relative peace of a three person home had been replaced with a spiteful great grandfather, a pot smoking, trouble making uncle, an out of work father, a working mother, and two grandparents trying desperately to hold it all together. Maybe that’s how I ended up in the backseat riding along at almost midnight to bail out my uncle. No one had any energy left to tell me no and I just thought it was all an exciting adventure.
While I wasn’t burdened with the horror of a potential massacre at school, or the active shooter drills of schoolchildren today, there was an overtone of violence that clouded my school days. In my middle school journal I wrote, “Ronnie got suspended because he had a knife.” “Valerie was going to beat me up, but I talked to her and it’s all ok.” “Valerie got kicked out of gym and then threatened to punch Sean in the face.” “I was so scared when I left school today because there was a rumor that high school kids were coming to beat us all up. There were police cars outside when I left school, but nothing happened.” Just the day to day musings of a typical eight grader in 1985.
While my parents and I had moved into our own small, quiet house the summer before middle school, I still spent time at my grandparent’s house because both my parents worked long hours. The instability of that environment only increased after my uncle moved his girlfriend and her two kids into the space we had left vacant.
“Randy and Kelsey were screaming at each other and then he was slapping Paul for something Paul said about Kelsey.” Paul was my uncle’s girlfriend’s eight year old son. “Grandma came and stayed with us tonight because she had to get away from the screaming between Randy and Kelsey.” “Grandma said Kelsey cut her wrists last night when she and Randy were fighting.” This would go on between them until my grandparent’s death twenty-five years later, the stories told as just another chapter of family history, as normal as picnics or Christmas parties.
In my high school journal I wrote, “Today there was a fight in the cafeteria and the cabinet for the awards got broken.” By someone slamming another person into glass. The metal detectors would go in the year after I graduated and we already had a police resource officer on campus. “Brian pushed Mr. King into the wall after he told him to go to the office.” Mr. King was a first year teacher with no idea what he was in for. “Tim wasn’t at school today because he hung himself in his garage. His mom found him yesterday afternoon.” I wasn’t close to Tim, but the scene haunted me for years and I felt for his mother. “Jenny and I went to the school counselor about Jeannie. She’s cutting herself again and we felt like we should tell someone.” Just the day to day musings of a high school junior in 1988, where self harm and suicide were normalized as after school specials.
We underestimate the impact this constant state of threatened violence can have on an entire generation. Research has shown that even being a bystander to violence and bullying can cause mental health concerns later in life1. Yet, this kind of violence is not only tolerated, but seemingly accepted by a large portion of the population. It’s “kids being kids.” It’s “they’ll grow out of it.” It’s “just teasing, not bullying.” It’s a mindset of, “I survived it and I’m fine, my kids will be too. They need to toughen up for a harsh world.” As an adult and a parent I marvel at the acceptance and excuses we give this kind of behavior in schools and in homes. If we won’t protect children from mass shootings, we certainly aren’t going to protect them from the overtone of violence that colors their tiny world. I would like to think that my generation, having been victims of the violence would strive to change it for our children, but stories of bullying and fighting and threats still haunt children at school and at home. I look back and wonder why I was allowed to witness my uncle being arrested, why I was allowed to watch him slap his girlfriend’s son. Why I was allowed to watch my otherwise gentle grandfather slam my uncle into the wall when he finally got fed up. The simple answer may be that our parents were just too tired and overworked to notice or it might be the neglect that haunted all of us in those times.
While I came home to a house with food, a television, clothes, and a room of my own with posters decorating the walls, I had no no adults to listen to my stories of joy and heartbreak and the anxiety of school. I had no one to care if I was doing my homework or eating rainbow colored cereal for dinner. I came home to an empty house and a prevailing silence broken only by cable TV, where the characters became my best friends. Research shows that emotional neglect in childhood can cause shame, guilt, a lack of understanding of emotions in others, emotional numbness, and a feeling of being flawed as those children become adults2. The acceptance of violence goes hand in hand with the neglect that may have made our parents unaware of the impact it would have on an entire generation.
As a mother, I have almost gone overboard in the opposite way and I have watched other parents my age doing the same. We give and give, wanting our children to feel cherished and understood and wanting to protect them from the world we knew. I am grateful for before and after school programs that keep kids from empty houses. I am grateful for an awareness of the way emotional neglect can carry forward as generational trauma, yet I know that much is left to be done. I knew as a child, when that cat bank slammed the floor beside my cousin’s head that I was more the reason it happened than she was. I carried guilt over things I couldn’t control. I have since hugged the little girl that I was and have told her that the violence was not normal and that she no longer needs to carry the guilt. I have allowed kindness and love to grow in guilt’s place and I have developed a compassion for what children are expected to endure. It is my deep hope that we can all reflect on the ways we were failed and to not keep perpetuating these scenes of violence onto the future. We don’t need to “toughen up,” we need to soften and create a safer society for every generation to come.
1 Hamilton, Audrey. “Witnesses to Bullying May Face More Mental Health Risks than Bullies and Victims, Study Finds.” American Psychological Association, 2009_,_ www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2009/12/witness-bullying.
2 Webb, Janice. “The Lingering Harm of Childhood Emotional Neglect.” Psychology Today, 2021, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/childhood-emotional-neglect/202112/the-lingering-harm-of-childhood-emotional-neglect