High Price

damnedest to protect him by exposing the injustice of this situation.
    Of course, children have no understanding of the larger forces that shape their lives—and I certainly didn’t know what was going on as the 1970s turned into the 1980s and the maelstrom of economic, political, and criminal justice upheavals of the era began to shred the lives of everyone around me. In fact, I was about to be miseducated on virtually everything about drugs, crime, and the causes of neighborhood strife, including the ongoing domestic violence that would soon shatter my own family.

CHAPTER 2
    Before and After
    They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
    They may not mean to, but they do.
    They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.
    —PHILIP LARKIN
    W hen my mother returned from the hospital after the fight with my father, she seemed to recover rapidly. We saw her bandages and knew not to say anything. We hoped that was the end of it. But although the hammer fight was not their last one, my parents would separate and divorce not long afterward. Oddly, however, even when I thought that my mother had been murdered by my father, before she came back from the hospital, I don’t remember missing her or worrying about her.
    Maybe I’ve just blocked it out because it was too painful; maybe it just came out in other ways. For example, in my family after my parents’ split, we gradually stopped calling her “Mom” or “mama.” In my teens, we started calling her “MH,” an appellation I’d given her after noting the way George Jetson of cartoon fame referred to his boss by using his initials.
    Looking back, I think this was a sort of distancing, a wish to deny her the affectionate names others used for their mothers. Because in many ways, for much of my childhood, despite her best efforts, she just wasn’t there. After my parents broke up, my mother spent two and a half years in New York, away from all of her children. I now know that she left in search of higher-paying employment so that she could give us a better life. But back then, all I saw was that we were scattered among various relatives.
    I’m sure I must have been upset that she was gone but it wasn’t something I verbalized. We never knew when she was going away and when she would come back. My sisters now say they felt like orphans. I realize that I did, too. But we didn’t share our feelings with each other then. I think I resented my mother for years because I couldn’t admit, even to myself, how hurt I’d been.
    Already by age six, I had learned to hide my feelings as well as any vulnerability or need. I thought then that this was the only way to protect myself from further hurt, the only way I could properly be the man of the house. I’d begun compartmentalizing. That would turn out to be a critical skill for my emotional survival. To make it work, I wouldn’t even show most of my feelings to myself. I’m still struggling with the detrimental “side effects” of this response to my childhood in my relationships today.
    I sometimes catch myself thinking that I have revealed too much personal information to someone I care about and start worrying about how it can be used against me at a later date. Often I recognize that my fears are ungrounded, but well-learned behaviors are difficult to change, whether they involve drug use or any other sort of emotional coping tool.
    And when I look now at six-year-olds, I can’t help seeing how young and vulnerable children are at that age. I realize now that I must have been quietly devastated—but I thought then that I had to be hard. It was the only way I knew how to cope.

    MH and Carl at a family reunion in the summer of 1978, about six years after they divorced.
    However, I don’t want to blame or judge my parents: they faced severe challenges that I managed to avoid in my own early adulthood. Before either of them had reached the age of twenty-nine, my parents had had eight children. They’d scraped and saved and had bought a nice home together. Their parenting skills were limited by their upbringing and their education. My father, for example, had lost his dad to cancer by the time he was seventeen and had had only limited male guidance throughout his youth. Despite this, both of my parents were extremely hardworking and did what they thought was best for us. For years, my mom worked the graveyard shift as a nurse’s aide, doing as much as she could to support her kids.