Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
At age 38, I’m sitting at my mother’s table, staring at a plate of silver-dollar pancakes. She stands over a cast-iron skillet in the kitchen as the edges of the second batch crisp. I shift from side to side in my chair. I stopped eating weeks ago, and I feel as if there is nothing to shield my bones from my mother’s furniture. So she is feeding me. All I want is for her to hold me and tell me that it will be OK. I cannot remember the last time she did that. Surely she had once, hadn’t she?
A few blocks away you’ll find my home, the one I shared with my abusive husband. When I fled in the middle of the night with one bag of clothes and my dogs, I headed straight for her apartment. Now I am watching plump summer blueberries form purple pools on my plate. As she joins me at the table, I confess that I’m not sure how to survive the anguish of my former self dissolving. “I never knew true agony until now,” I say. “I’m scared of myself.”
Her brows furrow, and the lines on her face tell a story I’ve been reading since girlhood — the one where she had her own rough childhood and unhealthy marriage to keep her occupied. The confession that I might hurt myself has hurt her. This is my cue to shrink. My body aches with the memory of how this felt, of dinners at the kitchen table where my parents ate in silence and I didn’t say how much that hurt or ask for what I needed. I sip my coffee and try to remember a time when I felt like I could place my needs before hers, and it hits me: I didn’t become an abused wife by accident. I had been training to make myself small since childhood. It’s not her fault that I chose that man. But it didn’t happen in a vacuum either.
Tears run down my cheeks, and she does not move to comfort me. In this moment, I realize that I’ve lost my taste for sitting politely at the table and pretending to be fine. I am no longer easy. I am feral and broken and messy, but I am still her daughter. There is no room for me to fall apart here. So I do what I did when things got hard as a kid: find a good hiding spot. I put thousands of miles on my car that summer, driving every backroad that led out of that Texas town, crying at stoplights and singing until I was hoarse. Somewhere among the hills between Austin and Luckenbach, I blew out the speakers.
By the time the Friday night lights from the stadium across the street flooded my mother’s living room, I was headed back to Nashville, the last place I’d been single and happy. You can’t heal in a house that’s still burning. As I finished loading the moving truck, the old woman who lived downstairs approached me. “I’ve been watching you working so hard to do this alone,” she said. She asked if she could hold my hands and pray for me. Then she hugged me, and I sobbed into her house dress.
When I returned to my mom’s apartment again in the spring for work, something had shifted. Healing doesn’t just bring change — it brings grief, loss and, in many ways, a death of self. When you undergo that kind of change, there are people in your life who won’t let you get away with it. One night my mother and I had an argument about the dogs — she had left them on the patio on an unseasonably hot day to spend time with her new boyfriend. It broke my heart. For the first time I could remember, I told her she’d hurt me. I was met with silence. I questioned my role in an old script that no longer served me. It was a betrayal of a shared storyline, a rewrite without consent.
That was one year ago, and I haven’t heard from her since. In the past I would’ve apologized to keep her in my life, but this time, I couldn’t stomach that abandonment of self. I do want to reach out, but I don’t know how to honor her unprocessed trauma while sorting through my own. I don’t know how to heal from my childhood when we can’t agree that it was painful. At times, I’m afraid that if I open the door to empathy again — even just a crack — her needs will swallow mine whole. I have hope that one day I’ll find the space where my pain can coexist with hers, where my needs don’t have to end for forgiveness to begin.
Until then I will keep my door shut tight, like I did in my childhood bedroom. Except now, I won’t leave the little girl with knots in her blond hair alone on the other side. On my hardest days, I envision myself softly knocking on her door and then embracing her. I tell her no matter how messy she gets or how much she needs, she’ll always have me.
