All thine enemies have opened their mouth against thee: they hiss and gnash the teeth: they say, We have swallowed her up: certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen it. (Lamentations 2:16 KJV)

“You never talked much as a child,” my grandmother says over lunch. “We all wondered if there was something wrong with you.” My grandmother, tiny and fragile with delicate skin, paper thin like the wings of a butterfly, offers this statement so gently her words seem to float across the kitchen table, landing like milkweed, sticking to my lips.

Though we sit in the same chairs, at the same table where she has fed me countless home-cooked meals, our roles are newly reversed. Now I am feeding her. I am nineteen. I should be in college, but I have put those plans temporarily aside so that I can help take care of my grandmother; an offering of support to keep her in her own home as long as possible. Her daughter, my mother, still recovering from cancer, uses what little energy she has to work full time. Although she has a husband, for as long as I can remember, it is my mother who has taken care of our family. Now, although she is a sister with two brothers, it is my mother who takes care of my grandmother.

As women, we tell ourselves that we are capable and resilient. Mostly, though, we are tired. But this is how it has always been. We are the helpmates, fashioned from the rib. Lessons passed down from mother to daughter, mother to daughter, we teach, and we learn. Our lives are shaped by the messes handed down to us, as much as the messes we create. 

Truthfully, I am trying to help myself. Trying to prove to my family, my church, to my God, and surely to myself, that I am a good person. That I am worthy. That I am not who they say I am, who I believe I am. That I am more than just a daughter of Eve, a second-class citizen, the result of all my sins. Like a good Christian, I’m helping so that I can hide my sins under a veneer of good works.

I look into my grandmother’s blue eyes, filmy with age and cataracts, distorted by the thick cat-eye glasses I have never known her without, and struggle for the right response. I wonder what she’s thinking about that brought this comment to her lips today. Which version of me does she see before her? It’s not that she is wrong. I didn’t talk much as a child and yes, there was something wrong with me. But what I had to say, no one wanted to listen to.  

Her words have cut a tiny hole in that thin veneer. Feeling the shame rise in my face, I reach across the table and take her hand. Teasing her gently, I say, “And now, Gram, just think, I talk all the time!” This is not entirely true, but close enough for lunch time banter at a table that was never big enough to hold a difficult conversation.

In the space that has opened between us, I fret at old memories like worry beads strung through the thread of my childhood. I slide one towards me and roll it in my fingers.

***

My father didn’t go to work like most dads. He was a handyman, a jack of all trades. He worked a few days here and a few days there. Occasionally, those days would extend into weeks or months, but there were always breaks. Breaks for rainy weather or tinkering in the yard, or some imagined slight with whoever he was working for at the time.

It was up to my mother to be the steady one. Paying the bills, putting food on the table, gas in the car, buying the clothes and washing them too, late at night at the laundry mat after work. Late at night, because she worked two jobs; one as a substitute teacher, the fading vestige of a career she gave up for my father, and one as a deli clerk, the faint hint of a future still forming. Most of the time, she worked every day except Sundays. On Sundays, we went to church and thanked God for everything he gave us.

I don’t know what day of the week it is, the afternoon I go to work with my father at the trailer park. I am always with him because we don’t have enough money for unnecessary sitters. The assumption being that if I am with my father, he will look after me. I will be safe. My mother will believe this for years. She will choose to believe this long after she knows it is not true.

 While my father tinkers inside someone else’s home, I am left outside to keep myself occupied in this unfamiliar place. He leaves me alone with the usual admonishments, “Don’t go too far”, “Don’t get into trouble”, “Don’t talk to strangers.”

I am already good at entertaining myself, even though I don’t know that’s what I’m doing. I only know my mother is rarely home and when she is, she is often tired and wants to sleep. Sometimes she is sad and cries. I know not to disturb my father, who works with dangerous tools and whose own unpredictability makes him seem dangerous too. I never interrupt them when they are talking to each other or anyone else. Children, if seen, should not be heard.

Scattered toys in tiny yards are evidence that children live here, but there are none playing outside today. It’s just me, my red trike and whatever harmless sticks and stones might be turned into something entertaining with a child’s eye and imagination.

 I am fascinated by these tidy rows of narrow miniature homes that surround me. Each human sized dollhouse is a pastel-colored box adorned with flower box necklaces, balanced precariously on white lattice skirts and placed on perfect squares of grass as if by the hand of a giant. This is a fairy tale land filled with friendly children and happy neighbors. A cheerful contrast to the real world where I live miles away.

 Where my family lives, we do not have neighbours or grass. No flowers signal the tender care of its occupants. There are no kids for me to play with next door. I do not yet understand that in an area of upstate New York considered rural by any measure, my father has moved us to one of the most isolated.  

How long do I push the pedals of my tricycle that day, my hand-me-down sneakers dusty from roaming through the dirt, before I become aware of my body and its incessant needs: for attention, for love, for food, and right now, for a bathroom? I’ve lost track of time and of my father. While ever present, he is nowhere to be found. I see no other adults that I might ask for help, not that it would matter. I remember not to talk to strangers. 

How much longer is it still before my father finally comes to look for me? The smell of shit mixes with shame as I sit in a mess of my making. Babies make messes. Good little girls do not. This incident reinforces what I already seem to know: I am not a good girl. I have no control.

 Later, when we are home, I hear my mother asking, “Why didn’t she just say something?” He doesn’t tell her he left me alone. “I don’t know,” my father says. My mother, who always hides her own needs from him, doesn’t seem to wonder why I might have hidden mine. I am left to ask myself, “Say something to who?”

***

I slide another bead into my palm.

Five years have gone by the night my mother comes home to fix our dinner after working all day. Teaching career now fully in the past, she spends her days slicing cold cuts for customers she sometimes considers friends. I am not yet ten, but I am old enough to be left alone in the creaky farmhouse we call home. I don’t know where my father is. He remains ever present, but is nowhere to be found. My mother stands in the kitchen and begins to chop vegetables. I am hiccup sobbing, snot running down my face.

Try as I might, I have not figured out how to control myself. I am still ashamed of my body and its incessant needs: for attention, for food, for a bathroom, and now, for love.

Paring knife in hand, my mother looks down at me, sitting on the floor, “Why are you crying?” Beneath her fingers, she deftly turns a once whole onion into tiny manageable pieces as she repeats her question over and over again, in rhythm with the knife. I cannot tell her I am lonely. I am frightened. I want her to pick me up and tell me she loves me. But I am terrified she won’t pick me up, and she doesn’t love me. The stories my father tells me about her are only just beginning. He starts by telling me she works so much because she doesn’t want to be home.

What I understand this to mean is that my mother doesn’t love ME. How could she possibly love me if she doesn’t want to be home? Because I am home. We are one and the same.

“If you don’t stop crying, I’m going to tell your father and he’ll give you something to cry about.” Her sentence cuts and cauterizes in one smooth motion. 

I force myself to swallow my needs, and with my silence, I am learning control.

***

In the coming years, my father’s stories will take on their own distinct shape. He threatens to leave. He will demand I choose who I want to be with. I have no choice, of course. He has convinced me my mother doesn’t love me. “Your mother doesn’t love me either,” he says. “If you stay, you will never see me again,” he declares. “We can move to Israel and live on a farm,” he promises. Israel is only one of my father’s many strange obsessions. I worry this might really happen. I worry he will take me away from everything I know, only to leave me there.  I barely understand the logistics of moving anywhere, let alone to a foreign country. I don’t know about parental permission or passports. I don’t even know that I don’t have a social security card yet.

 He’s never going to leave her, but I don’t know that either. He just wants control, and he does that by breaking us down to make us more manageable.

***

 I slide another bead.

Another five years passes. I take a metal tray out of the freezer in my grandmother’s kitchen; the handle stinging my hands as I lift it to free the ice cubes from its icy confines. Metal grates against the frozen water, shattering some into pieces from the force I used to wrench them free. Picking up thin slivers in my fingers, I slide them in my mouth. I love these slippery cool shards. I love little pieces of anything. Little things can be hidden in a pocket, tucked in a book, slid under your tongue. Big things, even invisible things like feelings, can always be broken down with enough control. To keep them safe, or keep them quiet. Is there really a difference?

“Don’t chew your ice cubes,” my grandmother admonishes me. “You’ll break a tooth.” I look up guiltily, surprised she could hear what’s going on in my mouth with my lips so firmly pressed shut, but her attention is already elsewhere so I don’t bother to respond. It is in this moment; a spark of female adolescent rage takes hold. I take a sip of juice, let the ice cube slide into my mouth. 

I test its shape, feeling the contours with my tongue and bring my jawbones together just enough to crack it open. The cube splits apart, cold water dripping down the back of my throat. I will not give up this secret pleasure. The power to reduce something once whole into tiny pieces. 

***

Months later, I am standing at the kitchen sink in the ramshackle cabin we now call home. In the dim light of a weekday morning, I am brushing my teeth before I leave for school. I cannot open my jaw. Spit fills my mouth, threatens to gag me. I panic. Why can’t I open my mouth? Is God punishing me? I run through my list of sins. Backtalk? Make-up? Pierced ears? Rock music? Dancing? Kissing boys? Drinking? All these things? My hysteria escalates, climbing the rising scale of my endless sins. 

I wiggle my jaw as if I am wiggling the knob of a door that refuses to open. With a loud pop and searing pain, drool gushes into the sink. 

It happens over and over. There is never a warning, but a near constant throbbing ache. I hear clicking sounds in my head. My body transmitting an S.O.S. only I can hear. My mother reluctantly makes an appointment at a dentist. We do not have dental insurance. I know this because she has never taken me to the dentist. No one in my family goes to the dentist. We rarely seek medical care unless absolutely necessary.

A doctor in a gleaming coat of pure white leans over me, puts his hands in my mouth and tells me exactly what my problem is. Bruxism. A fancy term derived from the Greek word brygmos, meaning gnashing of teeth. I clench and grind my teeth. My mother’s eyes flicker at me in annoyance. Her shoulders shrug in disappointment. I know what she’s thinking. Stress? You think you’ve got stress? Why can’t you just hide your pain like a good girl? I’m such a disappointment. I have no control. The man teaches me how to relieve the tension I hold in my mouth. No one bothers to ask about the root cause of my problem. By now, I no longer wonder who to tell. I know no one will listen.  

***

Another bead fits smoothly into my hand.

Ten years later, I am in the office of a different dentist. A different man has his hands inside my mouth, now bracing against the chair as he tries to pry a molar from my jaw. I hear the crack of my tooth, of bone. The sound reminds me of the crack of my teeth against an ice cube, only now grandma is right, it is my tooth breaking. Four molars need to be removed, but we must leave one behind. Its roots too intertwined with the nerves along my jawline to be extracted safely. The damage might leave me unable to control my mouth. He prescribes me medication to dull my pain.

Twenty-four hours later, with my face swollen and my pain and reason dulled by medication, my boyfriend leads me to the dock behind his mother’s house for an afternoon boat ride. His mother lives on a man-made lake in a private community where membership is both a right and an obligation. Far from shore, he offers me wine and asks me to marry him with a gold-plated band holding a brilliant cubic zirconia. Looking at the ring trying so hard to be something it isn’t, I finally understand what so many men have been trying to teach me; what I’m worth. Taking a deep breath before I answer, I have mastered what so many women have been trying to teach me; how to control myself. I know how to hide my pain and say yes to what men ask of me.

***

These days I often run my tongue over that molar left behind in my mouth, the way you might rub a finger over a worry bead. This tooth requires me to pay attention. Its constant semi-exposed state leaves it vulnerable to irritation. The soft folds of my gum allow for tiny things, once easily ignored, to become stuck in the crevices. Things that will fester and decay if I am not careful to remove them.

Though I’m still not sure what my grandmother meant the day her words floated gently around me, I like to think the “we” she spoke of were the generations of women that came before me. I like to think she was telling me not to be afraid to open my mouth and use my voice. To not be silenced by men. The men in our family, our church, our schools, our workplace and in our bedrooms. This is what I choose to believe.

Now, I am not afraid to spit out the stories that poison me. I am not afraid to say no more. I will not stay mute, becoming a party to my censorship. I will tell my stories. I will talk about it all.