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My mother was chopping garlic. Catherine was in the PhD program at Rutgers. She had always been brilliant, her mind capable of analyzing the complexities of literature while still able to appreciate celebrity gossip in People Magazine. I wasn’t like her. As a child, I loved to write and found it easy to spin poetry or short stories. In college, my creative writing instructor told me I should send out my work to literary magazines, but that was my father’s territory. He was, like my oldest sister, a literary genius. I was merely clever. My stuff was whiny and self-centered. I couldn’t imagine calling myself a writer any more than I could imagine happiness.

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Sometimes, it feels like I’ve been in recovery my entire life. In this moment, it was major surgery, but as I passed through the stages of feeling totally fucked and then beginning to believe I’d be all right, it occurred to me how many times I’ve had to remind myself, “don’t give up.” There were recurring experiences with my parents’ behavior around alcohol when it felt as if the world, my world, the world of a child, was on a path to destruction marked by terrible fights, broken things, witnessing violence and mayhem, betrayal by the two people I loved the most. And then, after the chaos, the tears, the terror, the light would gently enter the beautiful rooms my architect mother had designed, and my charming, brilliant father would be present, reading The New York Times, drinking coffee, and calling me “Swipsie.”  Only then could I breathe again.

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