3. The Turn

3.

I was born to parents born in the 1940s—kids in the ‘50s, college students in the ‘60s. You’d think that might say enough on its own, but if you met them, you’d still wonder how my brother and I came to exist at all. My mother has the patience of a saint. She’s been an elementary school teacher since before I was born. She still is. She doesn’t like conflict.

My father is conflict. I don’t know where he came from. Not in the literal sense—I know the genealogy—but the man? The personality? It never made much sense. His parents were refined. World travelers. Gardeners. Beekeepers. Readers. Lifelong learners.

My grandmother volunteered for hospice until she needed it herself. Practical. Direct. Never too sentimental. She didn’t put up with nonsense, but she did it with more grace than I’ve ever managed.  She came from money. Her father was a higher-up at A&P. Her sister married Joe Hardy, founder of 84 Lumber—until he divorced her in her seventies.

I can trace my temperament to her. My grandfather was one of the gentlest people I can remember. You always knew when he disapproved, but it never felt like withdrawal. He loved you anyway. He was raised by an ornithologist who was also a professor and a stepmother—his mother’s best friend—who had made a deathbed promise to marry his father and care for the children after she died giving birth to him.

And then there was my father.

He said he had no emotions. Said that’s what made him a good volunteer firefighter—that he could “scrape brains off the road at an accident scene and not react.” But the truth is, he reacted to everything. Always. Just never in a way that made you feel heard or held. He was contrary to be contrary. If you said left, he went right. His wants came first. Always.

Looking back, I don’t know how my mother managed to stay for the 14 years she did. She didn’t like conflict, and he was conflict. I fought him constantly. I fought for her, and maybe at her, because I hated that she didn’t fight back. Hated that she absorbed it all in silence, or as a victim, crying rather than throwing him out. We were raised in the space between containment and eruption. Between refinement and volatility. I learned early how to read a room, how to brace for impact, how to disarm a moment before it detonated. That’s a skill that stays with you, whether you want it to or not.

And now, here I am—parenting, grandparenting, navigating this strange and brittle now. The strange dissonance of censorship and control in a world flooded with a nonstop, flashing stream of so-called “information.” Cults disguised as Christians claiming this is a Christian nation, relying on a collapse of memory to justify it. As if this country wasn’t founded—stolen—from its original people by Europeans desperate to escape the very entanglement of church and state they now demand.

History repeats, they say. Maybe. But this version feels sharpened. Accelerated. The access we have to the past has never been more immediate, and somehow we’re still sprinting backward into something old dressed up as something new.

I wonder if this is just what it feels like, right before the turn.

Link for chapter 4 is below.