I was doing evidence review for the memoir when I found it.
Months of my own messages, laid out in exhibit order. I was looking for what she’d said. What stopped me was what I’d said. Always yes. Always warm. Always the heart emoji, stapled to sentences. I felt sick seeing it. Years of them, in my own hand. I once wrote that paper doesn’t nod. Mine had been nodding the whole time.
Here is how her control actually worked on me, because it wasn’t fear, not the movie kind. She made disagreement expensive. Not dangerous. Expensive. Any no, however small, opened a proceeding: the hurt, the theology, the hours of it. Agreement cost a smiley. I paid the smiley. Every time.
She made disagreement expensive. Not dangerous. Expensive.
She came from a long line of storytellers. The gossip was art. You got a world built around you for the price of a nod, and whether the story was true never changed how good it was. If it had all been fear, it would have broken sooner. It held because some of it was warm.
The body kept better books.
When the story was harmless, I enjoyed it. When the story was dangerous, I went dizzy: my mother reporting that my ninety-year-old grandmother’s doctors had cancelled the blood pressure medication she’d taken for decades. A miracle. When the story could kill someone, I was nauseated. The smile never changed. The body knew in units what the mouth kept paying in hearts.
Under all of it, a tax.
I was the one caring for my grandmother, and in that house the care itself was a kind of crime, an accusation I was making by performing it. The dinners, the hearts, the yesses. Penance paid up front so the caring could continue unpunished. I fawned so I could keep my illusion of a family.
November 2018. A woman stood at the gate of the house for an hour, calling her son’s name. Crying. Her son was my mother’s disciple. I texted my mother at noon: there is a lady looking for you. She seems to be his mom. I guess you heard her already lol. The answer came at 3:42. A thumbs up. She is crazy.... He called the police. Kiss. I was repulsed. I sent the same one back.
There was a dying woman in that house, and a conversation about her pain relief which made me feel sick, visibly unwell, and I said nothing.
The fawn response will stand politely next to anything.
The literature sorted this for me eventually. Fight, flight, freeze, and the one few people know: fawn. The therapist Pete Walker filed people-pleasing in the trauma column, appeasement of a threat you can’t fight or flee. It wasn’t only a threat I was appeasing. It was the only warmth on offer, played on the family instrument, and I was fluent in it before I could read.
Reading the messages, I wondered whether I still do it. Whether the fawn runs anywhere outside of her house. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t run at all. These days I’m utterly unpleasant. Nobody else has ever brought it out of me. Nobody else can reach that. It isn’t an ability. It’s a language, with all the constraints and possibilities a language carries: a grammar of things that could never be said, a vocabulary for things that couldn’t be said any other way.
The heart emoji was punctuation.
I’m still fluent. I never speak it. It had one native listener, and I don’t see her anymore. So it sits there. Like other such skills, deprecated.
The Keeper of the Mundane · A memoir.
My grandmother’s stories. My mother’s cosmology. My record of both.
Instagram · YouTube · KeeperOfTheMundane.com
Personal essay. Events as I lived them and as family members have sworn to them. No one here is named. People shown are generated images, not real footage. The judgments are mine.