I grew up in a very toxic household. It functioned as an unstable, precarious world that demanded I do everything possible to please, to squeeze myself into a little box, not develop my own voice or my own way of thinking, at least out loud. Unspoken expectations were thrust upon me, silently coercing my acceptance of debilitating, totally unjust roles as the black sheep and scapegoat for reasons that forever remained mystifying. In many ways, I was silenced, always made to feel that I asked too much, that I monopolized the airspace, that I needed to recede, become less of a presence, even though, looking back, that damaging assessment couldn’t have been more distorted.

Although I lacked the ability to put my confusion into words for a long time, I felt constant disapproval, a continuous dread for reasons I couldn’t explain. But as I grew older, I gained a disturbing awareness that something just didn’t feel right in my family’s dynamics. I remember once as a teenager, I’d asked my father why he and my mother regarded me as the family’s problem child when I hadn’t behaved in any way whatsoever that would warrant such treatment. We were upstairs in the hallway at the time, and I boldly brought up the subject, laying everything out to him almost as if an unstoppable force had taken hold, refusing to be intimidated.

“I’ve never gotten drunk, gotten pregnant or done anything to make any waves at all. And I’ve never been arrested or done anything illegal or hung out with the wrong crowd, or done drugs. Nothing! So I don’t understand,” I said to him.

When my words, which felt as if they’d rushed out of my mouth in an uncontrollable flurry, without prior thought, had stopped flowing, I stood in front of my father and waited. Quietly, not offering another sound, I watched him. He was sitting on the carpeted stairs that led up to my mother’s art studio in the attic, slightly slumped in his position. And he simply looked at me, his smudged, plastic-framed glasses glinting from the overhead light. He had no answer to offer, not even an attempt at a denial. I can remember the longest silence unfolding between us then, a chasm of pure coldness, where no explanation beyond a complete hush served as the official response.

After that moment, that significant, quite colossal silence, I don’t remember anything specific about this conversation. But the refusal to provide a single answer that could justify their abusive behavior really spoke volumes. I view my father’s reaction as profound on so many levels, one of which is that he never suffered from a shortage of words, always interacting from a very intellectual, philosophical perspective. So the fact that he couldn’t, or simply wouldn’t, offer me any reason whatsoever for why I’d been treated with such unfairness reverberates quite shockingly within that context alone.

As I reflect upon this truth so many years later, I can’t help but feel cheated, realizing that all of the blame I’d internalized, the feelings of inferiority, the confused acceptance that I somehow deserved this judgment, based on no tangible evidence at all, put me at a needless disadvantage. Indeed, and quite sadly, I must conclude that I was simply used as a receptacle to house anger and a dissatisfaction with life, to contain, conveniently compartmentalize, a poison that had little to do with me. It’s very difficult to reconcile, but the truth is that my parents didn’t regard me as a separate person, a welcome member of the family, who deserved unconditional love. Instead, I was viewed as an object and dehumanized to justify these secret roles, without ever understanding the set-up or the rules.

I realize now that all of the effort I’d invested in trying to please my parents amounted to wasted energy, an intense determination to gain approval that would never be granted. Whether I’d actively defied them or taken the path of intensely attempting to gain their favor, the results would have been the exact same. No matter what, they forever viewed me as the scapegoat/black sheep to justify their heartless treatment. Nothing I ever did could have possibly influenced their mindset, which amounted to a belief that solidified in ways I couldn’t have changed.

Knowing this to be the case after so many decades of struggle is actually freeing in a sense. The realization that I could not have altered anything, that I didn’t cause the abuse, enables me to look at the little girl I’d once been with compassion, not shame. I can watch the intense conversations with my father at the dining room table, where he routinely drew me to him by showing avid interest in my day, commanding my attention to listen to his philosophical wisdom, before inevitably pushing me away. With evident, even sneering disgust at times, he’d claim that I “took too much airspace” before marching out of the room. I can clearly remember still sitting at the table during these abrupt final moments, seeing my father disappear through the doorway, and feeling such a confused ache inside. That upsetting rejection was an unavoidable aspect of this dance. At some point, though never predictable concerning when it would happen in the conversation, I always knew my father would accuse me of monopolizing his energy. But having his focus, even for just a little while, somehow made the inescapable pain worth that predetermined anguish.

Yet I can recall trying everything possible to prove to him that I wasn’t selfish by not speaking too long, by attempting to follow any clues he might provide for my redemption. But nothing I ever did made a meaningful difference, even as I carefully walked on eggshells to prevent his hysterical and always sudden closure of our conversation. It bewildered me that he continually claimed I absorbed all of the airspace when he did the majority of the talking. Furthermore, throughout my childhood and long into adulthood, my father insisted that I was to blame for his tense relationship with my brother.

“You needed me more,” he told me over the phone during one of our last conversations before he died.

This anemic explanation served as a deeply unfair indictment, implying that I’d prevented him from having a close relationship with his son due to the time he’d devoted to our conversations. Quite conveniently, logic didn’t apply to his reasoning. Somehow, my father could decide when to end our talks, which always happened at his whim, but it forever remained my fault that he didn’t devote time to his other child. I was the scapegoat, a suitable figure to blame, even though he possessed complete control over our relationship and of how he spent all of his time at home.

To this day, the myth that I’d hindered my father and brother’s relationship remains a powerful narrative within my family, even though it’s such a ridiculous conclusion to draw. Their strained connection had nothing to do with me at all. Indeed, I was just a child, not equipped to have or ever interested in any authority, especially with a father intent on maintaining complete control. So I never blocked either one of them from being close to each other. But holding me responsible for their own failure obviously felt much better in their unjust and quite immature view than looking at themselves, than being honest about the unspoken factors that had kept them emotionally apart.

As the scapegoat, the relationship that I had with my mother also contained troubling threads. Forever exasperated with me for reasons I could never explain, she routinely criticized and diminished my emotions. I can remember countless times telling her that she minimized how I felt, discounting my voice in ways that startled me. Whenever I’d confront her, my anger becoming a whine due to overwhelming feelings of extreme helplessness, she’d simply look at me with a blank expression, never a response beyond cold silence.

During my last visit home before my father died suddenly of a heart attack, she revealed something I’d known all along, always sensing without her ever articulating the obvious truth. But in this moment, while we spoke over the phone, she said the words I’d understood for so many years, letting them tumble out so hurtfully.

“I only loved you because I had to,” she said.

Those words were awful to hear, immediately sending a horrible pang through my heart. I remember leaning against the nearest wall and slowly sliding down to the floor, the phone still against my ear, feeling such shock at that statement, spoken so coldly. Yet, at the same time, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. Deep down, I’d always known this truth. It had reverberated within me throughout my entire life. When I’d picked flowers for her once on my way home from school and she’d scolded me for uprooting them, never acknowledging the sentiment behind this act, when I’d put my head on her shoulder only to feel her stiffen, whenever I’d wished for any kind of affection, but somehow suspected she couldn’t or wouldn’t provide it, I just knew how my mother really felt. She didn’t even have to say the words she’d eventually unleashed over the phone for me to know.

Now that both of my parents are gone, I feel a certain relief, though guilt is profoundly woven into that powerful emotion, too. An unmistakable finality exists in the troubling relationships I shared with each of them. It haunts me because I can never question or have any kind of discussion with them again about the pain that I silently carry with me. So I have to remind myself on a continual basis that no conversation would ever have resolved the feelings that they’d inspired. My attempts to address their treatment of me were always met with blank looks or no response whatsoever.

That response is the answer, the only reply I’d ever received. And the best, most logical way to interpret it must be that they had no answer to give, no explanation to provide, no understanding to share. My therapist told me that trauma’s often generational, where it passes down from one family to the next as a built-in, unspoken reality. I think that has to be the case for my family, even though no clinical diagnosis had ever been made along these lines. But for all of their intellectual claims, for the thousands of books contained within my childhood home that radiated knowledge and awareness, for the incredible capacity to analyze stories with such impressive thoughtfulness, my parents could never, ever give me any explanation for why they assigned me such a painful, unfair role in the family, for why they’d make me feel like a selfish outcast who always needed to prove my worth to them.

That is the answer. A refusal to say a word remains the only answer they were ever able to offer.

I can only conclude that the reason had nothing to do with me as a person at all. It was much bigger than me, based on a collective trauma that I’ll never comprehend, and existed as an invisible force that had been out of my hands from the start.

That very trauma, a weight I cannot define, even though it has personally affected my entire life, is now all mine to figure out through my writing. And this is why I’m currently weaving together a novel in an attempt to understand these dynamics, to examine the dysfunctional family that raised me, and to heal from the damage I’ve endured. The novel, titled Multicolored, Genuinely Felt, will explore that trauma as I focus on trying to comprehend my mother and how she operated, seeing the unspoken distress that hovered over our family through her eyes.

This story, which I view as a literary mystery, follows the character of Louise Shapiro who is based on my mother. She’s a recently widowed artist struggling to come to terms with her husband Sam’s very abrupt passing. As a devastated reaction to his death, she spends hours in her attic studio painting and repainting his portrait. Furthermore, in her grief, Louise begins looking through Sam’s belongings, which amount to endless piles of books he’d scattered around their cluttered home. Quite accidentally, Louise finds strange notes Sam had written to himself slipped between the pages. They lead her on an unpredictable journey to figure out the man she’d never actually known. Ripped from her comfort zone, pulled away from her attic studio on an increasingly obsessive mission to discover the truth, Louise pursues troubling clues that take her to the most unlikely places within the Chicago suburb where she’d lived for most of her life. In the process, she learns Sam’s true identity as well as her own capacity to be more self-sufficent and resourceful than she’d ever have imagined to be possible.

Through writing this novel, I’ll be on a journey of my own as I work to figure out the invisible trauma that wove the fabric of my family together. Louise’s growing awareness of her husband’s true nature, something she’d quietly suspected all along, but never addressed out of fear, out of a natural avoidance of anything that could upset her idealized image, is a way for me to come to terms with uncomfortable realities, too. Even though the story’s largely fiction, based on intuition rather than any concrete knowledge of how the traumatic circumstances had evolved within my family, it’s still a vehicle for confronting these issues to gain a closure of sorts.

With both of my parents now gone, I have no other way to navigate my experiences, to come to terms with the treatment I’d endured by them so I can determine some kind of logic, even if it’s mostly fictionalized. At least it’s a strategy for dealing with the constant ache inside of me, turning it into something productive, an art that I hope readers will appreciate. That’s the best result I could ever want, and one that would help me move forward, too. I see this novel as a way of translating the trauma so that I can stop playing these family moments in my mind over and over without resolution, without a way to make sense of the upsetting circumstances that have no logical basis, that demonstrate abusiveness without concrete reasons to support them beyond a cruel desire to mistreat. Through writing this story, the only approach I know of to understand what caused such heartless behavior, I hope to be able to heal, to grow, to forgive, and to be a better person as a result, much like what I envision Louise Shapiro will experience, too. We’ll both achieve an understanding of ourselves together, overcoming trauma while also finding meaning in the struggles, the unfairness our lives presented to us so that, in the end, we can both prevail.