A youth unmasked. A journey towards adulthood that crosses borders, faces hard truths, and leaves one feeling like a stranger within familiar haunts…
by: Deborah Vinall, PsyD
The first time I am kicked out of my family’s home I am nine. Hot, angry tears stream down my cheeks as I set out in search of shelter, wandering the winding roads of the orchard valley that is my home. I roam between trees laden with apples and along the trickling creek where bullrushes emerge and mallards nestle between reeds. I pass the old yellow school bus that I know is open and know all too well has a bed in back, but where ghosts haunt my guilty memory of the teenager last summer. I rattle locks on rusty cars and sheds. I am trying the door to a neighbor’s llama barn when headlights find me. Dad steps one leg out of the station wagon, calls my name. I turn, hesitate, then go to him. I crawl into the warmth of the vehicle’s brown interior and pull the belt over me, a piece of safety. He turns the car around and we return silently home.
A familiar pattern outlines childhood as I move into adolescence: threat, wandering, shelter-seeking, retraction. I’m seventeen, and it is winter in Canada, snow softening the thunder and roars from within. There is a finality and a danger in the edict this time. I look around my bedroom before stepping outside, considering my treasures: the silver locket, a Bible, the wooden shoe from my Papa. I say goodbye to my plush Smurf who remains, smile wide, arms outstretched. A childhood comfort who can soothe no longer. I step into the swirling white and cross to the car of a man who is not my boyfriend, to sleep in his bed, for shelter and a sort of safety.
From car to bed to couch to car to floor to bed I crisscross the city, seeking shelter. No station wagon tails me now; no message beckons me home. I beg rides to school from classmates in proximity to the places I stay each night or seek sleepovers to secure a dual solution. I see my siblings at school, but no words pass. There is a sadness in my brother’s eyes as he silently hands me my mail: university acceptance letters, scholarship offers. I flip through the short stack, seeking a note from either parent, but there is none. When I look up, he is gone, his retreat a grey void in my chest.
On the playground of our small K-12 school I see my little sister. She is playing, but I cannot perceive from this distance if she smiles. A cold winter wind blows. I shiver, burrow deeper in my coat. She was crying, calling my name when I crossed the threshold of our parents’ home, stepping into the dim circle where streetlight met snow, backpack and clothing duffle burdening my shoulders. I hesitated, but didn’t turn back.
I don’t turn away now. I watch, longing. Wondering. Aching to go to her, to reassure her I would have stayed if I’d had the choice. That I didn’t turn my back on her, not on purpose. Hoping she and my brother are safe.
Hoping they don’t hate me.
A bell rings, breaking the spell. She runs one direction; I trudge another, brown slush seeping through the cracks of my shoes. Words unspoken, time-capsuled for twenty years’ release.
I’m about to head out from school on a date when my classmate tells me her dad called a social worker. I’d been staying with them this week and he grew concerned about legal consequences. I feel betrayed, anxious. The social worker arrives that night and decides to drive me to my parents. There is a quiet as fragile as ice when I arrive; we skate delicately to avoid falling through. I am home, but it no longer smells of home. I was sent, never called.
Home is a tenuous, fragile thing. No longer forced to hustle to survive, yet I cannot shake the sense of vulnerability, scarcity, and devaluation. I spend the summer working at a beach club, dancing all night in bars, sleeping in odd beds, still seeking shelter wherever I can find it. September comes and dorms open and I have survived. I am secure for eight months. My nervous system finally lets down and I drop into a deep, post-traumatic depression, barely functioning, sleeping through classes and final exams and my scholarships are not renewed.
I cross the border in search of higher wages to fund another year, leaving country and culture behind. I exchange poutine and Nanaimo bars for tacos and In-n-Out, and translate French words to Spanish. I trade birch and maple for palm and chaparral, daffodils for aloë, apple trees for pomegranate, snow for sun. I think homelessness could be bearable on a beach: it is not safety I seek, but harm-reduction.
Months later I return, though home is no longer home and I know I will not stay. I am the prodigal daughter, seeking restoration. We forge a new fragile peace, born of silence and pretense and shovels to bury unspeakable things. New snow falls over secrets and provides a fresh visage.
I am in my land, but I am not home.
I wander the globe where words are foreign and my face doesn’t fit and years later settle again into sunshine amidst orange trees and cacti and palms, stars and stripes billowing above. Stripes that will become prison bars, but I do not yet grasp the freedom and culture and connection I sacrifice for my new start. I do not belong here, either, but I make my home amongst strangers who accept my values as quaint eccentricities of the foreigner.
Outside looking in, inside looking out.
“You’re the cause of all your sister’s problems,” my mother tells me by email. “Because I was always busy dealing with you.”
It had been nearly a decade since they’d had enough of “dealing with” me and forced me out into the cold, snowy night to find my own way. A decade in which I’d tried to outrun, bury, outperform, and sublimate my trauma and play along with the family narrative of white picket fences to be accepted back within their gates. This message, this castration of my right to set boundaries with sibling behavior I don’t like, is too much. I can’t, or won’t, play by these rules anymore. I am done letting the consummate gaslighting dictate my reality.
I speak the truth, expelling the hot coals that burned so long in the darkness of my belly. Protecting no one’s lies. Laying it all bare in the starching white sun. Don’t you remember what you did to me? That was abuse. I know how you treated her, too. I was not the parent. I was just a child. I will not accept this burden.
And then I say goodbye. A long, quiet goodbye that stretches on. They, in my country. Me, expatriated, with silence and time and space yawning between. I long for my family, but it’s a family I never truly had.
“I read your book,” my mother tells me. “Over and over again.” Her eyes are liquid, her shoulders hunched inward, sorrow draped on her like a shawl. “I saw myself in the child victim…and in the aggressor role, too.”
We are walking in the emerging sunshine of early Canadian Spring, Covid border closure eased after an interminable barrier. I am forty-three, and Gaslighting has been out for nearly a year. I’ve been avoiding this talk for almost as long. I’m silent, freeing myself of the pressure to rescue with glossy words. I simply walk and listen.
“What was the worst of it?” she asks. “Of my treatment of you.” I answer. I am honest. She is listening. She proffers no defense.
There is a grace and a gift here as fresh as the dew, as new as the hatchlings waiting hungrily in nests, as golden as the light that streams dappled between newborn leaves. She is offering a gift that few receive. I hold it carefully, turning it over, examining it for stability and structure. It appears, to my surprise, solid. My gift to her is its cautious acceptance at last.
I’m a visitor here, among the birch trees, familiar and yet, now foreign. There is an ease to returning, and an ache. A loss that cannot be undone. Belonging grows slower than the maples, but seeds are planted in Spring.
Deborah Vinall (PsyD, LMFT) is the author of two award-winning books: Trauma Recovery Workbook for Teens and Gaslighting: A Step-by-Step Recovery Guide (available in English, Mandarin, Russian, Korean, Hungarian, Turkish, and Japanese). She has published award-winning trauma research and currently writes Mental Health Musings at dvinall.substack.com. Deborah has been featured in interviews for Buzzfeed News, Costco Connections Magazine, MindBodyGreen, Parents, Women’s World, Scary Mommy, Health Reporter, Well&Good, VeryWellMind, Medium, Glam, AskMen, Bustle, First for Women, the List, Reframe, Women.com, Breathe, the Good Trade, PureWow, Healing Law, and Authority Magazine. A native of Kelowna, Canada, Deborah presently lives, writes, and works in Southern California. Deborah is represented by Rachelle Gardner Literary (www.rachellegardner.com)
