40
Educated
When I was a child, I waited for my mind to grow, for my experiences to
accumulate and my choices to solidify, taking shape into the likeness of a
person. That person, or that likeness of one, had belonged. I was of that
mountain, the mountain that had made me. It was only as I grew older that I
wondered if how I had started is how I would end—if the first shape a person
takes is their only true shape.
As I write the final words of this story, I’ve not seen my parents in years,
since my grandmother’s funeral. I’m close to Tyler, Richard and Tony, and
from them, as well as from other family, I hear of the ongoing drama on the
mountain—the injuries, violence and shifting loyalties. But it comes to me
now as distant hearsay, which is a gift. I don’t know if the separation is
permanent, if one day I will find a way back, but it has brought me peace.
That peace did not come easily. I spent two years enumerating my father’s
flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every resentment, every real
and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him
from my life. Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me
and I could catch my breath.
But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage
directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the
fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.
I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without
endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine.
Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my
own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not
because he deserved it.
It was the only way I could love him.
When my father was in my life, wrestling me for control of that life, I
perceived him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. I could not