The Summer I Learned to Stand Guard

All you ever really need to know about me can be gleaned from this story. It's become one of my litmus tests for people who may become close to me—how they respond when I share it tells me everything I need to know about them.

I was thirteen the summer I became a physical and emotional bodyguard in my own home, though I wouldn't understand that's what I was until years later.

The suburbs of Detroit, where we’d spent a couple years on the east side, were a landscape of manicured lawns and tract houses. Broad setbacks and front-entry garages masking the chaos behind closed doors. My parents were both working long hours at new jobs, their marriage fracturing under pressures I was too young to know about completely. What I did know was that a year or two earlier, I had become the default caregiver for my younger sister and our grandmother, whose emphysema had (by that summer) reduced her world to the careful management of oxygen tanks and wheelchair transfers.

From eleven to fifteen, summers weren't about childhood—they were about vigilance. I was the keeper of schedules, the maker of meals, the steady hand that helped Grandma navigate a world that had suddenly become too heavy for her frail body. To function in spite of, as she put it, drowning in air but unable to get enough oxygen. Emphysema is not a nice way to go. Don’t smoke.

On this particular day, I had orchestrated what seemed like a perfect solution. Sarah was safely at her friend Danielle's house, and I had loaded Grandma into the car for our usual circuit—bank, doctor, grocery, pharmacy. The routine was familiar: I would help her from wheelchair to car seat, manage the portable oxygen tank, carry whatever needed carrying, and shepherd her through each task or appointment like an advance team. She did the driving and I did the doing. She was five feet flat and ninety pounds. I was five foot one and maybe 95, but I have always been a bit strong for my size, as my husband says.

It was a damn good thing we liked each other, we were spending 24/7 in close proximity. As the first granddaughter, I was the apple of her eye, but also the one who bore the weight of all the work to be done. She paid in emotional support, usually, with occasional buffering for the stormy relationship I had with my mother, who was her own daughter.

Something was different after the doctor's visit. Grandma grew quiet, retreating into herself in a way that made me uneasy. What I didn't know—what she couldn't bear to tell me, not while it was fresh, and not in the car—was that she had just received news that her emphysema had progressed to end-stage. The doctor had delivered a death sentence wrapped in sterile medical terminology, and she was carrying that weight alone.

When we reached the drugstore that afternoon, she wheeled herself back to the prescription counter and waved me away with more insistence than usual. Always fiercely independent, her limitations were a sore point. She could tolerate me helping because I was so similar to her in some ways, and I wasn’t one of her own children. I was not a threat to her dignity.

"Go look at the books and magazines, honey. I'll call you when I'm ready."

I wandered the aisles, thumbing through teen magazines and paperback novels, waiting for her voice to summon me back. When it came, she seemed lighter somehow, almost buoyant as we made our way home.

I made dinner as always, Sarah returned from her friend's house, and for a moment, everything felt normal. Then my mother's car pulled into the driveway.

The screaming started before she even made it through the front door.

I stood in the kitchen, bewildered and barefoot, as accusations and admonishments flew at me like physical blows. The house was clean. Dinner was ready. No one had been hurt or lost or forgotten. I had done everything right—or so I thought.

What I didn't know was that while I had been focused on grilled chicken, green beans and mashed potatoes, Grandma had been making her way through a fifth of Scotch she'd purchased at the drugstore—liquid courage to face the reality that she had maybe eighteen months left to live.

What I hadn't noticed was her progression from quiet retirement to her room to a full-blown celebration in the neighbor's driveway, dancing with abandon while they watched from their lawn chairs. It was a perfectly Michigan summer evening scene that would have been charming under different circumstances—a dying woman choosing joy over despair, movement over surrender, one last dance before facing that harsh truth fully.

She died less than two years later, much as the doctor had predicted. But that afternoon, she danced.

The thing about being the child of adult children of alcoholics is that you experience their triggers (and the results) without understanding their context. My mother's visceral reaction to seeing her mother drunk wasn't really about that afternoon—it was about a lifetime founded on managing around her father’s chaos as a child and the terror of watching it resurface in her carefully controlled adult world.

But I didn't know any of this as she angrily ordered me to bed at six-thirty on a summer evening, holding me personally responsible for something I couldn't have prevented and didn't fully understand.

I laughed. I actually laughed out loud at the absurdity of it.

The first blow sent my braces deeply into my cheek with such force that blood immediately filled my mouth. Through the searing pain and metallic taste, I managed to spit out two words that surprised me most of all: "Fuck. You."

In our house, where such language was forbidden, this was tantamount to a declaration of war.

The second blow, delivered instantly and twice as hard, embedded the braces in my other cheek, creating matching jagged wounds that would heal into permanent reminders of that night.

I was five inches shorter and at least thirty pounds lighter than my mother. I never hit back—not that day, not ever. I never grew another inch, whether it was Grandma’s genes or being stunted from years of competitive swimming and drastic undernourishment for what I was pushing my body to do matters less. I ended up much smaller than my mother, sister, or first cousins that I share both sides’ genes with. Like my grandmother, whose nickname had once been “Little Bit” for Elizabeth, I sure as hell didn’t let anyone intimidate me for long. Of course, my size and quiet demeanor made me a target for some, my gifts and talents have made me a target for others. I have a full life of experience dealing with a rather disproportionate share of aggression in the wild.

In that moment, bleeding and stunned, I understood something that would change the trajectory of our family dynamics forever.

My mother had learned that I was a suitable target for her irrepressible rage. I mean, I’d been put up against a plaster wall by my neck at the tender age of ten, held a foot above the ground with my feet flailing for mercy….but at least that was theoretically about something I’d personally done to deserve a confrontation of some kind.

I learned that summer night that I was the only thing standing between that rage and my grandmother, my sister, and anyone else who might be vulnerable in our fractured household. More to the point, there was no accountability or medical attention. This was my life and no one was coming to save me, so I’d better figure it out. I spent my teens “figuring things out” with my gifts allowing a beautiful veneer to mask the truth and lighting a path to get further away from that situation, and creating relative safety for myself.

I became a guard that summer, a defender, a person who did not back down even when the opponent outweighed or overpowered me. This was not by choice but by necessity. And in ways both seen and unseen, I've been standing guard somewhere ever since. Every so often, I get some new scars for putting my own ass on the front line and holding “danger” at bay so other people don’t get hurt. Sometimes this is in service of the greater good and sometimes it keeps everyone involved, stuck.

Because now as a full grown adult woman, I need to let other adults be fully accountable for their own choices—and stop accommodating them or taking the pain so that others don’t realize they are in (so much) danger. I was thirty-six years old before I realized that continuing to be abused (even, or especially to protect others) was—in a sick and twisted (and such a bitterly, brutally ironic) way—the ultimate form of enabling.

There is no participation trophy or peace prize coming, if you’re tolerating a situation that’s become dangerous to yourself in any way. I will say that (sssshhh) years later, occasional reminders do keep this lesson fresh.

Danger, in this case, does not mean obvious harm. I want you to think of danger as anything that causes you to feel diminished or lesser. That limits your ability to actualize. That puts constraints on the best development and use of your talents in service of the stated goal. Dangerous dynamics will cause you to hide your gifts, your strength. It’s dangerous to hold back, or to sacrifice any aspect of your beautiful being, let alone to take the brunt of someone else’s shit-spatter when their vulnerabilities feel inescapable and they go and step in it, again.

Dangerous is also creating conditions where someone doesn’t feel safe to be honest or vulnerable or raise legitimate issues in a timely way, and they don’t get contained in time, or create additional complications that could have been avoided.

We all start out with the idea that when this stuff happens in front of other people, it will get called out and people will be held accountable. That it won’t fall upon the very person who is being harmed to bring the matter to justice or confront the person who hurt them. Isn’t that what we are taught about how our system works? It doesn’t work that way in reality, and most aggression (emotional, psychological, relational) is not against the law. So we need to find for ourselves what we will do when we encounter it in the wild. Because most people… freaking… fold.

I mean, call it out when you see it happening to someone. You might inspire them to have courage when they need it in the future on behalf of someone else. But as far as someone swooping in and rescuing your ass? Don’t hold your breath. Notice that most people… just keep on walking.

The trouble with being gifted…with trauma, or gifted in the Alice Miller sense as I like to shorthand it, as well as intellectually gifted: Your brain, which you have been taught about in terms of having superior intellect, has even more resistance than the average brain to un-learning patterns that take shape in childhood or from traumatic responses.

You’re really sure that your thoughts and your “learning” from lived experience is correct. After all, you’re the one who never had to study, even in college, you always arrived at the right answers without having to fully examine the material. But this is a whole other subject that isn’t as axiomatic as math or science. Your automatic thoughts and behaviors can be thought of much more correctly as an “art” that you can practice, rework, and reshape over time.

This story is still my measuring stick. Not because I need anyone to fix the thirteen-year-old me—she handled herself—but because I want to know, when I share it, whether someone can stand in the heat without flinching. Whether they can hold complexity without turning it into blame or pity.

Some people hear it and lean in, because they know what it means to be forged in a fire you never lit. They understand that survival can look like competence, that endurance can masquerade as strength, and that sometimes the person holding the line or the frame is the one in most danger.

Others—well, they tell on themselves. They’ll say I should have stopped my grandmother, or that my mouth “invited” the blows. They’ll miss that the snapshot without context is a lie. Those people never get close to me.

The right ones see the truth: that danger is anything that makes you smaller, and the most dangerous thing of all is believing it’s your job to take the hit so someone else doesn’t have to.

***

This story has become my measuring stick for new relationships—not because I need people to fix or save the thirteen-year-old me, I did that a long time ago. I need to know they can hold space for complexity without judgment, understand that survival mode and dysfunction sometimes looks like incredible strength or capacity, and recognize that some of us learned to protect others long before we learned to protect ourselves.

I also, sometimes, encounter the odd fool who thinks I deserved it for not being on top of my grandmother’s behavior, or on account of my mouth. Those, I steer clear of. A snapshot without context can allow you to miss all the meaning, after all.

I also want to make specific mention that my dad did not witness this event and had no idea—until years later—how severe it actually was.