THANKSGIVING 1990
As our family trudges happily through the forest preserve, sniffing the crisp air and rustling the leaves underfoot, my daughter, Kristin, a 20-year-old college junior, slips her hand in mine. She walks along the path holding hands with her dad as though she were 5 or 6 again. I remember what a doll she was at that age: how she’d run ahead along the trail, her natural curls bouncing on her neck, then come running back and pull me by the hand to where she’d squat down low and show me a chipmunk hole she’d discovered. I don’t say anything now, not wanting to spoil this moment, but we both sense how sweet it is. It is one of the unmitigated joys of being a parent.
Later that weekend I stoke the fireplace and our little nuclear family-Joanne and I, fortysomethingmom and dad, and Kristin and Troy, our college freshman son-sit around and read, sometimes aloud. When the kids were young, we often spent cold evenings like this. Kristin still wants to sit next to me, and she puts her head on my shoulder. It is a very satisfying feeling, my almost-grownup daughter there, smart, a strong personality, an accomplished musician. Indeed, both children are bright and articulate, doing well at a good liberal arts college. Even though their mother and I are having a rough go at our relationship, the kids are all right. They’re secure, confident and feel warm in our love. Can anything be wrong with this picture?
CHRISTMAS 1990
Kristin announces during Christmas break that she has changed her college major from English to “gender studies.” She is toting around a book titled “Intercourse,” by Andrea Dworkin. I’ve always considered myself a card-carrying feminist, but I know that Dworkin is a radical-fringe lesbian feminist and that the relentless message of “Intercourse” is that any heterosexual intimacy is innately violative of the woman, essentially a euphemism for rape. I sense trouble.
Joanne has been a feminist for more than 20 years, and we’ve always been a feminist household. So Kristin has grown up that way, comes by it honestly, and approaches life as any young feminist would. But this is the first indication I’ve seen of her embracing the radical fringe. College-age kids are like that, and her professor is probably encouraging it in her new gender studies course, but it’s still troubling to me.
Later, a photocopied article about sexual violence appears on the dining room table, which is our family bulletin board. The writer makes some very good if exaggerated points and several times refers pointedly to how “Western culture” not only condones but encourages violence against women.
At dinner, I mention the article.
“I like a lot of what it said,” I begin, “but look, compared to other world cultures-Mediterranean, African, Asian-Western culture is a shining light in its respect for women’s rights.”
“How can you defend the pigs who perpetrate violence against women?” Kristin exclaims.
“I’m not defending anyone who-” I reply.
“You’re trying to defend a culture that rapes one out of every four women?” Joanne shouts.
“Individual men rape individual women,” I say evenly. “Cultures don’t rape women.”
Kristin seethes.
“A patriarchal, capitalist culture is at the core of rape,” she says. “This writer is simply revealing men’s abuse and their lies. But you just don’t get it, do you?”
The air is hot with female wrath, and Troy and I listen open-mouthed at the ferocious response. You would have thought I had just announced myself as an apologist for rape.The evening’s donnybrook adds acid to my deteriorating relationship with my wife, but, even more worrisome, it all but cuts me off from the affections of my daughter. The two of us have had stormy times during her adolescence, but that was because we are so similar in personality: both sharp, argumentative, headstrong and passionate. We had come through that period of conflict with our senses of humor intact and with an enduring love for each other.
But now, almost every time I open my mouth, Kristin simply glares at me. I realize that in less than a month I’ve changed in the eyes of my daughter from the warm, huggable, storybook dad to a middle-aged male pig.
I’m really quite appalled at the hostility of the reaction. Playing the devil’s advocate has always been a necessary and respected part of argumentation in our home. But apparently not in this discussion. Later that evening, I tell Joanne that I don’t deserve to be thrown onto her Jesse Helms junkpile just because I want some honesty out of the rhetoric. But Joanne isn’t speaking to me.
JANUARY 1991
Kristin and I drive back to her school together mainly in silence. She has her headphones on almost the whole way, listening to tapes of Sinead O’Connor, the angry, skinheaded Irish singer.
“I love Sinead’s strength and openness,” Kristin says as she punches the tape into the car stereo system. “I love how she tweaks the white male establishment.”
I know I’m in for some oratory now, but I hold my peace. She next plays the song “Sally” from a tape by Sade.
“The concept of prostitutes as the real heroines of our society, because they do the dirty work, is compelling,” she says.
Out of the corner of my eye, I look at her beautiful profile, now creased with a frown of anxiety as she listens to the lyrics. Some time earlier my wife had reluctantly revealed to me something that happened to Kristin during her recent study-abroad semester in Mexico. She had developed a relationship with a young man in her exchange group that had turned disastrous. During one of their evenings together, he held her down and forced sex on her. It was an apparent textbook case of date rape.
I have brought it up with Kristin, asking whether she wanted to talk to me about the painful experience. But she has not chosen to do so. I’m not sure whether this is a measure of her alienation from me or simply the uncomfortable nature of the subject matter-or whether the whole thing has contributed to her new hostility.
After a while, she drives, and I relax and hark back to my college days of civil rights and antiwar marches. Like me, Kristin is just a kid of her times. At school she has joined South Africa protest groups, saying how much satisfaction she derives from bugging “the suits,” as she calls college officials. And yet she also appears to be a grownup woman, driving fearlessly on snow-covered roads, past semis in the unplowed left lane, with no need for emotional input from her dad. She is a seesaw of maturity and immaturity, a battleground of emotions. And now, stone quiet.
As we say our perfunctory goodbyes at her residence hall, I wonder how long the growing-up process will require the two of us to be alienated from each other. Little do I know that this will prove to be the last time I will see my daughter face to face.
MARCH 1991
My marriage, which blew a gasket at Christmas, threw a rod in January and limped through February, now rattles to a halt. The wheels have come off. Joanne, who is working toward her graduate psychology degree, is studying for comprehensive exams in April and says the tension in the air makes it impossible for her to concentrate. She asks me to move out. I agree. We have fought to a draw and are clearly heading in opposite directions. In addition to everything else, our arguments over the new orthodoxies of feminism, catalyzed by Kristin’s newfound dogmas, have further alienated us.
I take a small flat a few miles away in the city. My job will take me out of town much of the spring, and the move means I will not be around on the occasional weekends when the kids return from school. I immediately write long letters and phone them about the breakup. They don’t have much response-they have seen it coming-and yet I sense a quiet shock in their voices. Joanne and I intentionally waited until they were both in college to make this break, but good Lord, this sort of blow is never easy.
“We’ll see each other during spring break,” I tell them. And to Kristin, “I’ll take you our to dinner on your birthday.” “It’s a date,” she says. “At least I’ll get to see you-even if it’s not at home. I’ve got something I need your advice on.”
But a few weeks later, just before spring break, Kristin calls to say she cannot see me and we cannot go out for dinner.
“Why?” I ask.
“I can’t tell you,” she says. “I just can’t see you right now.”
It is all so mysterious that I call Joanne to see what she knows.
“I have an idea, but I can’t talk to you about it,” she says.
“Does this have to do with the date rape?” I ask.
“It may,” Joanne says.
A week later I get a call from my wife’s therapist.
“You are not to see your daughter,” she tells me. “This is at her request.”
I already know that,” I respond.
Then she drops a bombshell.
“I am authorizing Kristin’s hospitalization because of suicidal tendencies.”
“Suicidal-what do you mean, she’s suicidal?” I gasp.
“Right now your daughter’s a threat to her own life. I have had to exercise direct intervention.”
I scramble to discover what is going on. I finally pull out of Joanne that Kristin has begun seeing a college counselor months ago to cope with the aftereffects of the date rape and also because of a debilitating premenstrual syndrome that has brought on a general feeling of depression. Kristin convinced her counselor to refer her to a psychiatrist, who has put her on Prozac, the controversial antidepressant. Presumably because the initial dosage was not right, Kristin has become suicidal.
The next few weeks are harrowing for me. I am out of town a good deal and out of the family loop. I am aware of an acquaintance’s son who severely mutilated himself while on Prozac. I have read and seen other news accounts of the drug’s dangerous side effects, including the tendency, according to one article, “to make up one’s own realities from hallucinations and fantasies.”
Joanne herself is reluctant to talk to me, but I do get more details from her. Kristin has begun, with the aid of a therapist, to recall from the deep recesses of memory an experience of being sexually abused as a child. She spent time in day care with my sister back then, and she is now recalling memories of being molested by her Uncle Jack. According to her newfound memory, he inserted tools such as screwdrivers and wrenches into her vagina.
I am devastated and sickened trying to imagine it; in fact, I can’t imagine my brother-in-law hurting my little girl in that way. But Joanne’s view is different. As part of her course work, she has counseled several women who claim they were molested in childhood by men they knew or were related to.
“I’m coming to the conclusion that all women have been victimized growing up,” she says. “In fact, I’m looking into the abyss of my own past.” That means, she adds, trying to pull up memories of her own father’s abuse of her.
“I have no difficulties imagining what Jack did to Kristin,” she concludes.
“Come on. This is nuts!” I protest. But Joanne isn’t entertaining any other view.
JUNE 1991
I have written and called Joanne, trying to establish some sort of reconciliation. I want to start over from scratch, try to rediscover the chemistry we had, find what it was that we fell in love with. She does not respond.
Kristin dropped out of school when she was hospitalized. Now she is out of the hospital and living in an apartment on her own. She is also into individual and group therapy and drugs and psychiatrist’s checkups at a tab of $200 a week. Troy is back from college, and I learn that he is also in therapy. In fact, everybody but me is in therapy.
When she finally writes me, Joanne says: “I’m painfully becoming a more whole and independent person, but it won’t make me better able to unite with you. I don’t understand why you are the only one not seeing a therapist. How can you do the healing and stretching you need to do without help?”
In a later letter, Joanne writes: “Kristin is really having a terrible time, really emotionally disabled. She’s so skinny you might not recognize her. She’s not the person I used to know. She has terrible memories during the day, terrible nightmares at night. I’m enclosing an article on incest to give you some idea of what she’s going through.”
I stare at the word incest sitting calmly there on the page.
